Agreed. It is very powerful but the interface has a long way ahead to be user friendly. Still, it is worth the effort if you really care about sticking to linux.
hummingbird
As a person who experienced the customer support regrading preorders I can confirm this firm is extremly sketchy.
Enshittification at its finest
There is no good reason so send the passwors itself to the server. Send the hash and you will have a fixes length of data to send anyway.
And even if insist in sending the password over the wire, there is no problem on the backend to handle longer passwords than that, so that no one will run into a limit in practice. We're talking about bytes here, not even a kb.
Correct, I use Kast on the desktop, works nicely
If you've got a nextcloud somewhere, you already have everything you need running. Install required extension and login in antenna pod. Works nicely, can recommend it.
Hopefully the court was clever enought to specify that the side loading must not be more difficult than installing via the store. Apple will for sure make it as complicated and user hostile as possible so they fulfill the ruling without having any practical impact.
Finally some good news
The bell riots never happend. We must have made a wrong turn already somewhere.