you’re not mentioning which Pixel you’re getting for $200 and also that’s only twice the stated budget. anyhow, the cheapest Pixel 7 I have locally available is $310 (“lighty used”), which I think is the lowest rung; sixes are like three years old and that’s a no bueno for phones with fixed batteries. as an aside, if I’m buying something someone rubbed their face on, spat on, and rubbed all over, I’m paying half price max, not 15% less than NiB ($355 here).
last week I bought a Poco F1 (SDM845/6GB) in not great condition for $60; excellent LineageOS and PostmarketOS support though and easily replaceable batteries. a month or so prior, a Mi 9T Pro (SDM855/6GB) for $80. those are on the high side, there’s a ton of LineageOS supported Xiaomi devices for $50 or less if you go down to SDM6xx/4GB, which is plenty for everyday use. they can be had on the cheap because their MIUI operating system is bloated and hella slow so people just upgrade, whereas unlocking the boot loader and flashing an alternative nets you a super useable device.
I’m not saying any of those is as good as a modern Pixel device, but for my use cases they are more than enough.
it was pretty bad. the “protagonist” was as irritating as they come. evacide, doctorow and co. were super-underutilized, I imagine a huge chunk was cut out to make enough room for mr. annoyance and his forced parables and non-sequiturs.
I understand some things had to be dumbed down, but this was really, really bad from every angle you look at it.
although just a cursory look at the drama surrounding it is reason enough, my real reason is pretty simple: the hardware costs just way too much.
a phone should cost like $100, max. that’s an easily breakable thief magnet and you should put in as much effort as possible to treat it as a fungible device. you break or lose one - no big deal, it’s encrypted, restore from backup and keep on truckin’.
I can lose/break/gift like 6 or 7 competent devices (SDM680/845/etc, 6 GB RAM) before I even get close to the price of one used Pixel. hard, hard pass.
OK, so what this purports to do is use your email server as chat platform. kinda intriguing, could have several use cases, don’t know what it does with existing email or how the chat looks like in e.g. thunderbird…
unfortunately, after installing it and being unsuccessful about having it login to my IMAP account (works fine with thunderbird), I’ve given up.
so, the “onboarding” is less than stellar and the desktop app is electron, which I hate; haven’t tried the android app.
edit: it works, the initial login process just takes super long; guess it’s trying different ports and stuff to be auto-magical. works fine for intra-server comms (accounts belonging to same domain), adding secondary device works (android, from f-droid). comms (encrypted) are stored in a separate IMAP folder that’s unreadable to “normal” mail clients, so it doesn’t disturb e.g. thunderbird. a fine array of customizations in the apps, will be testing it further.
found a pretty reliable way to make it perform shitty - alt-tab out of the game, do something memory-hoggy, like firefox with plenty of tabs and alt-tab back. it’s often (but not always) super shitty then.
I’m on F40 Plasma, didn’t have that degradation on F39 Gnome when alt-tabbing; but then I had Gnome session crashes frequently, which never happen with Plasma 6.
it’s completely random and incongruent with anything that is or isn’t happening. same game (Starcraft 2 and Far Cry 5 are currently in rotation) runs fine and then it just doesn’t. yesterday launched SC2, played it for a while, everything is butter smooth. left it open to go make dinner. started a new game after like 15 mins - choppy, drops to 15 fps, horrible. played a couple rounds this morning - everything back to normal. and so on.
no huge temp spikes, no huge CPU loads, nothing I can pin down as correlated. both games are well within the capabilities of both CPU and GPU. I have C-states and Cool & Quiet disabled, so it’s nothing power-throttling related.
I don’t like rebooting, got way too much stuff open all the time, I do that maybe once a month; the rest is just suspend in the evening and wake in the morning.
there’s a significant portion of software provided only via the App Store with no independent download from the vendor available. granted, you can get most stuff with direct download and macports/brew but there is stuff out there that forces you to sign in.
telemetry that’s baked in along with the global Apple network that you’re involuntarily part of (that’s how random airtags/find-my-shit work) should be deal breakers for anyone.
no experience with this game but performance drops happen frequently and randomly for me, Fedora, Lutris, AMD GPU. like, I play a game that I have 100+ hours played on the same hardware and software and everything is dandy - 60 FPS, butter smooth mouse and game play. next day, same game, same settings, no updates in the meantime, absolutely nothing changed - 25 FPS, mouse stutters, horror. next day everything is fine, and so on.
yes, I understand, you installed LOS and turned the raspberry into an android box. but you can install a normal linux distribution on it and then you can run both of those tools. then, your phone or tablet becomes the primary browser and remote control. right now, your raspberry with remote is the browser - you use it to browse/play media and control it (play/pause/etc).
e.g. you scroll lemmy and see a video you like; instead of watching it on your phone, you share it to e.g. AllCast (maybe there’s a better app, that’s the one I’m using) and that one transmits the youtube url to macast and voila - full screen video that you can control from your phone. same thing with reddit videos and other popular video sites (macast uses yt-dl behind the scenes, so whatever site yt-dl supports works in macast as well), as well as media that’s locally on your phone.
same thing with jellyfin-mpv-shim - you connect your phone’s Jellyfin app with JMS (click cast, select, make it default). you browse your library on your phone, press play and automagically full screen video on your TV while you control playback from your phone - pause, skip, stop, switch subtitles, volume, etc.
the remote you’ve been using with android becomes superfluous - the raspberry becomes just a dumb sink that plays whatever you send it.
I imagine you can rig up some screensaver with rotating wallpapers and clock and weather and whatnot when it’s idle.
it’s a false dichotomy; the issue is not whether you do or don’t have something to hide, the issue is you choosing what you share and with whom.
the fact that I don’t blast the quality of this morning’s stool accross all my social media outlets doesn’t mean that I’m hiding it, it means that I choose not to share it.
that’s my decision and I don’t allow my hardware, software, service provider, government, or whoever-the-fuck to make it for me.
thanks for the quick reply! curse my quick fingers, didn’t type it out correctly… I turn on FSR in the game’s settings in Lutris, it’s a switch. then I launch the game, it defaults to 3840x2160. I go “nuh-huh” and switch it in-game to 1920x1080. it switches over and mango says I’m still in 4K, so that should do it?
still, I don’t perceive any difference, does the game have to support FSR in order to work? Elden Ring is way newer than my old games, most are from 8 years ago…?
I have an RX 570 and run a couple of older games through lutris (FC3/4/5, tombraiders). I select FSR in the game’s settings and set the game’s resolution to 1080p (desktop is in 4K/wayland). is that all there is to it?
because I’ve launched it with and without FSR and I can’t tell any difference, looks similar, framerate is similar… how do I know if it works?
looking for “privacy issues” in iOS is like wondering if the sandwich you found in the sewer has healthy and organic salami, as if that’s the only issue preventing you from eating it.
you’re being spied on from the moment you activate it, including when it’s “off”, so does it matter if there are seven or actually nine things invading your privacy?