Akinzekeel

I just got a Galaxy S23 about 2 weeks ago. It came with Facebook and Swiftkey as well as a bunch of Microsoft Apps. But no Tiktok, Games or other crap. Even after updating the OS nothing like that had been installed.

My guess is that a lot of people do not read anything and just rush through the initial setup process, thereby confirming things like wanting recommended apps to be installed.

Also there are some mentions of rooting here. I suggest to first give adb a try. It lets you uninstall any app without rooting (including Facebook and Swiftkey in my case).

Literally everyone I know uses WhatsApp. It's probably been over a decade since I last sent or received an actual SMS (except for 2FA codes).

Sort of. Google and Microsoft really weren’t on good terms back then (relatively speaking). Both were competing for the mobile OS market, and Microsoft ran this whole „Don’t get Scroogled“ campaign to demote Android.

Naturally, Google did not offer any of their apps for Windows phone - i.e. no Google maps or YouTube. Microsoft then made their own YouTube client for windows phone which was an okay app. However Google wasn’t happy with this and had them take down the app and replace it with their own version instead.

The problem is that Google’s YouTube app for windows phone was so embarrassingly bad that after countless 1-star reviews they decided to pull the app from the windows phone store, effectively leaving the platform with no YouTube app at all. There was at least one third party client which was decent, but there was never another official one after that IIRC.

I’ve been on NVIDIA with Wayland since June 23 (which is when I switched to Linux in general) and I am still mystified what all this fuss is about. Everything just… works? What am I missing?

What about OneDrive or NextCloud? They offer photo uploads

Here is a picture that demonstrates the problem. On the left is Firefox and on the right Thorium (Chromium). I've had this problem on Windows before but now I'm using Linux and it's the same unfortunately.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/security/how-to-unlock-luks-using-dropbear-ssh-keys-remotely-in-linux/

As mentioned in another comment I haven’t quite gotten it working but it should be possible to do this via SSH

Just wondering what’s the power consumption and how long have you had it? I just got my electricity bill after running an R720 for a year and… let’s just say it wasn’t worth the low price after all

Have you tried to start it from the terminal? Maybe there is some insight into which part of the startup process is taking so much time

I keep reading this all the time but I have the same setup and I don't understand what's supposedly wrong or broken with it. It just seems to work fine. What am I missing here?

I was actually using my own user account instead of root, but now that you mention it… I’m not sure how that would even work so yeah that makes sense.

I did rebuild the initramfs after every change but did not manually copy the key file anywhere other than etc.

Will check out the link tomorrow. Thanks a lot for sharing!

Edit: tried again with root and it worked flawlessly :D

I keep hearing this from people but it runs terrible on my SD. Cannot get more than ~27 fps and it regularly dips below that.

Did you tweak the settings somehow?

I previously played it on my Xbox and had a great time. Would love to play it again on the SD eventually.

In the past I wanted to use auto unlock via TPM, however it seems quite complicated to set up and the Arch wiki advises against it anyway, so I just enter the password during boot.

The one improvement I would like to make here is to have a nicer input (visually) like Fedora but I'm not sure how this is done and how I could replicate that on Arch.

It seems that you get so enraged by someone daring to like a different product than you that you lose your reading comprehension. I said the software design was terrible (i.e. how the menus were styled). I never said anything about bloatware. Also we already established that you have no idea what those phones actually cost and just throw around some made up numbers. Who's the liar now?

I have a Windows 11 VM which I keep around. I was forced to use it for iTunes because I needed to sync my old photos onto the phone (fortunately a one time process).

I also played around with RemoteApp because I wanted to use Visual Studio or Office on Linux through the Windows VM, but I have not managed to get it working.

ICYMI the "simple" apps were sold to some shovelware company and will require a subscription soon (or maybe they already do). So you might want to look for an alternative if that's what you are using.

Sure, please check the other reply in this comment thread

I have both the Duo 1 and Duo 2. It is definitely a love / hate relationship.

The quality of the hardware is really good. But software has been disappointing since launch. While a lot of the bugs have been fixed, you kinda need to use Microsoft Launcher on this device. And in typical Microsoft fashion, it is worse on their own hardware than on any other phone. You cannot backup and restore your launcher configuration, cannot change the grid sizes, cannot change icons, etc.

Apps do generally work fine because unlike the Z Fold and Pixel Fold, they open on only one screen by default. You have to manually span them across both screens if you want, but very few apps are actually aware of there being a gap between the screens.

I don't remember who, but someone described this device perfectly imo: Surface Duo is the most amazing piece of tech that I ever owned, but it is also the worst phone that I ever owned.

I remember trying this as well but it didn't help, and the problem also exists on Linux

It's on my todo list I swear

I did not own one before, this is my first ever Samsung phone. So I can't tell what they might or might not do in 6 years. Owning a phone for that long would be a first for me though. So far, all the Android phones I owned would stop receiving updates long before that.

Thank you! I had no clue what to even search for but your comment pointed me in the right direction.

I spent the past hour setting this up and it almost works, but for some reason when I boot I only see something like "Loading initramfs" and then just a black screen and nothing happens. If I mash the escape key before I reach the black screen then plymouth works and I see the logo and LUKS password prompt.

I switched from Android to iPhone a month ago and the Nextcloud app can definitely access & sync all photos & videos just fine.

So far I have not noticed any problems with background sync but I do also open the Nextcloud app frequently so that might have something to do with it. I guess a workaround could be to set up a shortcut which opens Nextcloud whenever the phone is connected to a charger during the night, for example.

Lastly I just want to add that it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows on Android either. From my own experience photo sync never worked reliably on whichever phone I was using (Huawei, LG, Samsung, Google, Microsoft, …). And let’s not forget that each manufacturer is also trying to push their own gallery & backup solution to lock you in. Even worse, some manufacturers like Microsoft have this mishmash where you have OneDrive for photo sync but then also Google Photos which you can’t uninstall and keeps begging you to please back up all your stuff and then pay for more storage. It’s the same BS as Apple with their iCloud tbh.

They’re not in the cloud, they are on my NAS. I found that you can’t directly copy photos onto an iPhone to show up on the gallery, because there is some sort of database and file naming system. That’s why I had to go through iTunes because it would do it in just this way so that I can see all the photos in the native gallery app.

Any new photos get uploaded to my NAS automatically.

I‘m in the process of setting up a new NAS with Debian and disk encryption, and this is exactly what I’m struggling with. I’ve tried multiple guides for Dropbear but every time I try to SSH into the server to unlock it, I get “Permission denied”.

1. I bought the Google Pixel 7a before this one. Software design was terrible and loaded with unnecessary "features". Returned it.
2. I agree it's silly to spend that much on a phone. But the S23 was just under 800€ and I got a free pair of Galaxy Buds 2 Pro from a promotion.

Well, if you visit Youtube to watch a video, it will serve both the video and the ads from the same website. Ads are not necessarily being loaded from another website. If they were, we could just DNS-block YouTube ads, and they would be gone in your entire home network, for instance.

Because bold fonts look weird in Firefox and I have not found a way to change that