Droidian[0] currently supports a relatively new Motorola phone[1]. A Snapdragon 8+ gen 1 device, so the performance isn't bad, and most features seem to work, including Waydroid. I've noticed incoming phone calls causing a glitch where the call can't be answered, but other than that, daily drivable. Just like a PinePhone, only more powerful. In my region it can be had for ~€250 brand new.
Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, I must add this: when we work and focus, especially when using digital screens, we tend to blink a lot less frequently. If tear composition is not good or there are other exacerbating factors (e.g. an AC with high flow), the break-up of the tear film can easily lead to eyestrain and even blurry vision.
In such situations, preservative-free artificial tear drops 3-5x a day can lead to pretty good results. In some cases, one needs to try a few, each for a week or two, before finding the correct one.
Pro tip: any eye drop can cause discomfort for a few seconds, especially if the dry eye symptoms have persisted for a long time.
It's really eerie how moist it makes your eyes feel after even a few uses. I have definite reservations about instilling megadoses of PFAS directly into my eyes but there's no doubt that it is amazingly effective.
just a +1 here. I thought I had serious eye fatigue and focus problems. screwed around with various prescriptions. changed optometrists twice. went to an opthamoloist, and she just said..wow, yours eyes are really dry, use these drops. helped immensely
I asked by eye doctor why there was so much mucus around my eyes and after she dumped in a little dye she noted my eyes were almost like sandpaper from not blinking enough.
This seems like something that could have a technical solution beyond just putting liquid in your eyes. I am wary as liquids are sometimes contaminated with bacteria or other substances. Perhaps screens or headbands that trigger blink reactions.
+1. Something interesting I’ve learned - there can sometimes be a .25 - 1 Diopter difference in the Rx depending on one’s tear film. (Which intuitively makes sense - it’s the surface of the focusing lens, essentially). PF free eye drops have been very helpful for me.
I got a PSP-3000 during high school, and loved it. In addition to playing native and PS1 games, it was a very powerful media player as well. Much more versatile than most phones at the time, especially with its nice, though not very hi-res, screen.
The PSP wasn't very common in our area, but I managed to get some friends to get one, and we had a lot of fun with multiplayer too.
There were some games that had a feature called game sharing. This let you send a smaller version of the game, essentially a demo, to another PSP over wifi, and this let you at least try the experience without owning the game. Burnout Legends definitely did this, but I also remember it on some NFS and sports titles. I just found a list of games that did this.[0]
Also, there were some good shooters as well, like Medal of Honor or Battlefront, with pretty nice maps, especially for a handheld. And for racing games, Gran Turismo was incredible with almost all GT5 tracks and 900+ cars present.
I'm impressed! Bloodlines was the only AC I've ever finished completely, and even though the story was odd at some points, I found the gameplay and the graphics to be spot on for the platform. Very enjoyable for teenager me back then, and still holds up quite well. Doing this in 9 months... Just wow.
Tell us more!
I still beleieve that the PSP is a killer platform, those games are beautiful with 60 fps mods at high resolutions. I never really stopped playing them, just moved them to my phone.
I can tell you how surprised I was to find out that index triangles were slower than triangle lists on the PSP due to (I conjecture) a broken vertex cache in the PSP graphics hardware (guessing it was rushed out with this bug). The huge challenge of clipping triangles on the PSP - they had to be clipped on the CPU. I loved working on the PSP and wished we could have done more PSP projects.
Despite the limitations, many games pulled off amazing graphics. Many in the thread compare it to the PS2, but that's unfair. Doing better than PS1 graphics in a handheld was quite an accomplishment back then.
Interestingly, the quality of the assets in these games didn't have a chance to show on the 480x272 screen of the PSP. However, many games, including Bloodlines, Gran Turismo, both GTA's, just to name a few, look very close to PS2 when upscaled. So the work was very much put into these titles, and it shows, even after two decades.
Personally back in the days I had Nintendo DSi, but just recently I bought gamepad for phone just to check what I have missed by not owning PSP at that time :)
I can add that Linux is also pretty solid on Asus machines well, despite the company actively advocating for MS on their sites. I have an old G46, some i7-1065 Zenbook Flip, and a newish Zenbook with a 6800U. All of them running Debian 12 with GNOME or KDE, all hardware components supported. That also includes the sensors for tablet mode in the Flip! Also used to have an 8000 series Intel AsusPro something, same good support.
It takes around 1 to 2 years for the kernel to catch up on more stable distros, but I can wholeheartedly recommend Asus laptops for Linux use.
I'm really looking forward to this phone. However, their limited take on Android is very limiting, as a phone often needs to be at least a 2FA device as well. Without some support for Play Store/F-Droid, this can't really be one's only mobile device, which is sad. I love the overall design.
MFA and allowing some sort of music streaming (specifically Plex, for me) would make this a no brainer. Without those two, like you said, it wouldn't be able to be my only mobile device.
Exactly! The Minimal Phone[0] seems to be headed in a better direction in this sense, as the 'limitation' of that device is the screen being eink, but the OS is more or less vanila Android.
Interestingly, I got used to using my regular LineageOS phone in reading mode (greyscale) with a similar effect: I used it less and my usage is more on the point than before.
If you need to enter the BIOS: bring up the terminal, and write
`systemctl reboot --firmware-setup`
This reboots systemd-powered systems to the UEFI menu. May not work on other init systems, but SteamOS is based on Arch with systemd.
Shouldn't matter what you have as a bootloader, by my understanding it should be communicating with the UEFI directly to pull it off and going over any bootloader's head.
As others have already stated, without either actual paying users (not the celebrities) or some form of advertising costs can become very high quite fast.
Even though you are against all forms of advertising, some really privacy oriented form of it may be acceptable by your intended users.
Some thoughts:
- Users need to disclose some topics/subtopics (either broad or even very niche interests)
- The ads need to be conformant to some predefined, non-intrusive style guide: maybe black-and-white or a limited color palette and font selection. This could lead to interesting and even creative ads on the platform
- Advertisers could get anonymized click-counts for their specific categories, and maybe some other category-based info, but user data would be immediately aggregated and not used for specific targeting
- Base users would see 1/3 ads in their feeds, but some payments could reduce this to 1/5, 1/8, all the way to zero.
This approach might provide the intended privacy benefits with much less noise, but also not alienate the average user that expects social to be free of any cost.
[0] https://droidian.org/ [1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPhone-by-Motorola-...