It's a stupid term that is based on an antiquated mindset where Asian people are not creative and cannot invent anything of substance; we are only able to poorly imitate what the West develops. It needs to die.

Also, I've been using and customizing the X Window-based desktop for 25 years and I'm not sure that the term "ricing" was ever used anywhere before Reddit and even then only within the past decade or so. Let it die with that culture.

Neither.

I tell them about the ethical supply chain that produces my Fairphone.

It's a worse Mastodon, run by a company that celebrated election misinformation, leading to the storming of the Capitol, and who later helped police arrest a woman for abortion by turning over private messages she sent to another party. I hope it fails.

He misses the point that companies like Fairphone and Framework and system76 have proven that it's possible to support devices for a very long time when the bigger manufacturers told us it wasn't possible, or even if it were possible that there was no market demand for seven years of software support. In 2016, sustainability and longevity were not words associated with new tech. They showed us the way.

Nokia sells a couple of phones with a screwdriver now. Pixel 8 is going to receive updates into the next decade. Lenovo is trying to make 80% of devices repairable, a remarkable pivot from where they were trending. The demand is there and the ability is there. They also made us think about things that we had never considered before in terms of impact, educating us along the way.

If Fairphone folded tomorrow, they left the smartphone market a better place than they entered.

Did he resign from the position, or from Red Hat entirely?

Not just Linux; gcc was very important as well.

I got the popup all the time for a few weeks with Firefox and uBlock Origin. As a YouTube Premium subscriber. The paid service. The whole reason they were pushing back on ad blockers to begin with.

Fuck these guys, I let the subscription lapse.

The setup is kind of a kind of a logical fallacy here. More people are using Debian and RPM based distributions than Arch Linux. That being said:

Arch Linux has the AUR because at the time it was developed, the standards for distributing software on Linux were either RPM or DEB repositories. AUR was a necessity because one could get software on those distributions from the official vendor, but nobody was supporting Arch Linux. So it was a stopgap, an equalizer for one outlier platform.

It's hardly the first such repository: FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc predate the AUR by over a decade. Slackpkg predates AUR by a couple of years as well, though possibly not slapt-get. Gentoo has portage. Anyway, they took an idea that was already well-established, and catered it to a distribution that had fewer software options than major distributions.

These days it's still the same scenario: a placeholder, to equalize what's available for Arch Linux users versus other distributions.

People use Arch because it is a rolling release with a well-documented wiki. AUR is a nice perk, but hardly the main reason that people are using Arch Linux, given that other similar systems have existed for older distributions and operating systems for longer.

Its a made up criticism to make it look like the author is thorough, but it doesn't reflect a real use case. In two years using the FP4 in five countries, there has never been a single time where I wanted to swap SIM cards or eject a mounted SD card while the system is running. You do these things while the phone is powered down. It's an argument being made by an idiot.

Criticizing bezel sizes when people put their phones in protective cases; criticizing having to remove batteries to get to components that you only swap when powered down anyway; bitching about price to performance ratio like this isnt a phone designed to last half a decade; this is what techbro marketing shills, AI output, and other brainless NPCs do. Not quite as bright screen, no LTPO, who the fuck cares, nobody is comparing two phones outside under the sun in any sort of real life situation. You generally carry one phone, two if you have a job where you're on call, and you don't really choose the iPhone they give you for that so why would you compare brightness for two devices outside and use that as a reason to tell people not buy a phone? That's just not something real people do. You use one phone at a time. This review is not reflective of how people use phones. Its nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking. It's a worthless marketing review.

Do smartphone benchmarks matter?

Probably, but not for me.

Are they still a useful reference and do you consider them when shopping for an upgrade?

No.

Laptops: ThinkPad P-series. The repairability that the T-series used to have with slightly beefier specs and better heatsinks. Great for Linux.

Phones: FairPhone 4 (FP5 will likely be announced end of the month so wait for that) - user repairable, supports alternate operating systems, 7 years official OS support from FairPhone.

Spotify Premium pays Joe Rogan.

13% is low, but I guess this shows how resistant to change people are. It's better to establish a new market (or the first to become popular in a young market) than to try and come along with something disruptive in a mature market.

I am going to say the unspoken part out loud: it's rooted in Hitler's "Creators, Maintainers, Destroyers" view of race.

The fact that this article exists at all shows how deeply rooted the sentiment is, even if 95% of the people regurgitating it don't see themselves as racist or know that this is what their society has conditioned them to believe.

Asians only get tech by copying and stealing from the West. So when the "free market" West gets bothered by a little bit of competition and enforces protectionist measures, Asians who aren't willing to whore out their women to Westerners are supposed to come crawling back and accept sanctions as punishment for trying to be uppity. It's a shock to the system that China was able to keep innovating independently in a different direction, that can't easily be attributed to IP theft. It's not about the 7nm process; it's about the entire SoC.

There are a lot of dogwhistles and things left unspoken in these articles and TikTok videos (where I saw it first) and I'm sure the "well ackshually nobody ever said that" jackasses are ready to pounce on this comment so it's probably best to just leave it at this:

Unilateral protectionism has been a fucking disaster for consumers. All we got out of it was increased prices. A maxed out iPhone in 2016 cost $949. A maxed out iPhone in 2023 costs seventeen hundred fucking dollars and Samsung has done the same increase over that period. Less choice meant less competition and the duopoly was able to further entrench in their positions. This phone would be competitive with flagships at half the price. Why is that a bad thing?

About fifteen years ago, Microsoft felt threatened by Linux's growing market share, and decided to team up with/outright buy patent trolls and use the new portfolio of around 230 patents to claim that the Linux distributions were infringing on Microsoft's intellectual property and potentially sue them.

As Red Hat and other FOSS companies entrenched in their positions and geared up for a long and expensive legal fight, SuSE saw an opportunity to displace Red Hat, and threw everybody under the bus by saying something like, "Yes, Linux absolutely infringes on Microsoft patents. We will pay you for using your IP if you shield us from litigation."

So that threw out the entire argument that Linux did not infringe on Microsoft patents because you had the second biggest Linux company saying it was true and the right thing to do was to pay Microsoft for all of their wonderful contributions. So Microsoft did this kind of mobster thing where they let SuSE pay them for "protection" from lawsuit, and then used this as precedent that the other Linux distributors weren't playing fairly unless they also paid for patent use. And SuSE hoped that this would result in only Novell/SuSE being the legal Linux to buy in the market and everybody would run to them with open arms. Kind of a dick move.

This emboldened Microsoft, and resulted in lawsuits from Microsoft over things like, accessing the FAT filesystem from a Linux device (TomTom, at the time GPS device company) and is historically the reason that Nexus phones (which became Google Pixel phones) never came with SD card expansion (so they wouldn't be accessing a FAT filesystem from Linux). So for the next half decade or so, Microsoft decided to just start suing everybody over patent infringement, and this is how the smartphone era was born and why it is really difficult to do things that would be obvious on a computer -- smartphone designers had to invent new ways, even if obtuse, to get around patents.

In 2018 Microsoft decided that they needed Linux, and ended hostilities by giving the patent portfolio (now up to 60000+ patents) to a consortium of companies called Open Innovation or something like that, that was originally designed to share patents freely without litigation in response to Microsoft's aggressive behavior a decade earlier.

This must be authors first recession. The easy money is drying up and that means an extinction level event for some websites. Large sites are consolidating or changing, but new places always spring up like the mammals rose after the KT extinction. When Geocities was dying, we got Myspace which died and we got Facebook. Reddit is dying and we have Lemmy. AIM servers were turned off half a decade ago and people still communicate online. Something new always comes along. TikTok is now the place for Asian creators to go after they were whitewashed from YouTube.

The article reads more like a coming to terms with Twitter dying and that's all. I am only a couple years older than the author and I missed out on Twitter completely. It was just never a thing for me. But my TikTok account is half a decade old and a place where I can experience my culture without it being whitewashed or mispronunced. And I'm the guy still checking email with alpine in tmux like it's 1999. But one day, TikTok will also die; who would have thought it would be Rand Paul of all people who saved it from Facebook congressional lobbying?

Relax, the internet will be here.

If you can switch, switch.

If you can't switch, wait until Fedora is forked to a new project, which is inevitable at this point given how dependent Fedora is on Red Hat for governance (source: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/), and it seems that Red Hat no longer wants Fedora (source: recent pivoting away from the community, and laying off the Fedora project lead in May and terminating the position).

I expect within a few years, you will be able to just change repositories and a signing key, and load whatever community-based Freedora replaces it.

I would avoid openSUSE which just wants to be another Red Hat (Aeon is just a shitty Silverblue and the project lead hates KDE) and SuSE in general has been hostile towards free software in the past and will likely do so again if they had to choose.

Arch, Debian, EndeavourOS, Solus, NixOS are community driven and unlikely to have some kind of corporate/hostile takeover.

Previous iterations of this phone have been supported by LineageOS, so hopefully in the future.

Agreed. It's the best blend of keyboard driven window management and recognizing that users might also use the mouse from time to time. I got my wife to use and default to tiling with Pop!_OS.

The only problem is Pop!_OS is a shitshow of dependencies being built on Ubuntu. I had an update last night that reinstalled snapd and LibreOffice and Firefox even though I intentionally uninstalled them in favor of the flatpaks. Cosmic DE, and presumably re-basing Pop!_OS on nixOS (given a dev comment) can't come soon enough.

I miss real scrollbars. I remember being excited at the demo of Clearlooks with animated progress bars back in 2005.

We've regressed as a species.

There aren't any bots here promoting a narrative, or auto-downvoting people. From around 2015 until its final days, Reddit was manipulated by business and political entities to steer groupthink. Turning off reddit unplugs you from the Matrix, so to speak.

On Lemmy specifically: its a higher barrier to entry, there's less karma chasing here. Especially if you aren't on one of the larger Lemmy instances. It feels like a community and not like karma-whoring. In my preferences, I turned off viewing the number of votes a comment has, which is nice.

There is an entire industry of shady companies who make tens of millions per by selling dogshit "secure comms" products to barely literate and computer illiterate LtCols and procurement officers in the US Government.

Those officers are close to retirement and by regurgitating big words they do not understand while still in their procurement positions, they can land a job at said company and receive some of those funds once they hit minimum retirement age and wait a year.

Signal is free and disruptive to those business models.

Ergo the misinformation campaign, the FUD, is well funded, by people who have a lot to lose.

Firefox

I started with lemmy.ml because I didn't know what other server to use.

Then I found out that SDF, which I've used since 2000 or so, was hosting its own Lemmy instance. Since I've already been in that community for decades, I migrated my lemmy there.

Beehaw is really nice as well, that is where my spouse, who has zero Fediverse time, joined.

It's not the blue emitting light that causes eyestrain on OLEDs, it's the low frequency pwm used to control brightness. Basically all the pixels turn on and off a few hundred times a second, not slow enough for your brain to consciously notice it, but fast enough for your eyes to react to what is in effect a strobelight right in front of your face. That is how dimming works on an OLED.

You end up with devices that still cause headaches and dizziness because they flicker in this manner, but are "eyesafe certified" because they filter out the blue light right before bed.

Yes, they are two separate things but both measured in Hertz.

Refresh rate is what manufacturers are hyping with 90Hz and 120Hz panels. That is how fast the elements on the screen are redrawn and is strictly a user interface issue.

PWM frequency is how fast the screen turns off and on, and is also measured in hertz.

It is possible to have a phone with a high refresh rate (120Hz) and also low frequency pwm (220Hz) that strains the eyes.

On mobile OLED displays, dimming is done by turning the entire display on and off very quickly (the individual pixels always stay at 100% brightness). This acts like a strobelight and can cause eye strain because your eyes are always adjusting to the change in brightness, even though your conscious brain doesn't see or register the flickering, or registers it in a different way. Some people don't notice it at all; others have trouble looking at the text because the words seem to wobble on the display.

Lots of things flicker, like LED lights, brake lights, the sun, but people don't spend 6 hours a day staring into the bulb lighting their bedroom like they stare into their screens.

Flicker is not an issue on most LCD phones or laptops made in the past 7-8 years. It is also not an issue when the OLED pwm frequency is increased to where the flickering happens so fast that it is imperceptible to the eye (as in, 1000Hz or more). This is what many new OnePlus and Xiaomi phones are doing, as well as some of the phones in the article.

It's already started.

Anti-malaria measures in Africa are funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same Bill Gates that anti-vaxxers argue are trying to poison us through the COVID vaccines and has ties to Epstein.

They are already warning about weaponized mosquitoes being used as flying syringes in California and genetically modified mosquitoes being unleashed.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/flying-syringes-and-conspiracies-the-far-right-battle-for-a-mosquito-control-board/ar-AA1hMuT9

I have a Brother laser printer that works fine since undergrad. $100, almost 15 years ago. Good colors still, but it came with this thing where you have to block it at the firewall from the Internet so it doesn't spy on you (something about reporting to Amazon servers?) and it will pretend that your toner is low on purpose, but you can cover up the sensor with electrical tape and it works fine. Prints with Linux, BSD.

I also have a Canon inkjet. I was on a trip and needed a printer and ... $25 dollars out of pocket, I ended up with a device that has scanning and color printing and works with Linux. Five years later and it still works, although the aftermarket cartridges I use are $33, more than the printer itself cost. There's no DRM making me buy just Canon ink. Works with Linux.

After reading that Epson was getting out of the laser printer business altogether for environmental reasons, I called BS on it. Likely a reason for them to sell nothing but DRM'd junk inkjets that are even more wasteful because they break every other year.

But the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Laser printers are also horrible for the environment. The fusers and toner cartridges cannot be recycled and the toner itself is nothing but microplastic that never breaks down.

I hope to never buy a printer again. Fuck that anymore, It's the 21st century, I have a PDF editor and a tablet.

The Wikipedia article has a link that should always work.

The same kind that lists the Empire State Building in the headline, like it's the 1930s and that's still impressive.

Not surprising, given how difficult Apple has made it for people who want to use third party GPUs. I'm actually surprised it was ahead of Linux at all.

I run to work , thanks.

Haha, me too. The guy broke the screen working on my old iPhone, so he just submitted another AppleCare+ claim and replaced the screen again without telling me. At the time you got only two screen replacements in three years.

I wish they would support their software updates more frequently and for longer.

Feature updates for at least 3 years, security updates for 5.

I've avoided them for their lack of update policy.

They also only fight for privacy as a marketing differentiator from Google in the US. Their privacy stance varies from country to country.

If Apple had the same capability to harvest and mine user data as Google, there's no doubt in my mind they would already be doing so. Their inability to produce a viable cloud service and major security and update issues with iCloud imply it's a lack of ability and not any pro-user/privacy-oriented sentiment in the company.

Thanks for this list. Bookmarked.

There's also Replicant which is for those who want a totally blob (proprietary firmware) free phone. This is the Stallman-endorsed Android build.

I don't really care. I'm on Lemmy but fuck it, as long as it gets people off Reddit, competition can be a good thing in this space.

Metallica and Megadeth are historically successful bands, but Metallica would have never made it if Mustaine stayed.

The Democratic Party of North Carolina has been a complete shitshow for decades.

The party in NC continues to put forth dull and tone-deaf candidates in the races that matter, because its their turn, and then do fuckall for actually promoting them in the general election and telling independent voters why they should vote for Democrats.

If Biden wants to turn the state blue, start by cleaning house at the NC Democratic Party.

Trixie is next and Forky will be after that.

Slackware-current has a newer KDE than Debian sid at the moment.

It happens.