I have been using for years. It is quite usable, improves every day and even replaces things like Google of Office365 clouds (in a self-hostable way). I recently installed on a Galaxy Tab S6 Lite (first version) and I now use it as a laptop whenever I need a very long battery life or something smaller than my full sized Linux laptop. And, it is a real product, one that is thought to be used.
Holders of a PhD are considered as "capable of assessing the state of the art" by Tax authorities. Having PhDs in the committee which decides of grants thus reduces to legal risk of later seing tax cuts being cancelled by Tax authorities.
Regarding projects which receive a grant, holding a PhD does not matter.
Cash that gets into FDL/LEF is then spent to sponsor existing FLOSS projects or to acquire intellectual property rights of existing works and change their license to FLOSS.
Case 2: the radio hardware of the Open Radio Station (a 4G/5G vRAN base station based on Amarisoft stack and SlapOS) is in the process of being acquired and released as open source hardware. See https://shop.rapid.space/product_module/241/Resource_viewAsS...
The requirement for PhD is here to ensure that all projects that are financed by FDL/LEF have some kind of general interest or innovation, something which is useful to comply with Tax Law
Our story with /e/ is that we decided that it would make more sense to invest some cash in /e/ (we did it) than try to maintain NayuOS now that most ChromeOS users expect to run Android apps (and this part is not in ChromiumOS AFAIK).
Also, we observed a growing need for some kind of "desktop OS" for industrial applications (robotics, industrial automation) that does not depend on Google APIs (factories are often in China or do not have Internet access).
What you do not get in ChromiumOS (last time I checked):
- support for flash movies
- support of certain video codecs
- support of sound hardware of many recent Chromebook models
- support of CJK input (at least in Guest Mode)
- support of Android apps
- support of Linux virtual machine subsystem
- support of certain Google APIs (but that is OK for me)
Lack of stable support of CJK input in guest mode (and the difficulty to find anyone capable of solving this problem or supporting us) was the biggest issue for me.
Some years ago, the difference was:
- support for flash movies
- support of certain video codecs
- support of certain Google APIs (but that is OK for me)
What you do not get in ChromiumOS (last time I checked):
- support for flash movies
- support of certain video codecs
- support of sound hardware of many recent Chromebook models
- support of CJK input (at least in Guest Mode)
- support of Android apps
- support of Linux virtual machine subsystem
- support of certain Google APIs (but that is OK for me)
Lack of stable support of CJK input in guest mode (and the difficulty to find anyone capable of solving this problem or supporting us) was the biggest issue for me.
Some years ago, the difference was:
- support for flash movies
- support of certain video codecs
- support of certain Google APIs (but that is OK for me)
which was fine to me.