A reasonable desktop from that era should be about comparable to a Raspberry Pi 4, which can certainly be useful. Power consumption is probably the main argument against it.

Proprietary drivers and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer seem to be the main problems. The big, popular desktop environments on Linux have also grown pretty heavy, but there are plenty of alternatives.

I have a five year old Pixel 4A running LineageOS. I limit battery charge with AccA to ensure it doesn’t wear out.

The phone reports its battery capacity at 93%. I have no plans to replace it unless I break it,

It didn’t have to be this way. I can run modern Linux on 20+ year old PCs.

It doesn’t look like the major instances forbid posting in Portugese, and it’s ActivityPub+AtProto, so people can follow you from Mastodon and BlueSky. It doesn’t really matter if your audience is local.

You might consider Wafrn, which is a federated system like Lemmy. There are four instances listed there as open to new accounts right now.

You can even post to Lemmy with it, and people will be able to follow you with Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, etc… and optionally, Bluesky.

Headline is bullshit. This is an archiving feature for sectors where the law requires employers to retain records of certain kinds of communications. It only applies to phones set up with mobile device management, and it displays a clear notification to the user that the conversation is being logged.

Here’s Google’s announcement.

not likely to affect users who can count to 20 without taking off their shoes

There are a surprising number of people who aren’t stupid, but never learned basic computer admin skills before getting a smartphone. There’s some debate going on over whether the onus is on the user to learn those skills or the OS vendor to make devices so appliance-like they’re not needed. I’m firmly in the former camp.

They have been for years. I had a 2016 Sony that definitely wasn’t a good value on paper. I accepted that because it was small.

I imagine they announced the most extreme form of it they were considering and had several fallback plans depending on how much backlash there was.

School seems like a good use case for a powerbank since most people carry backpacks to school.

The advantage is that I can occasionally charge it to 80% or 100% if the situation demands it.

The amount of time the battery spends at higher voltage definitely affects its capacity over time. There’s plenty of research on Li-ion battery service life characteristics done with greater scientific rigor than is possible with batteries installed in phones.

It can take longer than the few months these tests required to see the effect. A phone that’s usually stored at 60% will eventually show a big capacity advantage over one that’s stored at 100%. That’s probably mostly true at 80% as well.

For some anecdata, my Pixel 4a has spent most of the past five years limited to 60%. It reports 1152 cycles and 91% capacity.

Yes, but there’s no guarantee that remains true.

Same on Lineage, so that’s presumably an Android default. It’s slow.

The feature I want is a specific fingerprint that triggers a lockdown, perhaps requiring a long password rather than a short PIN to exit.

That sounded too weird to be true yet it’s true. The problem seems to be that it generates some HTML to wrap the attached audio file, does voice to text, and doesn’t escape an ampersand, which trips a firewall.

It’s bad UX that it fails silently there too; at least the recipient should get some sort of explanation.

They also didn’t win sideloading on the IPhone, which would have benefitted users and open source projects. The outside payments they did win will benefit commercial developers (with some price drops for users).

Sending a message should never fail silently, so that’s an improvement, but fuck whoever decided this.

SMS works perfectly well for sending https://signal.org/install