• 11 Posts
  • 758 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If Google is going to turn Android into iPhone,

    It’s not. The change is definitively for the worse but still a far cry from Apple where you cannot just download an app off the internet and install it which you can even on Android 15, the permission management is just worse in such a case.

    Also, surely community ROMs will probably change this.

    why tf I shouldn’t get an iPhone itself?

    Why TF would it be a benefit over Android? Still worse compatibility, still more expensive, still no innovation.



  • Is that a practical question looking for a real solution right now or is more of a philosophical question?

    If the latter:

    Tech should be approachable by teaching users and add safeguards, not by dumbing things down to a degree users stay dumb. Options should be easy to find, preview what they do, and always offer to restore defaults. A desktop for extreme beginners may even adopt an idea from gaming and have them do a tutorial section first. It may even double as a wizard of which accessibility features to enable for elderly users.









  • Someone re-parented a variation to prevent it being public domain until 2040.

    So the variation cannot be used. That’s irrelevant for a file format. Some company could, for example, patent a more efficient encoding technique but the resulting file format is still public domain. So at worst an open source encoder would need to be slightly inefficient because it uses the traditional technique.



  • DeX is infuriating. It’s forever almost good enough to fulfill its promise of being a truly mobile desktop but somehow it’s never gotten there.

    So like ChromeOS? I wouldn’t say DeX is the greatest thing ever but whenever I get home from a stressful work day, sit down at my desk, and then realize that I left my backpack with the notebook at the door, I just plug the next best thing into my USB C dock and sometimes that’s my phone. Heck, I even did image editing with Krita from F-Droid once (the Android port has not been updated in years and is alpha quality, so the experience was bad but that’s on the Krita port not Android/DeX itself).

    The biggest problem now is that most android apps don’t present correctly in desktop mode, don’t behave intuitively, and / or look like ass.

    The quality of Android apps in desktop mode isn’t really dependent on whether they run on ChromeOS or DeX. If anything, the division in OS strategy into three operating systems at Google (don’t forget Fuchsia), caused needless developer fragmentation from both 3rd parties but also within Google.


  • Does that mean we’ll start seeing desktop apps like IDEs running in Android? How are you going to develop python on android? A linux container / VM?

    Non-web applications on ChromeOS already run in containers. Developer mode (or however ChromeOS calls it) is just installing Debian in an LXC container.

    That’s going to be so wasteful.

    Have you ever tried browsing the web using Chrome? THAT’S wasteful on resources. A command line-only container for Python development is nothing by comparison.


  • Finally. ChromeOS has always been a dumb idea. Making an entire OS just to use sluggish web apps in Chrome. Who thought of that? As if Android could not do web apps. Then, years later, ChromeOS got “native” apps, in quotation marks because those were just Android apps. So a whole dedicated OS, just to launch Android apps in a compatibility layer. Some additional years later, ChromeOS got “native” games via Steam. Again, quotation marks, because those run in a Debian-based container.

    Samsung DeX shows since many years that a Android with a desktop UI is a possibility.