I also am on Void since past couple of years. Paired it with LxQt DE for sometime. I didn’t have much opinion (or even cared) about systemd (which Void eschews in favor of runit) when I chose it in my distro hopping days. It’s lean and clean though package repos slightly smaller than competing ones.

I think I had used fluxbox once. I see that it was a fork of Blackbox originally. Is fluxbox more feature rich now than Blackbox? (I am assuming former would be more popular than it’s original fork now ).

I started with Ubuntu (when it was left, right and center in my country) but soon gravitated towards Debian. The old packages can be a pain sometimes ( I even tried running Debian Unstable for sometime and ironically that is quite Stable as well) but other things are quite sane.

The distro isn’t hard to use (though it does not hand hold like Zorin OS, say) compared to likes of Gentoo or Arch and deb packages are quite common (for third party software).

I ultimately(distro hopped a lot) settled on Void Linux but Debian, IMO, is still slightly easier. The only Achilles’ Heel is the woefully sore update cycle since the focus is on stability.

Sony also has the headphone jack I think. But Sony’s phone releases have gotten ahem much less frequent. I don’t think even the company is treating it with much foresight (I forget the last time I saw a Sony phone in somebody 's hands).

When million dollar AI companies pirate everything in the world

Silence

When one single person pirates something

Jail time

I wish it was available in more parts of the world. I don’t mind the mid range specs (they are decent enough for my use case). The long update cycle plus presence of microSD slot is a good thing. Does it have, by an chance, the good old 3.5 mm Jack as well?

It is not a power profile problem since I have looked into that. Even under normal circumstances, simple stuff like having tons of tabs open cause it to creak. Yes the hardware is not cutting edge but my previous laptop was worse (4 GB Ram) and whilst Linux showed it’s limits then, it never came close to crashing ever. I don’t think my Debian install in the past ever freezed on older laptop.

But it is bonkers on this model.

This issue did not affect my previous laptop. However, under heavy load, my current laptop sometimes freezes and even REISUB sometimes failed to work. The only way is to force power off via button.

This persisted across all distros from Debian based to Fedora to current Void.

Other times, laptop will stutter to a near halt post some complex process and even after said process(like a Handbrake task) is closed, continues to act as if the resources were never freed.

I only used Windows 11 for a single month b/w 2016- current (other wise, distro hopping was default) and it was stable. I can’t pin point the actual root cause (driver issues, kernel level problem) but still persist with Linux (Windows has its own stuff of problems that we all are aware).

80 W wireless charging

That even one ups the Oneplus 50W that requires a custom charging pad (or something I think). I find it quite ironical that wireless charging on some phones is now more than twice as fast as that on Pixel series (Wired)

This isn’t new. Just search for Glance. US/EU users may not have heard of this but entry level smartphones in India have long come bundled with this piece of spam, irrespective of OEM. From Chinese manufacturers to even Samsung/Motorola was guilty of bundling this.

Last I heard of Glance, they had embraced AI (because why not?). Either case, it was nothing more than an ad infested bloatware and whilst possible to toggle on/off (default state was on), removing it was usually tougher (if at all possible via adb, I am not sure of this part).

Glance walked so Nothing could run :p

Feel free to DM.

I wasn’t expecting tommydan from YouTube to be mentioned here :p. Best of all he does, what companies themselves couldn’t do, maintain the original aspect ratio. I remember that Shemaroo restored certain old Hindi films but the original aspect ratio for them was 4:3 whilst the restored ran into 16:9.

In fact, I have been seeing the odd old Hindi film from an unexpected source. The Russian site Ok. I am still not sure if it is a social media site or not since the English UI is not there for me but for all Intents and purposes, it is used to upload videos only. Some guy ended up uploading whole filmography of Rajesh Khanna on the site (much of it mirrored later to Archive.org). Whilst the irony remains that there is probably not a single legal hub to see the lesser known films.

Heck, I was hunting an out of print (like literally unavailable to stream or purchase anywhere short of anyone having the original CD/DVD) 1996 film and the only way was to pirate it (from a single source).

In some cases, piracy becomes an act of media preservation ( cues back to when BBC wiped some Doctor Who episodes in the late sixties and only way few were gotten back was because some folks had gotten audio transcribed or something at home).

From Kinks to Camel to obscure Krautrock stuff like Dissidenten, Out of Focus, Embryo. Ironically I have < 50 Hindi songs in my collection because the era I like the most [50s - 60s], good quality stuff is hard to come by. Like the files even on Soulseek or torrents are so incredibly compressed that it is a pity. The vocals sound so tinny that one wonders that how did the original masters sounded like.

I didn’t knew foobar2000 was available for mobile as well. I only knew it because it was so popular as a lightweight modular player for Windows. I used to be on Strawberry, a Clementine fork on Linux before moving to Deadbeef, which is like Foobar2000 but misses few features.

It is law of diminishing marginal utility. There would be more sonic distinguishness between a 64 kbps and a 128 kbps file, than say when making the same upgrade to 256 kbps. It becomes less and less obvious as one approaches 44.1 kHz/16 bit flac (beyond which it is useless to hoard unless one is mastering the albums themselves).

I have a DAC paired with Sennheiser IE 600 which is not audiophile level, but ought to be decent enough.

Either case, my point was not about audio quality and whether or not a person can distinguish a flac from say, 320 kbps mp3. Countless threads are made on that and viewpoints presented. My argument was that YouTube Music does not present first, to stream music in high quality and second, even if the quality was indistinguishable, there is no way to manage a library since most of the desktop third party clients remain without login.

Once can stream audio from YouTube via terminal on Linux but problem is all of that is limited to 128 kbps AAC. There is no way to stream proper 256 kbps AAC that YouTube Music Premium provides. One can download such streams via yt-dlp (it needs to be given authorization cookies) but there is currently no way to stream high quality audio from YouTube without using the webpage.

Could you tell me an alternative that allows for third party clients? On Spotify, I can configure a terminal client even on Linux and stream music with very low overhead [contrast with YTMusic with required a permanent browser tab opened]. Yes, local media streaming can do that but there is only so much space at one time on my HDD.

I heard of it. It is shipping in two variants, right? I just hope it makes general availability worldwide and not just a handful of countries (looks at Fairphone).

Pocketcasts really is trying folks towards it’s subscription driven model though I have no qualms with the UI. AntennePod relies on gPodder service to sync but that is slow and clunky sometimes.

There is Podcast Republic as well I think, which is still a one time purchase.

I didn’t even try using YTM as a podcast client. Streaming music players doubling as podcast players always have a hindrance (but at Atleast Amazon Music has some ad free content from Wondery in some regions in case one is a Prime subscriber).

AntennePod is a good FOSS alternative whilst Pocketcasts is a decent cross platform one (but the latter basically is subscription based if one wants desktop and watch playback which is a downer).