It depends on the game, character etc. I mean I suppose it adds to the escapism slightly?

I play all sorts of different games though, some where you’re not given the choice (Life Is Strange for example) and I don’t feel like it’s that big a deal

So because I play a lot of games and read a lot of eBooks then I would say getting my first tablet was pretty great, even though it was a midrange one that was just thrown in to the deal when I was upgrading my phone and I probably wouldn’t have bothered otherwise

It was a Samsung A8 from 2019, had about an 8" screen and I used it mainly as a kindle and games device. The games I play are mainly strategy or board games, but there were certainly some games that you wouldn’t necessarily think would cause a problem (Wingspan?) that would lag or crash. Since I review games it helped to have a second device to check things on, and a bigger screen is better.

Last year I upgraded it to a Samsung S8 which is a flagship. It’s a 10 or 11 inch screen which felt more unwieldy though I’m used to it now. It can run more things. It’s a really nice device. The screen isn’t actually OLED but feels like it, the quality is amazing. It actually came with a stylus which was a neat touch. The screen is good enough that yes I have found myself watching more TV on it.

However, when people say ‘productivity’, I don’t know really know what they mean by that tbh. I’ve got a work laptop for work. I’ve got my own laptop for other stuff. Do people mean drawing and things on tablets but that?

Usually Meet with my friends and WhatsApp with my family because it’s what they’re comfortable with

The Precession To Calvery was hilarious from beginning to end.

You beat me to it because this game is genius!

Someone else mentioned Procession to Calvary - an adventure game set in a cut and paste world of renaissance art with a very surreal plot and sense of humour. Pythonesque.

There Is No Game is pretty hilarious, the voice acting always makes me crack up.

Agatha Knife is a funny point and click adventure game where you’re a 7 year old girl who’s a butcher and needs to set up her own religion sacrificing pigs in the basement for… Reasons.

I remember definitely that Firefox was the browser of choice in our house pre-Google. IE was always nasty to use and my Dad was always a tinkerer and worked with IT guys a lot so we had Firefox on PC for ages

(As a side note those same well meaning IT guys persuaded my Dad Linux was really easy to set up and use as a home PC for the whole family. Didn’t end well)

Anyway, Firefox was trumping IE hands down as a family PC browser, I suppose I’m talking late 90s early naughts? Don’t know exactly. But we would have been using Ask Jeeves still as our search engine before Google search launched and that made my Dad’s eyes light up, because it was fast. And it was the same with Chrome when it came out. By then I’d moved out but like you say, they had the PR as the guys who were now changing things most.

And it wasn’t all bs, because it was and in many ways is a very good browser. On the one hand there’s definitely an element of people using what everyone else does but also, if it was a total crock of shit no one would use it. For me it’s not even so much privacy but my tolerance for ads and need for a dark mode on mobile have got me back to Firefox on Android for now

deleted by creator

Have to say with our home wifi (which is very good) Zoom is the only programme which consistently has problems with connections dropping out both on my devices and my wife’s. Turning VPN and other things off can help, but even then not always. And why should I have to do that exactly anyway, hm? Stopped using it unless I have to because someone else is using it.

My work uses Teams - it does the job, and is reliable. It also has chat functions and other various things aside from the video calling which clutter it up though.I personally prefer Google Meet - cleaner interface, no clutter and has an adequate subtitle function which is in advertently hilarious at times but pretty useful as well.

Both have the advantage of being matched up with their equivalent email systems etc, so if a business uses MS Office it does kind of make sense to use Office and same for Gmail.

I’m talking from workplace experience where places have tried using all of these or interact with other companies using them. Since lockdowns ended I don’t really do video calls in private.

Going for a more obscure open source option might have the same issue with other obscure options, persuading the other parties in the call to install and use something they’ve never heard of. That’s not knocking those options though, I’ve never used them and can’t comment on them.

Yeah to be fair I’ve always had a Samsung, either flagship or midrange and never had an issue.

Samsung has gone way overboard with their pricing for flagships recently but their midranges are pretty decent on that score and I guess I just go with them because I’m happy with what I’m getting now. The A52s is what I have now, upgraded from an S10+ which had pretty much the same specs.

In terms of bloatware, I just disable it or uninstall it, same as I do with any software which comes on a work phone or home PC that I don’t use. Is this a big deal?

As for pixels - it’s great that they get regular updates. But they’re also expensive. They seem to look nice. Generally speaking though I agree they are the attempt to do an iPhone version of Android which probably only really matters in the US market

Fair.

But I was just giving my perspective as an outsider who stumbled across this post because messing about with the terminal had the opposite affect on me as someone who appreciates the concept of Linux but doesn’t really have the level of passion to learn programming for it.

Anything using the terminal… I once tried to do something on Linux because a friend told me it was great. I gave it another go when it came up on my Chromebook and tried to teach myself. I just don’t get it.

I’m not a programmer at all, so anything that involves typing commands is going to baffle me!