Yes. See Valve Finds Open Source Drivers To Be Great; Valve Developed an Open-Source Intel Vulkan GPU Driver For Linux; Valve Bootstrapped Source 2 Engine On an Open-Source Vulkan Driver.

To end the Google Play hegemony, you have to show demand for services outside Google Play. Try this:

1. Find a competing bank whose app is on Amazon Appstore. You'll need its name in a later step.
2. Pack a Fire Phone or one of the Kindle Fire models with a rear facing camera.
3. Visit a branch, and ask how to deposit a check. If they say no can do, find a polite way to ask "What can Barclays offer me that $other_bank can't?"

Probably because makers of I/O components, such as GPUs and radios, aren't exactly warm to the concept of a completely free operating system.

F-Droid excludes all non-free software. And by default, it hides apps with antifeatures such as advertisements and reliance on non-free add-ons or services. So how are the developers of an app on F-Droid supposed to keep a roof over their heads? And would your suggestion also work for games?

I agree about the beater. The step I don't understand is how someone on a first job between high school and college is supposed to come by the "few thousand dollars" in the first place.

So what if I want to use services that aren't Google's, but I also want to be able to write my own programs for the device without having to pay the $99/year certificate tax to the publisher of the device's operating system?

I was under the impression that in the market for 4 to 5 inch tablets, the iPod touch had "a sufficiently large market share". Can you name any serious competitors in that size range that aren't either A. iOS based or B. intended for use with a cellular network?

I don't know if it's still in force, but there was a time when a single manufacturer wasn't allowed to ship both AOSP devices and Google Play devices.

Which major bank's app isn't on Amazon?

Selling your blood plasma to pay for motor fuel amounts to that.

A car is arguably safer than being kicked out of a closing store and then arrested for sleeping in public because the buses have stopped running for the weekend.

Most people who buy a device are unaware of what outside sources had already been allowed into the device when it left the factory.

So where should someone entering the workforce for the first time find the money to buy his first car to get him back and forth to his first job?

On not-Android operating systems, you can choose to deny a particular app access to a particular permission if you don't use features of that app that require access to that particular permission. For example, on iOS, you can deny an app access to your contacts without blocking the rest of the app from installing, and the App Store Review Guidelines state that the rest of an app must continue working without the permission. Android permissions commonly cited as useful to some but overly intrusive to others include "access network state" (be notified when Internet access comes back so that the app can sync data for offline use), "start after boot" (be notified when the device has been turned back on so that the app can sync data for offline use), and contacts (spell-check your friends' names). One could in theory ship a bare-bones app without these features and make separate helper service apps that just grant each of these permissions to the main app, but I'm told that would create a poor user experience.

Yes. AOL owns The Huffington Post.