When your phone options are currently hardware company vs advertising company
Same, it'd be cool to see pine phone or something take off , or like Huawei or Xiaomi come up with their own phone OS
postmarketOS will be usable as a daily driver one of these days
Like pine OS? I love Linux but I don't hate myself enough to try to DIY arch onto my phone hardware, I've already sunk enough hours into getting video and audio working on my desktop
Yeah, I'd like to see a phone come with linux pre-installed by the manufacturer. It's one thing to change over a PC, but I'm certainly not technically skilled enough for a phone
sunk enough hours into getting video and audio working on my desktop
What’s your hardware setup like? Between the
archinstallscript, ALSA drivers being good finally, and AMD hardware working brilliantly with mesa, sound and video has pretty much worked out of the box for years. Unless you’re using an Nvidia card. Then you’re SOL
There's plently of open source mods of android that let you sideload as much google apps as you need. LineageOS is the most popular and stable by a long shot.
Works fairly out of the box, except for the whole part of flashing onto the phone in the first place.
Lineage doesnt allow you to lock the bootloader tho. Calyx is the new cool kid iirc
Looks like another fad OS that's "focused on privacy". I can't find a list of what phones they support. It just says, "pixel 3 or newer", which makes me suspect it only supports pixels.
https://calyxos.org/get/download/ That has supported devices, yes its mostly pixels.
If Huawei keeps making phones in some form, it seems like they would be a good option. Sure, they aren't officially doing business in the US, but it's not too difficult to get one unlocked. HarmonyOS seems promising and will likely be a good option for avoiding US companies/government. They're also a worker owned company, which is neat.
Use Honor brand if you want a Huawei-like experience that still has android and can still be sold in the US
I had an Honor for a while, good brand. Not perfect (nothing can be) but was still more than good enough
As someone that's used Huawei phones in the past, they're not great. Still plagued with most of the issues modern smartphones have. Shitty updates and support unless you bought the flagship model, EMUI is a pile of nonsense compared to almost everything else, stock android is much better, and even Samsung has a better UI. Locked bootloader because reasons. Unfortunately it's not good
I just don't understand in 2021 why no one seems capable of making a decent smartphone that doesn't crap out after a couple of years.
Probably planned obsolescence.
It is planned obsolescence, but to be more specific it’s mostly the batteries. They just go to shit after ~500 charges. Nobody is willing to make a phone that sacrifices battery capacity for lifespan (by limiting charge to the 20-90% range you can extend the life of the battery, operating outside of that is stressful for battery chemistry) or teach consumers how to maximize lifespan (most people don’t want to babysit their batteries like that and enjoy all the bells and whistles of fancy UI animations and always-on connections and apps).
Plus increases in computing power almost all go straight to doing more stuff, faster, instead of doing the same amount of stuff at the same speed but more efficiently. We absolutely could have phones that stay alive for a week, they’d just be as powerful as phones from 2013. Granted they’d remain useful for a decade since it would take 5-7x as long to hit that 500 charge mark, so perhaps software improvements could keep performance up.
I think this is why manufacturers are charging more for phones these days, they see the writing on the wall. People are keeping their phones longer, and trying to fix them instead of just buying a new one. Fewer phones sold, but at a higher margin for each sale.
phones that stay alive for a week
they’d just be as powerful as phones from 2013
they’d remain useful for a decade
TAKE MY FUXKING MONEY
100% would replace my phone with one of these if it was an option. I remember keeping my Droid 4 alive by swapping to fresh batteries for years after they stopped updating it until even the texting app was unusably slow because of how much I loved the keyboard on it.
Wait so just to be clear, taking my phone off the charger at 90% and not letting it hit 20% would improve longevity of the battery?
Yes, battery chemistry is more stressed at either extreme. Keeping it out of those extremes prolongs its life and helps to avoid risk of fire.
you can replace your own battery for pretty cheap these days. just buy the repair tool kit and the battery. just did mine for $20.
Nobody is willing to make a phone that sacrifices battery capacity for lifespan (by limiting charge to the 20-90% range)
My Asus Zenfone 3(?) hand this implemented as a settings option.
Also this whole battery problem could be solved by selling new batteries, even those new squishy ones. My friend got a battery for his four year old phone changed at a repair shop but it ended up barely any better than his old battery. It's always the case for some reason...
At the end of the day, it's just a product they want to sell in order to grow and obtain the skills for domestic ARM chip manufacturing. And for that, it's a massive success. And it's not as if the phones are terrible or anything, they're just another smartphone, with all the issues that they have
you can replace your own battery for pretty cheap these days. just buy the repair tool kit and the battery. just did mine for $20.
https://swappa.com/catalog/brand/oneplus
when Chinese people have been making better phones than Americans since 2014
Can't you get them pretty easily through Chinese sites like, Aliexpress, Taobao, etc.?
Yes I think so. But if the price looks too good to be true, it is not a real Huawei. Beware "Alibaba and the 40 thieves", after all.
tbf Pixels are about the only Android devices left where you can completely remove Google’s integration
I mean, sure, there could be backdoors in the system firmware and bootloader code, but you absolutely can purge Google from userspace by installing CalyxOS or GrapheneOS
Couldn't be Xiao-me :big-cool:
Just kidding, I just wanted to make the pun.
We're joking around, but seriously: update your iphone. I'm sure some people on this site have one.
Bad for environment.
Only smacking your own ass like a drum is a valid form of communication.
ah yes Gorcenski, who's super proud of her contributions to the US military
Supposedly it has better privacy or security or whatever, so if I were an anarchist I'd probably use one.
IDK, seems like they figured out how to get into the San Bernardino guy's iPhone because they gave up on forcing Apple to open it.
i kept screaming "siri update my shit" at my phone but all that happened was i started bleeding from my ass, is this how it's supposed to work? i'm not super tech savvy.
El Capitan
Lots, that shit is old af
Update to Linux and enjoy the latest in security
I recommend keeping a disk image backed up (preferably in as many places as possible). That way even if the machine itself fails, you can recover everything and keep working on another (possibly Hackintoshed) Mac.
Nice! That hardware should last a while yet, and you should be able to swap to a SATA SSD and upgrade to 16GB of RAM if you haven’t already.
Also if it’s a 2012-era MBP with a Sandy Bridge CPU (i5-2xxx/i7-2xxx model number), it should upgrade to High Sierra just fine, which would get you access to safer, more modern versions of Firefox and other apps. High Sierra isn’t receiving security updates anymore but it’s a damn sight better than El Capitan. You might be stuck on El Capitan due to Logic’s OS requirements, though, I have no idea there.
The only Apple thing I own is a USB C to 3.5mm headphone jack adaptor, for my android phone
I use one of those with my laptop (via a USB-C to USB-A adapter) because the normal headphone out is full of noise.
One of the best things Apple has ever made.
It actually works so well. And it's pretty cheap too, for the quality. All other high quality ones are way more expensive. The official Samsung one is also terrible
They should be dirt cheap because it’s a passive cable. USB Type-C controller on the host detects the special alt-mode and the left/right signals are piped right in. It’s essentially a non-round 3.5mm port.
As the other commenter said, definitely look into Linux. Linux can run on aging hardware pretty well. If you're partial to the layout and UI of MacOS check out Elementary OS. I've never used it before but I have heard some good things about it.
IIRC it was a Webkit vulnerability, so you're ok on this if you're using Firefox. But as the other person said, your whole OS is old and that always comes with some risk.
The main release of Firefox dropped support for El Capitan ages ago, and the last El Capitan-supported version of Firefox ESR stopped receiving security updates in July.
They’d have to update to High Sierra (which is possible on that generation of hardware) to use updated versions of Firefox.
I thought antifa were using non-Google custom Android ROMs or Linux phones.
The “all antifa” is a bit (at least in the quote tweet) because “antifa, politicians, and journalists” were targeted by the Pegasus malware, which could hack a phone without any input from the user and without showing any signs of tampering. I think it sent a malicious text that you couldn’t see and then that was game over, you’re owned.
The update is supposed to fix the vulnerability Pegasus was exploiting, so it is very important to install if you have an iPhone.
I really feel like these text message attacks are implemented on purpose holy cow. There have been at least 4 of these attacks on iOS over the years. How hard could it be to make sure there isn't a buffer overflow or something in their text message code?!
Messaging apps these days are a huge vector for attacks since they have these massive, sprawling featuresets and are often integrated deeply into the OS. You've got rich text, URL previews, audio, video, automatic message parsing for replies/calendar events/reminders/2FA codes/etc, emoji, stickers, GIFs from external services, the list goes on. Most of the time there's some level of separation for third party apps like facebook messenger and discord, but the built-in apps are much closer to the OS and often have expanded privileges.
well that endorsement from emily droneski definitely makes me suspicious that the new version actually has an nsa backdoor or some shit
