• 2 Posts
  • 372 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • Yes, Android has issues but what I’m saying is that so far Linux on phones really hasn’t been able to compete. No one want’s a phone with no camera, no GPS, no apps and terrible battery. Making Linux phones is just super difficult and sadly I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Android is a good platform with lots of hardware and apps. You have Fairphone offering long tern support, f-droid offering privacy oriented apps and LineageOS offering stable OS. Getting more phoes to support it is a better bet than getting Linux to properly work on modern phones.


  • Yes, it’s all true but the issue is you can already do a lot of those things with a lot of cheap hardware that is is simply easier to support than old phones. And when it comes to phones being phones Android is really good and has a lot of apps. I think the problem with Linux phones getting more popular is that the overlap between desktop/server and mobile is very small. I mean I use my phone only for phone things and a lot of things I do on my phone I can do only on my phone (e.g. charging an electric car is basically impossible without a Android/iPhone). Having a phone that can do some things desktop/server can do but can’t do a lot of things a phone can do is pretty much pointless at this point.

    When we’ll get a proper Linux phone with full Android apps support and convergence it will be really awesome but I just don’t think there’s enough interest to get there at this point.


  • I honestly don’t really get what there is to gain by using “Desktop Linux”.

    More freedom I guess. I remember my n900 and how fun it was to just ssh into it and dig in my home directory, install apps with packet manger, edit config files with vi and so on. It really felt like having small Linux machine in my pocket. With Android everything is definitely more locked up but then again, I’m not sure what would I do if it was more open. Writing apps for Android is easier than for desktop (or just as easy), there are no more hardware keyboard phones so using terminal on them is terrible anyway and phones just work anyway so there’s no need to mess with the configuration. Personally I mostly gave up on the ‘Linux phone’ idea and if I need any new features I will simply write cross platform app that runs on Android (for example with tauri).


  • AOSP. Sad but true.

    When first pinephone came out I really believed it’s heading somewhere. It thought that it will be kind of like raspberry Pi (fun, cheap platform to play with) and that we’ll quickly see copycats and it will slowly grow the way Linux on desktop did. AFAIK nothing like this happened. You still can’t get a phone with decent Linux support which for me shows that we’re stuck with android. I think most people that would help Linux phone happen are simply satisfied with LineageOS so there’s no incentive to put as much effort into it as it requires.



  • Yep, programming is fun but working as a programmer not so much. For me writing software is a creative activity. It’s fun to come up with problems and find solutions for them. In my personal projects I decide what problem I want to solve, choose the technology I think will be fun to solve it in and then come up with a solution I like.

    At work you are usually handed a problem you don’t care about (we’re decommissioning X, you don’t have to know why, just change everything to use Y), the solution is described in detail by someone else and you just have to turn it into some code using 5-10 years old stack.

    Fortunately at my current job I mostly do projects without much technical oversight (proof-of-concept type project) so I can choose how I want to do then. I dislike the company culture but I know that moving somewhere else would mean going back to boring coding agian.






  • 85% after 2.5 years is not good. My car battery has guarante of 80% capacity after 6 years. 20% of range is a significant difference so I take car of my battery and don’t charge it above 80% if not needed. It’s the same with laptops. Current models can easily last 5-10 years but having only 50% of capacity after that time would be a problem. Sure, if you’re intending to throw it out after 3 years it doesn’t really matter but if you want to use it for as long as possible you definitely should take care of the battery. It’s pretty much the only part that degrades (except maybe keyboard).



  • Ok, I see how you could get confused and think we’re talking about some non-existing, future product instead of the device this post is actually about. No problem, this happens.

    When it comes to AR in general Magic Leap was pushing it hard for a very long time and after they released actual device their value quickly dropped. AR for general public is a gimmick, it doesn’t solve any problems, no one wants it. It has very interesting applications in some very specific fields and definitely will find it uses with professionals but when it comes to your dream of looking at 15 4k screens while sitting on a toilet most people are happy with just their phones.






  • It’s not 150 unique apps. The article says:

    It’s not just Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube that don’t have apps for Apple’s Vision Pro at launch.(…) As of this weekend, the AR/VR device’s App Store has just 150+ apps that were updated for the Vision Pro explicitly

    You can watch Netflix on the Vision Pro in a browser but they didn’t create a specific app for it like for example for iOS. 150 other apps were updated to run on the device. We’re not talking about apps that run only on Vision Pro, just apps that have specific Vision Pro version. It’s like if when Apple released the iPad only 150 apps were tested, maybe slightly adapted and marked in AppStore as iPad compatible.

    150 is nothing. There are millions of apps in the AppStore, all (if not all, most) of them could be updated to run on the VisionPro and developers of only 150 bothered to do it. That’s terrible result.