The tech companies are doing a great job at making me uninterested in the hottest new phones. I used to follow the news about them and know the tech specs and stuff, because I'm a nerd and gadgets are fun and smart phones in particular are the intersection of SO much technology and engineering. Moore's law was alive and well during all my formative years, so I am even conditioned to expect the excitement.

But lately, not only have I been ignoring what the big players are offering, I have been ignoring the phone I already have! Instead I have a PC at the end of the couch with a monitor on an arm that s swings right over my lap.

I use my phone pretty much just for music, web browser, Voyager (Lemmy on the go), and occasional texting. When I am at home I will sometimes misplace my phone for hours and just not worry about it.

I have already pushed the megacorp phone + social media experience so far out of my daily life, that if future options for open linux phones are rough around the edges and don't have tap to pay then oh well I don't think I care.

It's much easier to live without the shiny new thing once you see how well your brain does when separated from it. (and you have some loved ones who are still hopelessly addicted to the scroll)

Engagement bait.

I went and checked Facebook for notifications the other day and saw this exact post.

This is all over the place: Posts by people who are confidently wrong in some obvious way, just begging for some smart internet person to come set them straight and get their wimpy dopamine hit.

It is really enlightening, in a depressing way, to scroll mainstream social media like that and see the level of enshittification that people are conditioned to accept and keep scrolling through. It is so much worse than even ad-driven legacy media like live TV.

I'm human and I enjoy these stories of pettiness just like anybody else.

But if I may please speak in my "old man who has seen things" capacity for a moment, this is not the way to live. You should endeavor to do positive things every day to make life better for people around you as well as yourself. And you don't do this because it gets you praise or rewards, you do it because of the internal rewards. It's good for your mind.

*Upgrayedd

And the conservative base reads the article thusly:

Los Angeles

Oooh, strike one.

car wash

Ooooooooh, that sounds awful immigranty. Strike two!

Rafie Ollah Shouhed

Aaaand that's three, your humanity is OUTTA HERE!

Your woke propaganda like "citizen" and "business owner" have no power here!

LIN 👏

NUX 👏

MINT 👏

I've seen plenty of Debian mentions, and no pushback there whatsoever from me.

But if you find yourself frustrated that you can't just have Ubuntu without Canonical's snaps and ads and other ickiness, Mint is exactly that. Or maybe better, I dunno. It's super polished and full featured and stable.

And even better in this era of Windows 10 support ending, the main/default version (Linux Mint Cinnamon) looks like Windows out of the box but it installs, works, and updates at like 10x the speed. (The 10x is an exaggeration for moment to moment desktop work and latency, but for the install and especially for updates I think it's accurate)

I’ve had a lifetime plex pass for several years. Once I tried Jellyfin a few months ago it was all over. My “I’ll run both just in case” period lasted a week or two.

The downside is that Jellyfin will take more setup on your end, especially if you want to let other people connect securely to your server.

The upside is performance and responsiveness. Once I started using it I decided Plex had to go, even if I have to drive to each family member’s house to fix their shit. It was like moving between Linux and Windows, as far as one being designed to work and the other being designed to satisfy dozens of corporate KPIs.

Fortunately the setup for the end user is just as simple once your server is good to go. They just need URL, login, and password.

And since it’s all open source, there’s some fun diversity in clients. I use Finamp specifically for music, and there are audiobook focused ones.

The average person does not mount network drives themselves.

I would hazard a guess that for the truly average user, booting to a desktop with Firefox and LibreOffice installed is like 90% of what they need.

The person making the argument could just be naive too.

I could see myself 25 years ago making such a statement in completely good faith, trying to see both sides and all that. But I was naive to think that both sides were also arguing in good faith.

But to be fair, that naive messenger would still be repeating an argument that originated in bad faith.

~~and smallwaist = true~~

and itty_bitty_waist = true

and round_thing_in_your_face = true

That answer is like the electronics version of the image with Patrick Stewart and the caption:

“Use the force, Harry

-Gandalf”

That’s correct. It’s just a normal weekday.