We can’t even get to a point where we have 3rd party apps supporting RCS on Android. I don’t really trust Google’s ability to deliver on and continue to support new products.
Yeah, I've been watching the mobile Linux space with interest but it's definitely not in a place yet where I would consider using it as anything more than a novelty. The PinePhone is a neat little piece of hardware but no way it can replace my LineageOS phone right now.
I was vaguely wondering how hard it would be to use a GNU/Linux laptop as a phone. If you always carry a laptop, that's more-reasonable than it might seem, and that opens things up hardware-wise a lot. There are at least three obstacles:
The touch-oriented app infrastructure is stronger on smartphone OSes.
Laptops aren't as good at idling power-wise as phones. You want to be able to listen for calls without consuming a lot of power.
Apparently, while you can get 5G modems for laptops, getting one for a computer that can do voice service is not an option today. You can do VoIP or something, but I suspect that you're looking at a latency hit then.
Can they at least handle texting? A lot of services require SMS-based 2FA (insecure as it is) these days, so a phone that can't receive texts is a complete non-starter.
I don't know that off-the-top-of-my-head, but I would guess that with normal voice service the modem may well also handle texts, as at least historically, I believe the SMSes went over space in some sort of command channel separate from the per-active-phone timeslice reserved for voice.
However, you could hypothetically get SMS service and relay that to a your laptop-phone over IP from some service that provides VoIP service. With SMSes, unlike with voice, the latency shouldn't really matter.
It seems to me that that might seriously deter third-party Android distributors—AFAIK most do not ship stock Google apps for all the basic utilities, they only ship the auxiliary ones like Gmail or Docs.
Unfortunate, but somewhat of a formality. AOSP Messages and Dialer were essentially deprecated as it was already, and we have many projects ready to take their place.
if we don't watch their ads now because of how intrusive and poor quality they are, where's the logic leap to they get money from us if we can't block their ads? We just move on or get better at blocking, they don't actually get money in this scenario... This is the problem with tech decisions these days, the companies are completely out of touch. You can't use consumers as products and then charge them for it, and make no mistake about it you are the product.
Every time they make blocking ads harder, more people give up and live with it than those who leave or find a way around it. As much as I wish that wasn't the case, it unfortunately is.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
I want to abandon the shit platform but its just so nice like in my lunch breaks at work or just after work, whack on some YouTube, and I can watch gaming, I can watch tech, I can watch really niche tech, I can watch people fixing cars, I can watch an Aussie dude fuck around with his nuggets, like these people are genuinely interesting and make genuinely good content, but there’s no decentralized or otherwise separate YouTube-like platform they upload to elsewhere.
Sure, Nebula has thought provoking videos, Floatplane has a few, Odysee has a few more but there’ll be that niche YouTuber who does videos on vintage Macs that I’m in the mood for, and back onto YouTube I go.
It’s scarily difficult to get off it. I want to, and maybe I will if things get so shit it’s borderline unusable, but I think Google knows how to boil the frog and unfortunately that’s the reality of it all.
I envy you not having YouTube as something you don’t use often. YouTube was genuinely at least a decent platform over 10 years ago when I joined it, and I’ve been hooked on it since, every single shit change they make.
I think I'm lucky enough for being born in the '70s and there were less things to which become addicted. In my case, they were (and still are) books. If you really feel like leaving YT, you may just look for books on topics of interest...
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