Alaknár

Wouldn’t an immutable OS be overall a pretty good idea for a stable server?

Then configure vim using emacs

OOTL. What happened with Ladybird?

Weird. I use it on my Linux PC and my Android phone. It had a period of problems some weeks ago, but the creator of the YouTube plugin fixed it and it works perfectly fine again.

I mean, it’s Linux, so you could use it right now.

It’s a kind of “yes, but actually no” situation.

Way back when, smartphones were a relatively new thing. Nobody gave a crap, so building a new OS that had similar capabilities to the competition was easy. We had a bunch of those over the years.

However, every new OS means new architecture, every architecture means developers having to take it into account when building apps.

Eventually, the smartphone market essentially defaulted to Android and iOS - long gone are Windows Phone, Blackberry OS, and a dozen others.

They didn’t die off because they somehow had to - they died off because they couldn’t keep up with feature parity with Android and iOS.

Nowadays, everything is being made for these two OSes. And by “everything” I mean things that are actually crucial to people - banking apps, ID apps, train ticket apps, parking lot apps - things that they either cannot replace with “not in a smartphone” solution, or can, but it would force them to juggle cards and papers.

Any new OS coming in must take that into account. If Linux comes to mobile phones but can’t run national ID apps or banking apps, it will have a market share of maybe 1% - the hardcore fans, and the “technological preppers” who are always anonymous, always off-grid - and that’s that. No users further users will switch, and because no users switch, no developers will take it seriously enough to make their apps work on it.

Windows Phone is a great example of this. At its height it had around 20% of the European market share. And what happened? Snapchat (massive at the time) and Google actively worked to undermine and destroy it, because they knew that - in the long run - it’ll be cheaper than having to hire a third group of developers. With 3rd party alternative apps being constantly blocked, the OS eventually went down to sub 5% in its biggest market, and sub 1% in the US, and Microsoft finally pulled the plug.

An OS coming in without critical app support won’t ever get to even 1% of market share in any region larger than “local Linux fanclub”.

What we need is a good linux phone that is affordable, has hardware that isn’t slow, and isn’t over sold to an annual pre-order.

That’s not enough, sadly. That phone must support, at the very least, all the national ID and banking software. And that bit might be tricky.

Europe is slowly working on that. Ironically, Trump’s policies were kind of a blessing to Europe, because it forced politicians to finally start working towards strengthening the independence of the region.

And KDE devs will stop assuming they know better than their users…

What kills me is that even the “official” clients (Element, and Element X) are not full-featured. What kills me even more is that Element X (the official “new” app and the “replacement” for Element) supports some additional features over Element, but not all - as in, some things are not possible in it, but are possible in Element.

It’s like it’s run by an insane asylum…

It’s cool that it “supports threads”, but - as so many other clients - it forgets to actually expose threads! As in: once the initial comment starting a thread slides up in the chat, the only way to access the thread is to scroll all the way up there again.

Fake edit: OK, Commet shows all threads if you type “thread” in search. Still, having a button to do just that would be infinitely better.

Also: no support for polls? :(