Title kinda doesn't make sense to me, they argue to donate monthly instead of a lump sump which I can understand, a lot of individual artist / podcasters etc prefer this as well, because it's easier for them /Gnome to work / plan with a steady stream of income instead of random payments here and there.
Which I totally understand. But personally I'm not a fan of lots of small amounts cluttering up my (digital) bank statements every month, so I tend do just do "amount I'm comfortable to pay monthly x 12" once a year (sorry 😬).
What problems did you encounter? I dimly not using the official docker-compose file but one from else (because I wanted to use Http?) but personally I didn't find it as complicated as setting up Immich or Invoice Ninja or other services that have multiple containers that need to talk to each other.
Mmmh, I don't think the app ever got disabled by Android during my days of testing (I actually reinstalled yesterday and having a look again, battery drain seems a bit better now so far ... ). But obviously a system service is always gonna be prioritised higher than a user app. But as I said I didn't have this problem with this app (actually the only one I can think of is Syncthing and with that I'm not sure if it's not the app going to a sleep mode or something by itself).
It (theoretically) works without PlayServices. I'm on CalyxOS with MicroG enabled and while I was testing OwnTracks I think MicroG was using the Gplay Location services or something? I've since turned something off in MicroG location settings that was phoning home to Google and GPS is pretty bad now, not sure if OwnTracks would still be usable.
I think the official app tries to not be killed by Android woth the usual tricks (permanent notification, disabling battery optimisation):
You can (theoretically) control how often locations are tracked and sent but for me was using the location service constantly and draining battery quite a bit.
Yeah, I feel you but I think that's just learning something new that is pretty complex. I've had decades on Windoge and MacOS (and a lot of software only available on those platforms) and then switching to Linux and FOSS apps is obvioisly a huge learning curve.
Or might be a sign that capitalists wanna keep on siloing their networks once the hype has cooled down.