feel like we’re going to be waiting for 2-5 years at least…

by KDE i meant Fedora KDE. Thought it would be obvious since the graph is labelled that way, i guess not.

I feel bad for the people on the developing team who had no idea this may be used for surveillance

I guess competing is correct, but I don’t see it overtaking steamOS any time soon or even coming close since the steamdeck is an actual product marketed by a for-profit company.

I feel like it may not overtake KDE, from the graphs the trend seems to somewhat be following there too recently. Like a bump in number of downloads because of popularity, but not a linear trend. Does that even make sense?

yes I understand, but I was just mentioning that the process is convoluted for everyone involved. people tend to forget the troubles of devs and maintainers.

In addition to demanding payment of a registration fee and agreement to their (non-negotiable and ever-changing) terms and conditions, Google will also require the uploading of personally identifying documents, including government ID, by the authors of the software, as well as enumerating all the unique “application identifiers” for every app that is to be distributed by the registered developer.

The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot “take over” the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications.

(implying that even non-play store apps needs Devs to give their info to google)

source: https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html

granted, this is a secondary source, but it does link the primary source within the quoted text.

Convoluted process where the developer of the app has to sell their soul to Google

Can’t they not let Android get locked down in a few months too? It’ll almost become as bad as iOS at that point. Who knows they might even block installation of other OSs in the future.

While it does seem that way initially, strict copyleft licences can often do more harm than good. Projects need companies to use their software so that it becomes popular and get funding. There’s a reason why there’s barely any AGPL (or adjacent) licenced projects compared to GPL or MIT.

When people comment about having issues with Linux, this is what that should be compared with.

Or not, since linux distros ideally shouldn’t be bound to windows. (but realistically they are)