I mean, there’s no singular reason for Kamala’s loss - but abstentions over the middle east were still a reasonably noteworthy problem for the campaign.

With that being said… more broadly, people are just generally awful and a lot of people bury their heads in the sand rather than acknowledging how backwards the majority really are.

Not sure what you mean, you can get a used Pixel 6a for 120 EUR, which will continue to get updates for another 2.5 years. Show me another phone with such a great value proposition. That’s exactly my point, outside of the EU and north america, you’re just very unlikely to find that scenario. I don’t want to doxx myself here, but the going rate for the phone you mentioned is at minimum 300 euro equivalent - comparable flagships significantly cheaper. I have nothing against Pixels specifically - before the re-brand, I had nearly every Google Nexus phone ever made, and they were all amazing. They’re just not acceptably priced in all markets for what they are, even used.

I’d argue however that there’s much more to android than either Pixels OR chinese spyware crap - Samsung, Sony, and LG aren’t always perfect, but often make very good products that if running a custom ROM, are every bit as secure as any pixel, while the hardware of pixels is generally a bit worse, but compensated for with better software optimisation. Buying into a false dichotomy that there is only one good android manufacturer puts us no further ahead than apple fanboys beholden to a largely good, but sometimes flawed ecosystem.

My ideal is that development can expand to other mainstream brands and OEMs, and that the interest in the graphene/ROM community picks up steam more broadly, rather than being siloed into pixels alone, and bound to the fate of google-specific hardware going forward.

graphene is ONLY for select Google pixel phones though. I wish this was made much clearer by the team and advocates.

its a real shame because pixels, although big in the USA are typically a minority of most android ecosystems elsewhere, and bootloader hijinks keep some perfectly capable phones from being easy to switch over to, even if they were supported.

Even on samsungs, which are much better for flashing than they used to be - my options on a year old flagship for a decent ROM are pathetic compared to the old days.

so I would really love to use graphene, and go back to an open source ROM without crap on it, but pixels are such a bottom tier phone for their price in a lot of places, as much as I really really want the project go gain traction for their transparency and objectives.

“it prevents some users’ preferred operation of using the mouse while its charging”

…

“It’s not a stupid decision”

absolutely. I had tried Linux on various machines long ago but was one of the people that was put off by older distro’s learning curves - I’m now daily driving Linux on both my laptop and desktop and the main push for the switch is microsoft fucking around with settings, installing candy crush after updates (on a paid OS), adding more and more dumb, unsolicited, privacy invading AI bullshit with every feature update, and running like shit on a perfectly adequate machine.

Modern Linux, with flatpak support? I haven’t looked back once - had to help a friend fix something on a win11 desktop recently and was reminded of every reason I made the switch. Even if I had to jump in the terminal every day like long ago, it would still be worth it to not have bing, copilot, and edge rammed down my throat, whether I want them or not.

Windows is getting so shitty that completely non-technical users are tired of it… as soon as somewhat open minded users start to experiment and realise that Linux feature and UX parity has been achieved - I hope microsoft fucking collapses and we can all finally walk into the sunlight that open source OSes and software represent.

dont know why youre being downvoted, this is completely true. The majority of people favour the convenience that streaming has represented, and TVs have been designed to turn on showing a shiny netflix icon instead of “Composite II” for like a decade now.

Yes, while consumers have been sold a double-edged sword/lie - the streaming companies were obviously never going to market their platforms by saying “one downside of streaming is we can take away content whenever we like”.

The average person with a bluray collection is going to be much more aware of the pros and cons of the formats - I’d be willing to guess most peoples family “collections” are still on DVD.

The issue is WhatsApp from a few years ago versus WhatsApp today - meta/favebook is probably the worst possible company to have bought it, their record on security, privacy, and features is horrible.

The app today is full of enshitification (meta ai being shoved down my throat by the communication monopoly) and nobody can ever fully trust their security or privacy because its not open source.

Signal sadly doesn’t yet have the ubiquity of whatsapp - but for everyone that has it (now I’m finding even non tech-savvy family are switching over) use signal, and where you have to, use WhatsApp.

imessage is no better in that case - and outside America barely anybody still uses either SMS or RCS, apple is a smaller share of the market meaning the ubiquity of imessage isn’t there.

If you want anything beyond SMS which is a universal standard, you both have to be using the same service - I’m just saying that signal is available for anyone who wants to use it.

I was also upset at the removal of texting from signal, but in hindsight its for the best - if its a secure message service that youre not charged per message to use, the support of a dying platform which is difficult to distinguish when in use is an issue - now its extremely clear whether youre reaching someone through signal or text, cause signal only sends signal messages.

Signal is better than any other common alternative, and its on both android and ios

The confusion about how the protocol works for new users is real, and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading, firstly when you’re not used to how fediverse stuff works, but also when bizarre rules about no swearing or NSFW content are applied at an admin level. I first started on .ml, but moved here after some deliberation because people can tailor their feed and content through joining communities, not having their instance hyper-politicised by ban-happy tankies. (I’m very progressive myself, before it’s claimed otherwise)

I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption. Of course admins are entitled to their own opinions, but the entire purpose of communities like this is to try and decentralise the problematic censorship which has ruined reddit (among other issues). Having faith in the users and mods to consider content and conduct with as impartial as possible development and administration is vital to the site having any chance of being transparent and worth-contributing to.

I don’t want to see the whole concept of Lemmy written off by outsiders because their first experiences of the site are of the rabid circlejerk messageboards instead of a new and exciting format for online content with greater interoperability and user control. To this effect, I’m still on the fence about defederating with those communities at a user level, but I think that I’m going to make a more concerted effort to make content and foster the communities I want here, so that .ml fades into insignificance - I don’t want to feed into their narratives of persecution.

I wanna call on @dessalines, and @Nutomic, among others, with the greatest respect for their views and contributions to the project, to put the future of the platform ahead of turning it into an echo chamber - either by relinquishing themselves from one or the other (admin/dev), or by the admins collectively creating a clear policy about politicised banning to acknowledge people’s concerns about this behaviour.

I think PC gamers tend to overestimate their importance in OS distribution these days - gaming on Linux is just as passable these days as on Mac, and there’s much more to PC use than only gaming for 90% of users.

I feel that PC use is more complicated than gamers/productivity - but having switched over full time this year, Linux clearly has some work to do so the average user doesn’t need to touch the terminal - but even compared to 10 years ago its infinitely more capable and user friendly.

Customers of paid software need to start either voting with their feet meaningfully, or lobbying to get software support on Linux if they want it - complaining that titles aren’t available for Linux and then continuing to suffer through windows instead of making that known to the devs is seen exactly the same way - a sale.

I certainly miss some windows only software - but I’m not going to be held captive anymore for programmes I paid for, that refuse to consider my needs, when they are a part of my wider usage and expectations.

Not everybody who approaches the machine or walks past it is really consenting to their appearance being logged and analysed though - not to mention that “we don’t store data” is only true if the security is effective and no exploits manage to weaponise the camera now staring back at you as you try to make a purchase.

Ultimately vending machines are completely passive sales anyway, the collection of demographic data about who is buying from the machine are a little useless because it’s not like the machine can work on its closing techniques for coin based candy sales.