I could see them doing fine losing those features if it meant the hardware was compact, light, and cheap. But doing it on giant $1000 phones is not going to do them any favors with the lemmy crowd like I said.

100% agreed. I agreed more with each paragraph.

Your last sentence hit on what I think is a contributing if not primary driving factor in the health crisis you described.

It’s like the goal of modern society is to insulate us from the natural world and from learning subjects or doing tasks that we don’t absolutely have to.

But we are critters that evolved on this planet just like the others. You can’t just live a commoditized life that consists of work, car, screen, sleep, repeat and get the same fulfillment out of life as if you found the unique path that’s optimized for your unique brain.

Not acknowledging that everything jacks with your head to SOME degree only prevents you from trying to defend yourself as best you can!

Over the past several years I have gone through a transition from living life the way I was supposed to, or that I thought I wanted to, to living according to what produces the best outputs from my brain. Once I have the lived experience of an undeniable improvement from some change, it might actually become a habit.

I personally might not use a headphone jack or SD card slot very much, but for the market that a GrapheneOS phone would be targeting they seem like OBVIOUS things to include.

The crowd getting excited about this partnership is pretty much the same crowd that complains about features like those going away.

Then make the machine try to keep people talking for as long as possible…

That’s probably a huge part of it. How many billions of dollars have been spent engineering content on a screen to get its tendrils into people’s minds and attention and not let go?

EnGaGeMent!!!

My employer has the usual setup of M365 enterprise shit running on Dell laptops.

Fortunately we devs are able to “dual boot” to run Linux on our machines, since our product is an embedded Linux system. (has anybody seen my Windows partition btw? I can’t even find anything NTFS formatted, whoopsie!)

All that background info is just so I can pay Microsoft a compliment, even if it has asterisks all over it:

The entire Microsoft suite works just fine in a browser, and in LibreWolf too! I do typically add some permissions for those sites for convenience, since librewolf is privacy/tracking hardened (firefox fork) out of the box. I use Teams and Outlook every day, and occasionally will drop a file into OneDrive or edit something in MS Office. I don’t write many office-format documents though, so I’m more likely to be in LibreOffice or a PDF viewer just reading a doc.

You know how in media streaming and gaming there’s that balance of whether it is more convenient to be a paying customer versus pirate everything?

Microsoft’s stuff is literally better to use in Linux. Even if I need to test the Windows build of something, a VM is SO much more convenient. And I’m not even logged into the microsoft shit on that. If I need something from OneDrive, I go to the browser there too.

If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren’t entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.

But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I’ll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.

I think it’s more of a way for those of is in the US to hang on to some shred of optimism. Surely somebody somewhere will continue to make nice things for normal people, right?

I’ve spent just a little bit of time in Europe, with most of it in Sweden. I have seen with my own eyes how civilized societies can have nice things in shared spaces!

Excellent! It’s hard to believe how much easier the Linux experience can be than Windows. Take your PC and boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive. If you like it, it can be installed in like 5 clicks. (assuming you already prepped the machine, backed up, etc. I dual booted at first but that only lasted about 2 weeks before I wiped windows)

I have personally since moved to Debian KDE Plasma. It’s a target platform at work, and it’s more of a server machine at home. Plus doing a few more things via CLI or via finding old forum posts or documentation is fine by me.

I might try Garuda on the new PC we’ve been putting together, though. It looks like a well polished gaming-focused OS that is also Arch-based to get me into that whole family of distros. (because Valve went that way of course, and in the future I’ll always want a PC that can seamlessly run SteamVR. Plus computers are fun.)

Throw a self hosted Jellyfin server in the mix, and you can access your entire FLAC library from any device you want! Your friends can listen at the same time, if you want to give them logins.

The tech companies are doing a great job at making me uninterested in the hottest new phones. I used to follow the news about them and know the tech specs and stuff, because I’m a nerd and gadgets are fun and smart phones in particular are the intersection of SO much technology and engineering. Moore’s law was alive and well during all my formative years, so I am even conditioned to expect the excitement.

But lately, not only have I been ignoring what the big players are offering, I have been ignoring the phone I already have! Instead I have a PC at the end of the couch with a monitor on an arm that s swings right over my lap.

I use my phone pretty much just for music, web browser, Voyager (Lemmy on the go), and occasional texting. When I am at home I will sometimes misplace my phone for hours and just not worry about it.

I have already pushed the megacorp phone + social media experience so far out of my daily life, that if future options for open linux phones are rough around the edges and don’t have tap to pay then oh well I don’t think I care.

It’s much easier to live without the shiny new thing once you see how well your brain does when separated from it. (and you have some loved ones who are still hopelessly addicted to the scroll)

Yeah, they seem to think we are like the drug addicts who will seek out the batch killing people with ODs because it must be strong.

Should we tell them that the free first hit is supposed to make the user feel GOOD? Meh, let’s watch how much money they can burn before it all crashes down.

Oh touche, not Michael Woolridge! The technology has created an entire segment of the economy worth many trillions of dollars based on NOTHING BUT promises! We are living in a promise-based economy!

/s but not really

Hello, friends in civilized lands, especially those of you who work at financial institutions…

Some of us in the states are excited to watch you do some damage to the entrenched middlemen that have been skimming from all of us for so long. Please do consider letting us sign up for the new stuff. Our money is still worth something, for now!

Yep, I’m ready to read the news that this platform surpassed the user base of Lemmy on the first day and never looked back. And I am ready to not be bothered by it.

Good on them for any pain they inflict on reddit. And I do hope the fediverse takes over the global media landscape because that is better for humanity than corpo-governmental gatekeepers. But if Lemmy’s user base just hangs around in the tens of thousands rather than the tens of millions, I am content.