the opposite of “enshittified” isn’t “good.” some stuff sucks for fresh, new reasons before it enshittifies and turns to full on exploitative rent-seeking.
for example, anthropic quietly pulled claude code from their pro subscriptions and made it a separate subscription. that’s enshittification. and stupid AI bros are gonna fall for it every time.
you’re right, but i need people to understand that this is simply not a workable solution for most people. the simple fact is if we want the average person to adopt more open source alternatives, it needs to improve usability even without their help. it’s not really enough to only cater to us power user nerds with “good enough,” and it doesn’t win hearts and minds to handwave complaints and tell people to come back with a patch.
yeah, regular AOSP-likes that need you to manually flash them after support for your device is finally added are not particularly relevant compared to a security-focused fork that’s supported by several flagship phones at release. the latter can actually make it into the hands of the average person. the former, not so much. imagine trying to explain to your elderly mother how to flash lineage onto her phone.