I feel like a boomer in my 20s with the fact that I fucking despise having to pay 30-40 dollars a month just so some guy from work can reach me and tell me I need to work extra hours. Everything and everyone else I can contact online using my work’s PC or my personal laptop. It’s also dogshit-garbage because it’s getting to the point where most services entirely give up on their desktop/browser ports or websites because they just assume people are going to use their phone.
Instagram was like this for a long while. Indeed recently removed their “distance” feature and other filter features from their desktop version. Reddit is another example. Enshittification of the internet to put it all on a phone is awful.
data is easier to obtain through a phone from what i know, that’s why important features are getting probed from the browser version and transferred to the mobile version (which is most likely a browser version due to the chromium craze), no way to do it in any other way other than through “the app”
browsers like firefox have some measures to keep data in or whatever, especially on phones (which is why some privacy advocates prefer using the browser for stuff that ask for phone programme apps or whatever they’re called. software.) and even companies that use this data junk go like “IT’S BETTER TO USE THE APP!” because they really want you in the grasp
I agree. On top of that manufacturers can decide when a device is “obsolete” since most smartphone’s bootloaders are locked and even if they aren’t flashing a different OS on them may be impossible due to a lack of drivers because all the information of how they work on a low level is proprietary. It just pisses me off when I see these pocket computers that are sometimes more capable than most office PCs getting thrown out simply because some capitalists decided “this is now obsolete, go buy the new thing” even though there is nothing wrong with the hardware.
Also I think all current mobile operating systems are terrible. Their UIs suck and they’re massively bloated. Not only are most “Apps” just nodejs/wasm bundled with the chromium browser, but every “App” is also running inside a container/sandbox (which is hilarious, because chromium is already running tabs in a sandbox afaik). Even if you have an App that isn’t just a webpage inside chromium it will still be anything but native. The whole “App” architecture is so abstract and inefficient it’s offensive.
The only “smartphone” I’d be OK with using would be one where I can boot my own custom Linux Kernel, install all the software that I’m already used to and copy over all my configs and shell scripts to achieve the same workflow I have on all my other machines.
hey fellow foss games enjoyer! thanks for the reply!
it’s not just the regular usage of a modern-day smartphone that sucks. for instance, playing on a phone (statistically one of the largest demographics in terms of video games, don’t let the pro g*mer propaganda get to you) is genuinely not fun at all. no tactile feedback unlike a keyboard or a controller and to get those you need intricate set ups that hold your phone and turn it into not-a-phone that not only is harder to carry but also defeats the purpose of a playable experience easily played from the magic slab in your pocket.
back when phones were little tiny bricks like the nokia or flippies like that one motorola i constantly played jewel quest on as a kid, you had physical buttons. a directional pad with a middle clicky button, standard stuff. not made for games, but it felt usable. now swipe, tap, swipe, tap, triple finger tap, whatever. touch controls are a mess!
my fingers are too large to accommodate stuff like “claw gripping” that actual players of mobile games do. it’s a weird place to be honest
for elderly family members that just require to send and receive phone calls, mobile phones are a total mess. i have to help my grandma constantly because it’s either “swipe up to answer” or “look at the top to press the green button to answer”, or even “press the right button to answer which is a bit green, the left one is a bit red and that declines the call, all of them are white so you can barely see which is which” or “same thing but you swipe instead”. there’s no rhyme or reason, it’s always different. my sister sometimes uses facebook messenger even if i moved most of my family members to signal, it’s always a different way to accept the call. on a “buttoned phone”, you press the greenish button that never moves to a different place. here, you do anything based on certain types of calls. like what the actual fuck
i can’t wait for linux phones to be viable enough, it’d be cool to run xonotic on a fone natively with no hiccups. i saw someone already run supertux on a pinephone or something, funnie :D
Yeah touch screens are one of the worst input methods that exist. Whenever I use them they never work reliably and there is also some noticeable input lag that makes everything feel more sluggish than it is. They’re tolerable with a stylus but still inferior in every way compared to physical buttons. Using a touch screen for any serious stuff sounds like purgatory to me lol. My parents are still using their “dumb” phones for basically the reasons you described.
I have a Pinebook Pro which has the same processor as the Pinephone Pro but slightly higher clocked and with a docking station it’s a pretty usable machine (aside from some buggy proprietary drivers that require a custom Kernel). Most FOSS games just work on it without issue but 3D games are a bit problematic since the libre graphics driver is the product of reverse engineering. I got OpenMW to compile and run on it once but it was barely playable due to lacking OpenGL features. Minetest runs a lot better but had random slow downs in large open areas when I tried it.
Unless chip makers start publishing low level documentation none of these machines will ever work 100%. I do have hope that China will change this sometime in the future.
i know people that use tablets and phones to type out entire essays and stuff… how?! the keyboard feels really bad no matter what i use, i’d rather use my laptop. i don’t care that i can use my actual keyboard, a computer feels smoother for that purpose alone
another example are kiosks. like in a fast food restaurant. i tried one of those and it didn’t feel responsive just as you said
how is the pinephone pro in general? i can’t afford it and i don’t know if it’d be viable sooner or later. currently i have an s9+ and i’d need to switch to a new one, hoping for a xiaomi or anything with support for custom roms. i won’t be able to get my hands on a pixel tho
i also hope china breaks new ground chip-wise to be honest
I don’t know about the Pinephone Pro since I don’t have one (I was talking about the Pinebook Pro which I do have and since the Pinephone Pro is basically just a Pinebook Pro that fits in your pocket most things apply to both) but I would only recommend Pine64 stuff in general if you’re into hacking and tinkering with hardware. Any smartphone that is supported by a Linux distro like postmarketOS or Armbian will probably work fine.
i misread it lmfao
apparently the j5 2016, a phone i used to use, has partial support for postmarketos, with the only issues being microphone not working and brightness not being controllable. would be cool if i do that but my dad forced me to flash original firmware because “it’ll be very expensive in the later years, a collector would buy it!”
real