recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?

There is a mountain of anecdotal evidence, and a small mound of scientific research, suggesting that psychedelics can improve creativity even in the long term. Ask your doctor if LSD or psilocybin might help with your imagination deficit.

Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.

People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.

Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.

Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I’m in have thousands.

Many channels are default for all users in the server.

Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can’t handle this is no alternative at all.

If we’re talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.

I’m not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don’t think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.

I set up their accounts

Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.

The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.

Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.

I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.

I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.

Does it have access to the same filesystem as Android? I’ve been looking for Android apps that can do something like dropbox’s “online only” feature. Most cloud storage providers offer that on desktop but I’ve never found one that works on Android. It’s just photo syncing or nothing usually, and even that doesn’t work like I want.

Also, can it run uninterrupted in the background or is android going to unceremoniously kill it randomly like it does with normal apps?

@SynonymousStoat@lemmy.world @jet@hackertalks.com

FYI, Graphene just released an update that includes the new network location option I mentioned. See https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114076777599414646

I’ll try it and see how it works for me over the next week or two.

The only use I ever found for it was setting alarms and starting timers. That was reliable, and faster than opening the app, navigating to an alarm, and manually setting it.

I disabled my assistant entirely though. Setting alarms a little faster is not enough to justify it.

Yes, the issue persists even with all of that enabled. I don’t understand why.

I had a similar issue on my previous phone, but never on my Pixel before. So I guess Google specifically does something extra.

Google Wallet (or whatever they call it these days) doesn’t work, even if you install Google Play Services. So NFC payments are simply not possible for me. I’ve heard that some banks have NFC payments built into their apps, but I have never seen a list. I’d switch banks if it meant I could get this to work.

There’s currently no NLP (network location provider) support, so if you don’t have an actual GPS satellite signal, you will not have active location unless you use Google’s location services. There’s been some talk of including a new NLP service in the future but I don’t know of any timeline.

Even when using Google Location Services, accuracy is worse than on the stock Pixel OS. I’m not sure why, but I get tons of drift indoors (whether Wi-Fi is enabled or not), whereas on PixelOS it was almost always stable. It also means navigation apps will sometimes think I magically hopped off a bridge and onto the side street below or something like that.

There’s no “extreme battery saver” mode like on Google’s Pixel OS. When I switched, I didn’t realize that was a Google feature rather than an Android/AOSP feature.

If you rely on Google backups for app data, I’m not sure if there’s any reasonable way to get that into GOS since it can only happen during initial setup. Might be solutions to this, but personally I didn’t spend time on it because there was nothing I cared too much about. Check your apps to see if they have settings import/export functions. A lot of open-source apps (like Lemmy clients) do.

GOS has an open-source backup system called Seedvault, but of course if you ever want to switch back to a stock Android OS, you won’t be able to bring those backups with you since apps simply can’t get that level of access on any stock Android OS. You’re stuck on GOS or other third-party OSes that support Seedvault, or maybe rooting if that’s possible.

If you use WhatsApp (ew), be aware that it only supports backup via Google Drive. And you can’t manually download and restore that backup without adding Google Play Services and logging in.

Lawnchair and other third-party home screens seem to work worse on GOS than stock Pixel OS when it comes to the app switcher animation bug. I’ve seen some GOS forum threads about this so I know I’m not alone.

And that’s the #1 reason to use Mint over Ubuntu!

Snaps make a little more sense in servers since you can package CLI stuff in snaps, but not in flatpaks. For GUI apps, it’s “fine” but it doesn’t solve new problems, and the way Canonical has migrated apt packages to snaps is aggressive and error-prone.

Honestly, that sounds great.

My biggest problem with Flatpak is that Flathub has all sorts of weird crap, and depending on your UI it’s not always easy to tell what’s official and what’s just from some rando. I don’t want a repo full of “unverified” packages to be a first-class citizen in my distro.

Distros can and should curate packages. That’s half the point of a distro.

And yes, the idea of packaging dependencies in their own isolated container per-app comes with real downsides: I can’t simply patch a library once at the system level.

I’m running a Fedora derivative and I wasn’t even aware of this option. I’m going to look into it now because it sounds better than Flathub.

Kids these days and their “Plasma”. BACK IN MY DAY it was just KDE!

I’m not sure why this feels new to me. Perhaps it’s because I spent a lot of time on other DEs after 2009.

But also, from that link:

We will use “KDE” exclusively in two meanings:

• KDE, the community, which creates free software for end users
• As an umbrella brand for the technology created by the KDE community

So I don’t feel like it’s wrong to just call it KDE, just imprecise.

We need a lock before the lock screen to deal with all the functionality you can now access without unlocking it.

Sometimes I accidentally turn on the flashlight when the phone is in my pocket. I call it asslighting.

10 years ago, all I wanted was a brick-sized phone with a battery that won’t quit. Now that we have cheap and reliable portable power banks, it’s dropped down on my priorities list.

I guess a 22Ah battery would have a longer effective lifespan, too. I mean, if it drops to 50% capacity after a few years, that’s still more that double most phones. So that would potentially solve my longevity issue.

Typically, I use a slow-charger overnight (a plain ol’ USB type-A charger, which I think means 5W max), then top-up as needed during the day with USB-PD fast chargers. I generally do not top up to 100% during the day. I have adaptive charging enabled in settings.

That said, I’m a heavy phone user, and I’ve never had a phone that reliably lasts me a full day. According to aBattery, my current phone is at 750 charge cycles, which is just about 1 per day since I bought it. I’m not up to date on all the latest developments in battery tech, but I think it’s normal for a battery to drop to 80% of its original max charge after 500 cycles. I don’t think I have a dud on my hands, just an ordinary battery that is aging as expected. Like I said, it’s still “fine”. It hasn’t started unexpectedly shutting off or anything like that.

I still have my old Pixel 2 (now 7 years old) that I occasionally use as a wi-fi device. I used that phone heavily for 2 years and very lightly for the remaining 5. I’m lucky if the battery lasts half an hour at this point; it’s basically a desktop device now.

Also works on Twitch with the added benefit of NOT playing ads (you still get breaks, just with a placeholder screen instead of the commercial).

mpv has yt-dlp support built in, so it can just play the streams directly.

vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.

I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.

I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.

Yeah, I’ve replaced phones in the past that were perfectly fine except the battery was terribly degraded. With an iFixIt repairability rating of 2 stars and a new battery costing more than the phone was worth, it just didn’t make sense to fix it.

My current phone is only two years old and while it’s still “fine”, the battery life is noticeably lower than it used to be. I doubt it’ll remain useful for another two years.

Many brands now provide software support for longer than the hardware will remain useful (thanks to non-removable batteries). Strange times!

Consumers partly killed replaceable batteries by demanding things they couldn’t deliver. Waterproofing

Ehhhh…no, not buying it. We had water-resistant phones before the switch to non-removable batteries. For example, the Galaxy S5 (the last Samsung flagship with a removable battery) had an IP67 rating. The current Galaxy S24 has an IP68 rating. Go ahead, ask your average consumer what the difference is between IP67 and IP68, and how much they care.

Oh yeah, and the S5 also had a headphone jack and SD slot. You can do all these things and still have water resistance, so let’s all please stop perpetuating these myths. If you’re not on Apple’s or Samsung’s payroll, you do not need to lie for them.