There are plenty of alternatives to the Kindle, several years ago I used the Kobo Glo, worked fine with PDFs, though I remeber having to hack it’s local database to make it work without an account.
Surprisingly, Remarkable tablets, despite not being open source, you can do just about anything with. They allow root SSH access and the backend is a heavily stripped down version of Linux.
I’ve been writing an application to allow customizing splash screens over SSH/SFTP and it’s actually been super easy to work with. The “jailbreak” scene is also super active, and the company has gone the opposite direction of most. They retroactively removed the need for a subscription to cloud sync on all devices, and seem to very much embrace the ridiculous things people have done with their tablets.
The device is also no nonsense and does exactly what it’s designed to do extremely well and no more. No ads, no bloat, no constant internet connection. You could never connect the thing to the internet if you really wanted. Honestly one of the few devices I’ve bought in recent memory that I feel like I wholely own.
Two big downsides are no Bluetooth, and you need a modified hardware device to unbrick the device if you fuck up (jumping type C pins to put the device into recovery). Overall really solid and would recommend.
After reading the “issues” discussion from w weeks ago, this is just an idea at this point. The simplemobiletools fork was a mock up for something that sounds like its very much in the planning/ideas stage. you can also go to fossify.org to see another mock up that does nothing right now. You could message one of them, but I think maybe its some MIT software team / group & their just tossing ideas around for a foss hub of sorts.
I don’t think any builds have been compiled yet. I have no real knowledge how, but but you could build your own by downloading developer tools an cloning the codebase. Probably better just to wait. How were you downloading Simple Mobile Tools previously?
If you have the apps from F-Droid, there is no need to rush, I think. The F-Droid-apps are without adds and offline. They no longer receive updates, but they are not apps that need constant updates.
This isn’t exactly true. My guess is your app profiles are either bloated, and/or your measuring your RAM usage incorrectly/unfairly.
On my M1 MBA for instance, a fresh profile of LibreWolf (+ child processes) uses 514 MB. Compare this with a closed-source browser like Opera (fresh profile) which takes up a massive 1183 MB. Vivaldi uses a but lesser RAM compared to LW, but it’s still a comparable amount (486 MB), whereas the new and fancy Arc browser uses 587.3 MB.
Now, LibreOffice on the other hand does take up more RAM than MS Office by default - 475.4 MB - but it works a bit differently to MSO, because LO uses a single binary for all office applications, unlike MSO where each office application is it’s own app. But if I were to open a blank Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, and a blank LO Writer, Calc, Impress documents, they use approximately the same amount of RAM in total (~750 MB).
Selling 8GB high end laptops like macbooks with soldered RAM shouldn’t be a thing at all. It’s such a waste of resources, because devices which could be used in 10 years won’t be useful beyond basic word processing and browsing.
The only reason Apple has them is to have a low starting price while taking 200 USD for 8GB additional RAM. For context, 16GB RAM costs about 50 USD in retail.
won’t be useful beyond basic word processing and browsing.
Not even that. For most basic users, web browsing is by far the most resource-intensive thing they’ll ever do, and it’ll only get moreso. If it weren’t for modern web design, most users could honestly probably be okay with 4GB or 8GB of RAM today. For a laugh, I tried using a 512MB Raspberry Pi 1B for all my work for a few days. I could do absolutely everything (mostly developing code and editing office documents) without any problems at all except I couldn’t open a single modern web page and was limited to the “retro” web. One web page used up more resources than all of my work combined. I’m guessing it won’t be too many years before web design has evolved to the point where basic webpages will require several GB of RAM per tab.
(I agree with your overall point, by the way. Soldering in 8GB of RAM these days is criminal just based on its effects on the environment)
Looking forward to this coming to Godot. Personally unlikely to ever need it but there are some impressive projects going on in godot right now that could use it!
Mh, that’s unfortunate. Do closed-source apps use less RAM? Like MS Office compared to Libre Office? Not sure if it would be fair to compare Safari to Librewolf since it’s probably optimized for MacOS. I think generally programs become less RAM efficient since people tend to have more nowadays.
I just opened an empty Writer document to check the RAM usage. On Fedora 39, it is using 161.0 MB. I opened an empty Calc, and the RAM usage increased to 223.9 MB.
My first guess would be emulation for apps that do not run on aarm by default.
A lot of OSS devs don’t want to spend time supporting a closed architecture. Especially some of the more privacy and openness focused apps that you’re running.
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