> But this is the problem: everything you describe is 10-20x the effort for an average consumer
You are pushing it. Once the phone is set up, everyday use is easy enough. Some things are less convenient and you are missing some bells and whistles, but the phone is still usable. it's still Android, with the same UI, for the most part.
But I know this "My time is limited and expensive, I have no time for X" argument too well. (X being "freedom" and "the environment" in your comment).
The world does not progress in the right direction if everybody considers their time too limited to spend time making it better. Of course, trying to improve things takes time but someone has to do it. Maybe you are improving the world in your way but if so, you are probably spending time on it.
At some point we need some people to slow down and take the time to think if we are doing / how we can do the right things. Being fast and efficient towards the wrong direction is useless or even harmful.
Yes, that's the idealistic person in me speaking.
> if something breaks I don’t even bother to figure out how to fix it anymore I just get a new one as it’s the rational time investment.
See, that's my point. It's rational until the world breaks apart because we kept burning resources building too much stuff instead of limiting the production and repairing things that can be repaired.
Throwing things away and getting new stuff because one thinks their time it too important to bother is rational only in some specific meaning of "rational".
I don't live to be economically efficient. The way the economy works today is absolutely not efficient with how we use our resources and produces a lot of waste. By focusing on being economically efficient, you are missing the bigger picture.
As an aside:
> As they say “Linux is only free if you don’t value your time”.
This sentence has to die. It assumes I'm less efficient with Linux than with its alternatives, but this can't be more wrong. For what I do with computers, Linux is far more efficient and has everything I need. I'll admit free software on mobile is still far from perfect (degoogled Android is far from being bad though), but Desktop Linux is solved for me, and has been for a long time. It's not perfect and it's ever improving, but any desktop OS has its quirks. And K-9 mail is quite fine too.
And I value my time. We might have different priorities.