Posted on with tags Christianity and Art
During my 6ish month experiment with Apple products, I purchased a base model iPad Air with GoodNotes to pull up and annotate pdfs for Byzantine chanting at my parish. This obviously contravened my free software principles, but it’s what everyone was using and it worked really well.
What I noticed, however, is that the most experienced chanters used a mix of print outs and iPad apps that weren’t iOS-tied. This would include Google Drive and Adobe Acrobat. What finally drove the nail in the coffin was my recent trip to an Orthodox monastery: the monks were using old android tablets.
If a clunky android system is good enough for a popular monastery, I don’t see how using a libre implementation of android, GrapheneOS, would be problematic. Thankfully, GrapheneOS works on Google Pixel tablets. Is there an ample GoodNotes alternative? No, but the conveniences offered by that app aren’t really necessary — the default pdf viewer is good enough. Instead of tabs, the viewer just opens several windows that you can toggle between when needed. Frankly, this is good enough. Android, and transitively GrapheneOS, also supports split screen viewing which the monks used to intersperse canons.
To iterate, if the fullest living example of the faith — a monastic community — uses it for daily services, it’s good enough for me! If you really care about libre software and avoiding LLM permeation, the “pain” of using more principled technology is absolutely worth it anyway. Taking the initiative and being the person who actually puts his foot down is never the wrong choice.