Joined 7 years ago
Roughly every other week there is a new "The (programmable) CAD that fixes everything!" post on the front page, just for me to open them up excitedly and noticing that they use a mesh kernel and will thus never be able to provide fillets and chamfers painlessly (for the user). All while they are absolutely essential for a lot of designs, especially in 3D-printing, a well-placed fillet/chamfer can make the difference between an object that breaks upon looking at it funny and one that can bear significant load.
Generally I think the marketing of GraphenOS is interesting. They are usually positioned as the "Absolute security. No compromises." ROM, but in my personal experience, they are the "It must work. No compromises. Then make the rest as safe as possible"-option, given aspects like using the "real" Google Play Services (if desired), but sandboxed, instead of MicroG or unrestricted Google Play, which pretty much all other ROMs roll with.
That said, I think the marketing of GrapheneOS could be better. Every introduction of GrapheneOS I've seen paints the image of Graphene being "Absolute security, no compromises", whereas in reality GrapheneOS is the most "Things need to work, no compromises. Then make the rest as safe as possible" custom ROM that I've used thus far (in particular regarding them allowing you to install Google Play, rather than using MicroG).
The biggest issue is that there is a different way to do this for every device, so most custom ROMs don't bother. It's relatively simple and automatable for Pixel devices, so the GrapheneOS installer takes care of it. e/OS/, which is based on Lineage, allows this for some devices, iirc.
It has a spark of profound thought "Generative AI will obscure the path to truth" combined with a lot of conspiracy-theory-grade, flimsy analysis.
The number of CPU cycles my current android phone burns through just to boot and get ready to accept my "first useful input" is probably in the same order of magnitude as or higher than my old N900 would use for the entire day (600MHz single core vs. 8 cores at several GHz). Yet somehow the N900 could easily run quite a lot of things in parallel and would still react quickly to inputs, while I decided to get rid of my previous (still several times more powerful) phone because it would regularly hang for 10 more seconds without any good reason (also there were no more OS updates).
Also with the N900, I had control over every aspect of the system, I could easily script things in python without installing a huge app for it, which the OS would decide to randomly kill to save battery, etc.. Closest thing you can do on Android is root your phone and now every second app complains what a horrible person you are for wanting a bit more control over your own hardware.
That being said, I too eventually buckled to the fact that all the software you need to make a smartphone useful/entertaining is pretty much only available for Android and iOS. And the most realistic way to get "Android-compatibility" to a Linux phone is to just ship an entire Android build with it, due to how interwoven things are on Android.
I'm wondering if those will be affected by the new ban as well, or if crypto scams aren't political enough to apply.
2) A reference implementation for browser-features is an insanely complex project. Already there are effectively only two entities on the entire planet who can produce a browser that is reasonably close to the current spec. If you forced a reference implementation to exist, it'd probably just end up being Chrome(ium), which is arguably an even worse situation than where we are now.
In my case, it started with a video that appears to be broken (?) the video just ended without any life guard reaction, but you can hit "Play Another Video" which appears afterwards.
