Reading this post makes me very happy: it reminds me of my university times. The challenges were different, but the spirit is just the same: software freedom.
I could go on talking about what hacks we had to bypass in order to avoid undesirable software, but perhaps it would be boring.
What I will tell is that:
1. You're *not* wasting your time, as you're working for your freedom.
2. Even if freedom wasn't important, you're still not wasting your time: working around stupid limitations is what gives you experience, and there's always demand for it.
3. The battle is never over. I know a dude who wrote a whole bunch of scripts to convert microsoft-outlook-365-whatever-the-f*ck to text. And he did that during working hours, because it allows him to be more efficient.
With that I'm not saying that procrastination is good, but creativity and working around microsoft shit is the true mark of the hacker.
~pseudoriemann wrote (thread):
Thanks for the encouragement! I have never been called a hacker before (even though I have used the command line in public) so I will take this as a badge of honor.
I definitely learned some things by doing this side quest, mainly that tinkering with video/audio programmatically can be much more tricky than one might think. It was very annoying to get things working but I'm glad I did it in the end.
Sadly not all software freedom related problems can be circumvented by hacks. The biggest issue is that the majority of important discussion among my fellow students is done via WhatsApp groups...