I’m not sure everywhere, but I can say that any place that has a population of about 5000+ in my area is fairly well mapped, enough to mean that I haven’t used google maps in about 2 years. The less populous areas aren’t great, but I have at the very least never had issues with highways so it usually gets you close enough that you can get by.
I think the best of both worlds, assuming you don’t need rebootless updating, is the distros that act as immutable for any given update set, but allow updates ala rolling release and just cache the previous image. This way you have the newest packages while having an easy recovery method if the update breaks things
If I new that, I wouldn’t have an issue, all I know is that my Linux and windows desktops are unable to do it, so if I were to take myself as a sample, I would conclude that it doesn’t work at all, which is what I used to go by when making posts until others were having good experiences with it. Nowadays most of the time when it gets brought up, I’ll see roughly an even split of people for which it doesn’t work and those for who it does, I surmise that there is some fundamental misunderstanding that myself and others have that causes this, but as of right now I haven’t been able to figure it out.
The biggest issue I’ve had with element calls specifically is no audio on screen shares, they keep claiming it’s fixed, but there are a lot of setups that don’t allow it, of which mine is included. I don’t know if other call protocols have better luck, but fluxer has been solid for it since I started using it.
As far as I am concerned, fluxer fills the niche of the bridge between open protocols and discord for normies. Xmpp doesn’t have clients for all major OS’s and matrix is finicky if you care about the voice and video side of things.
I don’t know how it is in the UK, but I use street complete to contribute to osm
You can read your student code, most of them do not have anything that compels you to use the services that are provided. If that is the case, refuse to use the service and make your position known, they’ll generally give you a workaround or if they say that’s how it is, you can ask for the part of the student code with the nonexistent objective reason why you must use it.
If you don’t want to be a squeaky wheel, there are technical ways of limiting the information loss, but the easiest is to not install anything and be conscious of what location, network, & device you use
For my notification needs I need only unified push with Mozilla sunup & if that is not an option or if it is not reliable I use websocket. The latter has battery life issues, but some services have very poor unified push servers.