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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • I’m personally really excited for Linux phones and want to move to one relatively soon. They’ve done amazing work on the experience of using them. What I’d really miss, based off of talking to folks and trying them at conventions, is:

    • battery life. My Pixel 3a lasts over a day on Android, likely much less on pmOS
    • UnifiedPush for notifications. I only see a Matrix client listed as WIP. Every other app (Fediverse, Signal) I would have to keep running in the background
    • Notifications while in sleep mode. Looks like we don’t have “Doze Mode” from Android, so only calls & SMS work while asleep
    • Fingerprint sensor. More of a QoL but I kept my phone model specifically for the ergonomics of the sensor on the back, and being able to scroll with it. Communication with the sensor is not yet figured out

  • While degoogling is accessible right now, what worries me is that all of these projects are 100% dependent on Google’s whims because they use Android as the upstream. Same reason why I don’t use Chromium browsers: yes, they can patch over things, but they can’t fight the direction of the upstream project and they are powerless if the upstream stops publishing commits / source, like Google seems to be moving toward. Additionally, what “the big distros” aka stock ROMs do to prevent FOSS apps being installed means a much much smaller potential userbase for them. I develop an Android app, and (while I don’t have analytics) I don’t find it unlikely that at least half my users are on stock roms that would lose access to my app with this policy. It’s much less motivating to develop something when I know less people will benefit, and especially knowing I’m supporting only custom roms that are 100% beholden to Google. Degoogling is a good first step. I’ve been on Lineage for many years now. But I believe that the step that will truly make us independent is moving to Linux phones.









  • I currently host Navidrome, which has an okay web player. On Android I use “Tempo” (though it is unmaintained) to connect to it, and on Linux I use Tauon (though it has very poor playback). I could not find a native Linux client that is not buggy unfortunately, so I’m also on the lookout for better solutions! I’m not familiar with the device you are talking about but every client I tried supports MPRIS, which are the regular media controls that can be used via the playerctl command, so you should be able to hook things up that way.




  • I did a bachelor of videogame programming in Belgium 99% on Linux (minus exams), but it was definitely a huge struggle. All the courses and assignments were Windows-only, and 90%-ish required Visual Studio (non-Code) and Windows-only libraries like DirectX or Win32. I got by writing my own tooling to auto-convert these to CMake projects and convincing each teacher to allow me to hand in CMake projects. I wrote SDL backends for most of the win32 assignments, falling back on clang’s excellent cross-compiling for stuff that requires e.g Windows.h. I wrote a blog post about this: https://blog.allpurposem.at/adventures-cross-compiling-a-windows-game-engine And using e.g DirectX natively on Linux, easier than expected: https://blog.allpurposem.at/directx

    I also wrote a small wiki on my general experience + a summary of courses and main problems encountered… Windows was non-negotiable during exams: https://dae-linux.allpurposem.at/ I maintain tools, converted assignments, and information on this for future students who want to attempt something like me, but it’s hard to recommend the Linux challenge if you are totally new to programming!

    Hope some of this is helpful!






  • mat@linux.communitytoLinux@lemmy.mlPost Deleted!
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    4 months ago

    Awesome! I hope he will help share this with more folks, the friends who I’ve talked into finally giving modern non-Ubuntu Linux a shot love it, but there’s a lot of work to get over the damaged image created by the countless “linux user installing a browser” memes. I’m sure someone with his reach can help though :)