131–140 of 277 posts
Just like the Linux desktop, alternative smartphones will forever remain a tiny niche market for highly technical people. Mainstream adoption can and will never happen given the current state of hardware design and manufacturing.
Please elaborate on how the current state of hardware design and manufacturing ensures that mainstream adoption will can and will never happen.
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On the other hand, my android phone works reliably for ... I don't know weeks? Months? I only restart for major update. My Ubuntu laptop after a straight install didn't turn off properly, my Ubuntu desktop regularly has chrome crash and fails to wake up the screen. I've had so many issues with basic Linux setups that I absolutely do not want that on my phone. I don't want a browser that's described as just "usable".…
I actually don't share your experience. My Linux machines are all more reliable than the best smartphones I've had. Flagship Android phones have been the worst in my experience, most can't make it a week without crashing, not to mention the awful battery life. Maybe it's because I know to be picky about PC hardware and don't run things like Chrome. >I don't want a browser that's described as just "usable". I have to…
I'm currently living with SO MANY "crooked picture frames" on all my devices that I've just given up on fixing after spending tens of hours on them and burning my free time on it. I still prefer Linux in general for a lot of the reasons you like it, but just doing basic "I want to install a program to take screenshots" has send me down hours of reading about how window compositing systems work, and why Snap is the devil even though everyone seems to be using it now. If I wasn't single and had better hobbies other than tinkering with config files, I'd have given up months ago.
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I actually don't share your experience. My Linux machines are all more reliable than the best smartphones I've had. Flagship Android phones have been the worst in my experience, most can't make it a week without crashing, not to mention the awful battery life. Maybe it's because I know to be picky about PC hardware and don't run things like Chrome. >I don't want a browser that's described as just "usable". I have to…
I've been daily-drivering on Linux for Desktop and Laptop for months and Linux across 4 different distros has made me feel more helpless than Windows ever did. Sure, the Windows "police" would come in and straighten my update settings (which is ultimately why I abandoned Windows), but Linux you get the helplessness of sometimes having something break and the only answer you can find after spending half of your weeken…
If you pull out everything complex and thoroughly understand what's left you won't run into the "idk just reset the whole OS" situation.
Something Windows/OSX users coming to Linux might not realize is that almost nothing in the userspace is actually necessary because the kernel does almost everything. Especially if you don't want graphics but even if you consider those components necisary then all you need are: The kernel (one file plus some modules), a device manager (the thing that creates nodes in /dev when you plug stuff in, if you use kdrive you don't even need this), a display manager (Xorg, kdrive or Wayland) and some kind of shell and VTE (bash and Xterm for example.)
Literally everything else can be thrown out if you don't want to deal with it. Don't like configuring systemd? I've used just script in the past at /linuxrc. Don't like what Gnome is doing or maybe it's crashing on you? Get rid of it, for the most part it's just aesthetic and the functionality can be replaced by eg fluxbox and PCFMan (and maybe wpa_gui if you like using a GUI to configure your wireless card.) Did the package manager get confused? You can actually get away with removing the database and starting over (although this will replace all the binaries it previously installed and potentially overwrite configs.) Don't be afraid to nuke things.
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I actually don't share your experience. My Linux machines are all more reliable than the best smartphones I've had. Flagship Android phones have been the worst in my experience, most can't make it a week without crashing, not to mention the awful battery life. Maybe it's because I know to be picky about PC hardware and don't run things like Chrome. >I don't want a browser that's described as just "usable". I have to…
I've been daily-drivering on Linux for Desktop and Laptop for months and Linux across 4 different distros has made me feel more helpless than Windows ever did. Sure, the Windows "police" would come in and straighten my update settings (which is ultimately why I abandoned Windows), but Linux you get the helplessness of sometimes having something break and the only answer you can find after spending half of your weeken…
On a very related topic I received my Purism phone recently. Worked great... once. Now it's bricked after recharging. I haven't had time to reach out for support and certainly need to do that, but after waiting a very long time for the phone I'm too demoralized to make this a priority. Perhaps I should've bought the Pinephone, or installed Lineage on my old pixel... but time is a scarce commodity.
Its sad how utterly terrible the Pusrim phones are, can they even make a _phone calls_ reliably?
I second just reaching out to their support, they have been pretty good at helping to fix things, even obscure bugs.
> Don't smartphones... kind of suck? How many times have you had to replace a phone in the past 10 years? Do you have a drawer of random crap with a growing pile of phones? I simply cannot relate with this hook. > Don't smartphones... kind of suck? No, smartphones are kinda magical. They take better snapshots than my first DSLR, they play games at higher fidelity than my first gaming PC, and they’re general purpose c…
I think the problem with smartphones doesn't lie so much in hardware as it does the software ecosystem. Yeah, my phone also takes better snapshots than my first DSLR and plays games better than my first gaming PC (from 2001) -- and yet, it can't run the OfferUp app or Google Maps for more than 5 minutes without freezing up.
>> How many times have you had to replace a phone in the past 10 years?
>Twice. My first smartphone was the Nexus 4 way back in 2012. I moved on to iPhone with iPhone 6s, and then upgraded to iPhone 12 Mini last year because I was enraptured by the faster performance, better camera, and small size.
I had to replace my Thinkpad 0 times in the past 10 years, and my phone 2 times as well. I also bought devices from companies who promised software longevity. But why can't I replace my phone 0 times in 10 years like my Thinkpad?
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> Just editing fucking textfiles and copying it back to a normal PC (that isn't a mac) is a real bitch. Especially if you don't have an internet connection. It's almost as bad as a ti84+ honestly. If you're on Android, I suggest looking at F-Droid; there exist decent text editors and file managers, and failing all else Termux manages to drag a decent amount of sanity in.
I had an Android. Every update made Termux less and less capable (IIRC exec is very complex or impossible in a recent one.) Now I have a Pinephone running a normal X11 DE and I don't have to tolerate an ounce of stupidity. Sure there are legitimate good faith defects in the software but nothing is intentionally broken just for the sake of it. ssh just works (the phone shipped with it preinstalled) vim just works scp…
rm -rf / in one of those scripts also just works I assume; my point being that at least part of what you consider nonsense are real security improvements in Android with its permission model. I wish I could easily run Termux and access all everything by default without any restriction, but I also like that I've heard way less stories of viruses on Android than on Windows among my friends.
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I had an Android. Every update made Termux less and less capable (IIRC exec is very complex or impossible in a recent one.) Now I have a Pinephone running a normal X11 DE and I don't have to tolerate an ounce of stupidity. Sure there are legitimate good faith defects in the software but nothing is intentionally broken just for the sake of it. ssh just works (the phone shipped with it preinstalled) vim just works scp…
> All the scripts and little tools I've built up over the years just work (no fighting with namespaces when you switch to root or other weird Android nonsense.) rm -rf / in one of those scripts also just works I assume; my point being that at least part of what you consider nonsense are real security improvements in Android with its permission model. I wish I could easily run Termux and access all everything by defau…
In fact it doesn't, I have GNU rm installed.
>I've heard way less stories of viruses on Android than on Windows among my friends.
And how often do you here stories of viruses from Linux users? (outside the ones running Wordpress or NPM who carelessly fling executable code from strangers around.) Naive Linux users are protected from this problem but it's done in a very different way: Installing software that the distro maintainers haven't looked at requires a small amount of understanding and thought. They're discouraged from just grabbing executable from the web the way Android and Windows users do and so it's extremely rare that desktop Linux users experience malware (even if you use extremely broad definitions like RMS might. Often maintainers patch out things like telemetry or drop packages containing it altogether) Because of this the kinds of security measures Android has would mostly just get in the way.
These tools are all there if you want them. SELinux can sandbox your app and prompt you for permissions. No one does this because it's just not necessary the way most people use typical GNU/Linux distros.
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I actually don't share your experience. My Linux machines are all more reliable than the best smartphones I've had. Flagship Android phones have been the worst in my experience, most can't make it a week without crashing, not to mention the awful battery life. Maybe it's because I know to be picky about PC hardware and don't run things like Chrome. >I don't want a browser that's described as just "usable". I have to…
I've been daily-drivering on Linux for Desktop and Laptop for months and Linux across 4 different distros has made me feel more helpless than Windows ever did. Sure, the Windows "police" would come in and straighten my update settings (which is ultimately why I abandoned Windows), but Linux you get the helplessness of sometimes having something break and the only answer you can find after spending half of your weeken…
... On Linux? That's the traditional Windows solution.