As someone who is not treating their smartphone as a third arm, I am always interested in the latest "linux phones" that is not Android. I guess I am an easier customer to move over when the time comes.
As long as apps like discord, whatsapp.. or teams is available (I know whatsapp and telegram can be installed on Linux) then it should provide most of my personal and business needs.
This device looks interesting.
Going off topic - I do miss my firefox phone. It served a purpose for its time... and it cost me something like £50 and well for 5 years.
I wouldnt say I am someone who struggles with doom scrolling but I do share how easy it can be to fall in a trap. I think its just easier for me because my smartphone is really for messaging and calls.. with some niceties of discord. I refuse to have TikTok or use typical social media on my phone.
To clarify, its not that "I refuse" its just I find little incentive to. On top of this, I do not view my smartphone as a replacement for my laptop. Yes, its great to have the internet and apps that can fit in my pocket. For many people, their smartphone replaced 90% of their activities on a desktop/laptop but not for me.
Sure when I go on youtube I watch a Short I find interesting. Before I know it, I am pressing down, down, down... etc.
I also admit that when I am learning or trying to solve a problem I can venture off to youtube or other sites. I can vaguely relate what it must be like for younger kids who grew up with the internet and smart phones. It is easy to get sidetracked.
Despite being in my 40s I hate to be that "back in my day" type of guy but the truth is, before the internet was common, we had little distraction on our PCs. We could only run what our computers had installed, right? Sure, we could still get distracted by our TVs or video games but they still exist today + everything else.
I try to teach my kids (one of which has a phone) that its easy to get caught up them... to be a third arm if you will. My eldest is slowly learning and, in my opinion, is a better example that my spouse.
Lastly, I have enjoyed reading other comments on here and their methods to improve their daily lifestyle choices.
Anyway -- a bit of fun for you...
Not long ago I was in an important meeting with 30 other people. The organiser had to leave to take a phone call. The moment he left EVERYONE took their phones out and all you could hear was 'tap, tap, tapping...'
I was the only one not on their phone. I didn't even bring it into the meeting room with me! I couldn't help but smirk look around the big table with everyone looking down on their phone.
^^ This was in 2011... 14 YEARS AGO!! This would be around the IPhone 3 era. As I looked around the room I started to hate the idea of a "smartphone" and how reliant the average person will be... and I consider myself an introvert! It was just a reflection on what the future holds. Personally, I am glad (even to this day) not to have a reliability towards it.
How I phrase it is: my phone is for utility, not pleasure.
I check emails, I ePay, SMS/Discord messages, utility apps like hobby score tracking or taking notes, necessary company apps like airlines or resorts, etc.
I never use my phone for pleasure. If I look up a YouTube video, it's for a purpose and it ends at that purpose. If something takes me to a social media site, I read the post and end there.
I keep pleasure on my computer. When I step away from my computer, I'm disconnected from all the carcinogenics of the modern online life.
- Text messaging / WhatsApp / Discord of few groups, etc
- Alarm clock
- Taking pictures or videos.
(Likely family oriented)
- Booking tickets - document, shows, travel
(the main reason I have email setup on my phone)
- Travelling - Geolocation / map (gmaps, etc)
- Exception: Internet if working on laptop with no internet (ie in cafe)
(This could also be youtube videos or similar)
If smart phones were banned tomorrow then my life would not change that much. The above is mostly for better convenience of what is other methods and requiring a some paper or printer, etc.
I do wonder what the percentage is today that rely on their smartphone (even if not serving a decent purpose other than "social") and struggle with daily life if a ban started tomorrow.... waking up to no smart phone.
I think it will be pretty high even for people in their 40s. Its rather sad.
I am falling back to 'plain and simple' in the world of web applications (or a website)
While I am a programmer, I will continue to write code that injects html text with another... like a layout having a title and body html, etc.
I certianly limit my client-side codebase. Most of my javascript code is really focused on GUI/UI, even if I have to use a specific library. I dont bother with React or the like.
I will use htmx if I want to do partial updates. Other pages might be a tad more complicated if fetching data from SQL. However, I also have pages that are SIMPLY HTML+CSS!!
> I so badly wish we could change a big Windows business application to use PostgreSQL
This ^^^
A small businness I (no longer) work for was using Windows Servers, SQL Server, Classic ASP, .NET and other things. It was expensive!
I tried sooo hard to migrate to get them to realise the savings moving over to Linux and Postgres, and get their DATED software over over afterwards!
Well, it was Linux and MySQL/MariaDB but I have slowly grown fond of Postres over the last couple of years.
I will always remember (and find funny) when we purchased a server a third-party no longer wanted to support for us anymore (linux+php) and my boss said "they only pay £300 a year for that server" -- yep.
There would have been no article about this pizza place. It's free advertisement -- and interested me looking into it. Looks like nice pizza! Would be interested trying them if I am ever in Norwich area.
"And given the lack of access to the Internet, I couldn’t figure out what else to do with Linux.."
The 'good old days' of learning a computer without the internet. You had books or, in my case, my dads university books... oh and I had Microsoft Encarta. LOL.
While I am responsible avoiding the distractions of the internet, I still prefer disconnect from the internet at times. Sure, it has its powers with quick searching for answers but when you learn by doing (rather than copying/pasting) it releases great vibes to the mind - and what you learn sticks!
I can picture teenagers today trying to learn but end up doom-scrolling on tiktok or other... or distracted by other "content" that is easily accessibly than ever. A Windows 3.1 or 95 computer was as good to whats installed.
Todays computers have the same thing, but everything else the internet throws at you. Its easy to lose track, even for people in their 40s today.
This comes from an old Red Hat Linux advert, likely way back to the late 1990s. At the end of the advert it says "you are here" which shows an old-style plane (before commercial) about to take off. Point is its just a matter of time it leaves the ground and "about to win"
Love or hate GNU/Linux, but it has been extremely successful and while not a winner in the desktop field - it has on servers!
Many people would never believe Linux getting the popularity it deserves. Of course things are changing - though slowly. Here we have Linux getting the love it needs as a serious gaming system anf Microsoft making some poor decision in the last couple of years especially with Windows.
Still a long way to go, especially breaking into the corporate world. Imagine - we could be seeing business laptops/desktops slowing gaining in Linux rather than Windows. That is not going to be easy. Again, it is not about Linux -- but the SOFTWARE. If the Office-space software and tools get more love in the Linux world, Microsoft start to focus away from their Windows platform and be purely about Software/Azure focus.
FYI that quote originates neither from Red Hat, nor from Gandhi (the usual misattribution).
Consensus attribution appears to be: Union leader Nicholas Klein in 1914:
> And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.
Just yesterday the news was Nvidia's personal AI supercomputer (on Linux). Today the news is about gaming and SteamOS. The "cloud" is already for decades overwhelmingly Linux. There are remarkable devices (pun) [1] based on Linux. Whether for fun or serious work, if we connect the dots the future is Linux, or at least Linux-like.
Yes, it is a painfully slow journey. People acting as individuals or in organizations have enormous inertia (which is not totally a bad thing- upgrading a Linux desktop is still a dance at the precipice). But the real cause is mostly the extreme centralization and suppression of competition in the broader tech space. This has not helped the adoption of mass-market oriented devices based on Linux. But slowly the wheels of computing history are turning...
To the degree the phrase "a supercomputer in your pocket" stops being an empty marketing term and reflects real empowerment of users I would expect Linux to get ever more exposed to mass markets. But this development is predicated on non-technical users somehow becoming aware and valuing the agency and empowerment that a FOSS personal computing environment affords them.
These days the smartphone is the (very) Personal Computer for a lot of people.
Remember how Android is technically Linux ?
The risk here is for SteamOS to go the Android way...
but I have more faith in today's Valve than in Google of a ~decade ago.
At least for now, while Valve is still a private company and Gabe Newell is still leading it and still seems to be in good health and sound mind.
Sadly, this will probably only last for a couple of decades at best, but hopefully this is all the time that Linux (and libre software in general) needs.
> They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Just because you are somewhere on that sequence, it doesn't mean you have any chance of moving forward. Also, most things don't follow those steps at all.
But yeah, those are the steps that "disruptive innovation" follow. The real kind, that the famous book was written about. Not the bullshit kind that people throw around to confuse others.
(Also, apparently, Carl Sagan wasn't much of a history nerd, just a physics one. I expected that phrase coming from somebody else. But well, at the time people knew very little about things that were not their specialty.)
They were correct to laugh at Columbus. He wanted to sail to India, everyone told him (correctly, because they weren't naive about the basic geography) that the distance was much too far. He lucked into finding an unknown landmass that wasn't India.
20 years ago we were using the likes of PHP4 or Classic ASP or perhaps Perl for server-side languages. Possibly the early days of VB.NET (ASP.NET) being a thing.
Some sites created 20 years ago were still not making use of AJAX, either. If they were, in very specific ways. It is more likely to be using IFRAMEs back then to achieve partial refresh.
Today, the difference is that we still apply "the old ways" building websites but with modern languages + htmx. This is the difference.
When I look at websites I have created or inherited, all I see if bloat crossing between code written on the server-side... and code on the client-side. The further back in time I go the more it was server-side but, as mentioned, begin to lack the AJAX side of it.
Personally, I prefer to be back to the vast majority being server-side code. Sure, the amount of Views (and Partial Views) on my backend codebase is much higher than before but it is still organised code and testable without even using a browser. I then let htmx do the magic onto the webpage.
I have success stories but I also mock some things I did in the past but with htmx and it is very promising!
Sure I am still using Javascript but it is not ready about the data anymore - mostly additional libraries used for better drop down features or other cosmetics/UI things.
EDIT - ADDED:
It is worth noting that the last 20 years, despite various javascript frameworks from React to Angular to knockout to jQuery to MooTools, etc..... we also had Flash and Silverlight and other things. We also have HTML5, CSS3, etc.
I have tried many things in the last 20 years. I also accept that htmx, while my goto choice for todays web development... is not going to be the best choice in my future.
Web Assembly (WASM) is going to get better and more popular. It will not be about HTML coding like today or even javascript in many ways. They will still be there, of course.
(Javascript will always be there but its use will get smaller and smaller)
Lets hope the AI tool being used does not convert to a particular religion and distorts ancient texts that challenges their beliefs, especially if it predates their "historically accurate" stories by hundreds or thousands of years.
human - "Please compile these texts"
AI - "done! Here you go"
human - "114AD? Are you sure. We expect this to be around 100BC"
AI - "NO! Nothing to see, here! Water turning into Wine was clearly added to this God AFTER our lord and saviour!"
human - "But I have this thing.."
AI - "NOTHING TO SEE, HERE! THEY WERE PLANTED TO TEST US! TEST US!"
>...Once you see how both OpenJDK and Mono need to be boostrapped under Guix...
Where is GUIX covered on this site? I am interested reading about it. I dont see how guix needs OpenJDK or Mono as it is written in GNU GUILE -- but maybe there is something I am not aware of.
Guix in order to bootstrap OpenJDK and Mono from sources it needs to create a centipede-like toolchain building. WIth Rust it's even worse. One build per release since the first C++ compilable compiler.
As long as apps like discord, whatsapp.. or teams is available (I know whatsapp and telegram can be installed on Linux) then it should provide most of my personal and business needs.
This device looks interesting.
Going off topic - I do miss my firefox phone. It served a purpose for its time... and it cost me something like £50 and well for 5 years.
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