I feel UI trends have gone in the direction of making things worse, not better.

I remember when it was pretty much unanimous that “mplayer” was beautiful in all its square corners glory, while “Windows Live Media Player” was seen as a horrible abomination.

Now it feels like everyone is on board with inefficient UI designs like the latter for some reason.

I don’t understand the posh stylistic decisions around padding, rounded borders, etc. How do those things make the UI better exactly?

As someone who used low resolutions for most of my University years (I did my thesis in a tiny ultralaptop), I relied heavily on a custom gtk2 theme I had to write to remove most of that padding that made the UI feel so unnecessary and my screen so cramped.

Gnome now pushing for removing theming completely and relying on just color scheme customization feels totally backwards to me. I don’t have an answer for OP sadly… other than just using terminal / tui apps more whenever possible.

True. Same for Android. I feel some form of that should be part of the approach. Splitting it carelessly would likely either:

A) result in no real change: ie. instead of allocating budgets within Google, they’ll just exchange money through deals and partnerships, as separate companies, but still having pretty much the same relationship between projects and level of control (Android & Chrome would continue favoring Google interests, even as independent companies), and they’ll keep being monopolies each within their own fields (I don’t see how that’s being addressed with the split).

B) result in independent projects that push for monetization and shady schemes to try and be profitable on their own (although, to be honest Mozilla has proven that being non-profit is not a shield against this either). This actually might be a good thing if the enshittification manages to get people to switch away from Chrome to a better alternative… but I wouldn’t be so sure of that (both that they would move, or that they’d choose a better one …as opposed to say MS Edge which has just as bad of a ruler).

Stock Android does not have tools to do that verification. Just verify it from the desktop and then send it to your Android device.

But I don’t see how verifying the apk signature would help if your concern is that “you have bare to none knowledge how it works”. The only thing that would fix that would be if you actually learn how it works.

Luckily, unlike other stores that are closed source and actively and purposefully hide from you what they do, F-Droid is open source, so anyone can go to the repo holding their source code and learn how it works, or build their own themselves, as long as they wanna spend that much effort.