There’s a massive cultural thing in the US about the iPhone being the preferred phone and if you don’t have one it must be because you’re too poor to afford one. Obviously this is a result of marketing and isn’t universal but it is a surprisingly widely held view.

Given that, showing up in a group chat as a lone blue bubble marks you out as the inferior group member (in some people’s eyes). It doesn’t matter so much 1:1 but if there are 10 people the odd one out stands out.

It absolutely discusses phone size - in some detail both in the intro and as part of the reviews.

You can update your version of Fedora through the updater software as well but it’s a very clear separate process that is initiated manually.

Distro version updates bring major updates to key packages - the one you’d notice most would be to Gnome, the desktop environment. There will be other things too that get only bugfix and security updates during the life of that version, and then after a while that version will lose support and you won’t get any updates at all (https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/releases/lifecycle/).

Updating is very safe and reliable. I’ve had my Fedora install at work for 3 years, updating periodically and it’s working extremely well.

I bought the JSAUX dock (from Amazon). Has been really good. It’s a fair bit cheaper than the official one and there are a load of reports.of the official one having issues.

Black Skylands. A friend gifted me a copy on steam after he had a transaction error and got two copies. Thought it might be fun for a few hours but I’ve been obsessed.

It’s an open world exploring game where you’ve got an airship and go from island to island, and it’s a top down twin stick shooter. The mobility is really enjoyable with the grappling hook, the combat is fun with interesting weapons, tech and upgrades and you have an airship!

From that quote I took “that salmon is ok, but this dish that it’s in is overall good”.

There’s also Stormgate coming out later this year from a load of the former StarCraft developers.

What do you mean by Phase 2?

There’s some stuff about the roadmap for most of this year: https://blog.beeper.com/p/state-of-the-app-spring-2023

If it’s dead then it’s no risk, right? Afterwards it’s either working or still dead.

Yeah, it can and should be a warning to studio heads, but as game consumers we absolutely should raise our expectations (and stop buying micro transaction crap). There are plenty of big studios with money who could buy the licence and spend years making the game, but those studios belong to the big publishers who optimise for profit not for game quality.

Coincidentally, I’ve been looking at these as I’m due a new phone soon.

The flip 5 style has no value apart from gimmick as far as I can see. It goes in your pocket in a smaller height which might be of use to some people but that’s about it. Same volume of phone, same size of screen.

The Fold 5 style makes a lot more sense to me. You get a phone the same size as a normal one (roughly) but then a screen twice sized normal (roughly). I’m sure not everyone is interested in that, but there’s definitely a practical value there for some.

I think we need to separate the system from the product. With Reddit they’re the same, with a single owner. With Lemmy/ActivityPub, just like with email, there’s an underlying system that nobody owns. It’s an ecosystem of pieces created by lots of different people.

It is a good thing that people are building products on top of that. Some of them are FOSS and some of them not. As long as no-one gets too much control of the underlying system then that’s great! Users retain choice and can choose FOSS apps if they want, or they can choose something like Sync.

I agree it would be sad if the only apps were paid, but I think a mix is a sign of a healthy ecosystem.

Which he is now also doing - one time payment to remove ads permanently.

It’s moderately expensive actually at more like $20 (depending on location) but I’m happy to pay it - it’s a great app.

I personally think that a sign of a healthy technology platform is one where some people can make money from it, while the platform itself remains open. To use Linux as an example, it’s wonderful that it’s open source, and it’s great that Red Hat can be a profitable company based on Linux. It’s a good sign and it helps the Linux ecosystem thrive due to RH’s contributions.

For Lemmy there are plenty of free apps - no-one is being forced to use Sync. I’m happy to pay for something that provides some more polish to my Lemmy experience, and doesn’t require anything of anyone else.

Everything else in my life is USB-C now - my laptop, my Steam Deck, my ear buds etc. My wife and I are both Android so we only have to have one charging cable anywhere in the house or our bags.

I agree, but this provides a path towards that. It is Matrix underneath so if we get a proportion of people using Beeper they it becomes easy to transition to using Matrix to talk to those people.

I think they mostly died when GChat turned off XMPP support and became a walled garden.

If Beeper does become a successful business though, there’ll be a full time development team “playing catch-up” with money behind them. It’s interesting if you read this that they’re rolling out features ahead of the message providers in some cases!

They’re also leveraging some existing infrastructure. Beeper is built on Matrix which does a lot of the heavy lifting for them.

See “Password Hashing” here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_derivation_function

It is actually important to have a controlled cost to calculate in the forward direction too.

Gaming laptops are really just portable PCs. If you’re playing on them on in the usual “Keyboard and Mouse” way then you need to put it on a table to make that work properly. Maybe you could do it on a sofa but it’s very quickly going to get uncomfortable.

Handhelds on the other hand are extremely portable and happily usable anywhere. They’re also a lot cheaper than a gaming PC! I’m a big fan of my Steam Deck and recommend it a lot, but I should admit I also have a Gaming PC which I use for multiplayer stuff with my friends