MiddleEndian

Still wish Windows Phone was around. Having basically no apps was a positive and at least some people at Microsoft understood it when they advertised WP as being for people who didn't want to use their phones all the time.

Being able to say "Oh sorry I can't run that I have a Windows Phone" was fantastic, and if like 10-15% of the young adult population could say that, random services and venues would not be able expect you to install unwanted mobile apps.

Just hook up a PC to it?

I've run into bizarre situations where smartphones were required. Went to Royale in Boston, and it's bad enough I have to use an app to pay for tickets, but at least I knew that ahead of time and accepted it. But then they wanted me to install another app to use the coat check when I got inside. How would one anticipate the latter ahead of time? Complete lunacy.

Ultimately I declined to use the app and hid my coat under a chair lol and I will not return to the venue.

Chat bots are pretty terrible, usually.

I also refuse to use two-handed phone, which is why right now (after finally accepting there will never be a new version of the Palm Phone) I use the Motorola Razr flip phone and just keep it flipped close 99% of the time. Pretty much all Android apps work on it, sub-4" screen.

>when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).

This is good but not far enough. They should not show up as "private number" they should simply now show up at all. After some time, any networks that even allow spoofed outgoing calls should be disconnected from the phone system.

Yes, this is what I meant.

Also to respond generally to other posts. I am aware of the the separation between NT and 9x. That was Microsoft's problem and not the customers' problem. They could not force people onto ME and had to actually appeal to customers with XP. Then later on, they could not force people onto Vista and had to actually appeal to customers with 7.

Automatic updates remove the step where they have to appeal to anybody.

And I don't mean to single out MS. I remember having a Mac and switching from some version of OS9 back to 8.6 for some reason (don't recall why, but it doesn't matter because it was my computer so it was my decision). Nowadays people are complaining about Liquid Glass and they cannot rollback their OS on their iDevices.

This article is a bit rambly so I'll just focus on some things from the beginning:

>If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in.

This concept was betrayed far before agentic tools, with a much earlier concept: Automatic updates.

To use one product as an example: When Windows ME and Windows Vista came out, people hated them even more than they usually hated Windows, so they did not use them. Microsoft was forced to respond by making a not-quite-as-bad OS in Windows XP and a pretty good OS in Windows 7 respectively. No longer is that an option, your workflow will simply be interrupted by automatic updates.

>Vim and Emacs, in their infinite customizability, can be molded to fit your exact hand and workflow

Vim is one major exception to the automatic update problem. I trust vim not just because it can do a ton of shit (although that is certainly nice), but because unlike most other software, its UI doesn't change unless I tell it to change. Aside from switching from vim to neovim (my decision, not a forced update), my muscle memory from a couple decades ago still works today.

Both of them are bad

>You do want the application to steal focus when necessary

No I don't. We recently switched to Zoom at work. Meeting notifications steal my focus (Windows 11 device) and it's fucking terrible. Nothing should ever steal focus.

Having owned a good number of Macs and one hackintosh in the past, that would be very bizarre assumption to overlook. App icons bouncing while something loaded was never a rare thing.

IMO, nothing should ever steal my keyboard focus. As soon as I've typed a single character, whatever happened before, too late for you.

I use KDE on Bazzite. It has a couple killer UI features over Windows. It can label bluetooth devices (so I can have blue dualsense controller, pink dualsense controller, white dualsense controller, etc.). No clue why this doesn't work in Windows lol. Also the super/win + arrow keys are more predictable, super pgdn is minimize and super pgup is maximize, so I never find myself accidentally minimizing windows when trying to move them to a corner. My wife was able to easily install and play the Sims with all her mods as well. I also use Bazzite specifically because it's atomic - so when I make the mistake of giving into temptation and updating shit once every month or so, if it's broken I can just revert it.

But I will say I've had a ton of failure to wake up from power saving issues (resolved by just disabling pretty much every power saving feature, which I was gonna eventually do anyway because I want to be able to remote into the machine), and VLC can cause the UI to lock up because of some XWayland nonsense that they're still trying to fix (I just use Haruna, KDE's default mpv-based player, and it's mostly fine). It's a little silly and was quite frustrating that Linux is still dealing with this shit. A more minor (but still irritating) issue is that each taskbar has its own set of pinned applications (instead of just being identical like in Win10/Win11), so if I change the order on one I need to manually go change it on the others.

Overall, I like it because it's good for development and creating other stuff, the filesystem is fast as fuck (way better than WSL) it's obviously less actively antagonistic than Windows 11, Photoshop has gotten worse so I've switched to Krita which works great in KDE, and I've not been surprised negatively by anything after dealing with the previous paragraph's issues, but a non-technical user might struggle to deal with maintaining it.

Most of the time, I want neither. No I don't want the ticketmaster app (or DICE). I may need to visit a website to buy a ticket, but after that just email me a QR code or something. Even worse, I found myself at Royale in Boston and they wanted me to install yet another app to check my coat. I hid my coat under a chair instead and have not returned to the venue since then.

The example from the article:

> This summer, the kids’ performing arts school are singing and dancing in a show at Disneyland. We’re all very excited, but my excitement, at least, was muted a little when I was told to install the “Travelbound” app in order to get access to the itinerary, travel arrangements, and accommodation details.

I don't need an app for this or website for this. Just email me the information and let me put it in my calendar and then leave me alone.