I agree that modern smartphones are too big, but that’s what the vast majority of the options are nowadays. I don’t know if you can call it a “gimmick” anymore if literally all of them are like that. It’s getting harder and harder to find a reasonably sized phone. But believe me, if I didn’t have a folding phone, I’d be looking out for small phones like the Zen phone.

? Just because it’s not practical for everyone doesn’t mean it’s “just a gimmick”.

Modern smartphones are freaking gigantic. Women’s pants pockets are comically tiny. Modern smartphones physically would not fit in the majority of my pants. I bought a Z Flip so I could fit a modern phone in my pants and not be forced to carry around a purse.

The length is important for women’s pants pockets, not necessarily the thickness. It is practical for me. No, it’s not practical for everyone.

Lol glad to hear it!

Are you alive today lol

I’m using Voyager. I can zoom in on the image

How do you pronounce Wafrn?

I haven’t used Jerboa in ages because of how buggy it was in the beginning, but that looks very pleasing to me as well. So many of the apps out there just look too “busy” for me. I am also coming from Reddit is Fun, so I like as simplistic looking an app as possible. Voyager fills that role for me and fixed the bugginess issues I had with Jerboa.

I’m sure Jerboa is much more stable now, but I just haven’t had a reason to leave Voyager yet.

Also in terms of games…I know Steam compatibility is supposed to be great, but if you use other platforms, you might run into some issues. Most of my library is in the Epic Games store (I know, terrible to admit this online…but they give you a lot of free shit), and I just could not get it to work at all the last time I tried Linux (maybe 6ish months ago).

Whenever I try switching to Linux, there is always something that doesn’t work right and takes forever to finagle with to fix if it’s even possible. I’m primarily a Linux Mint fan (daily drove it on my aging desktop until it died of old age a few years back), but I’ve also dabbled in a few other noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu (was really into it when everything was still orange and brown lol) and Pop OS.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love using Linux to breathe new life into older systems, but it just isn’t a good option for me personally if my device hasn’t gotten sluggish yet.

As an example, I have an aging laptop that started blue screening a bunch. It doesn’t support the Win 11 upgrade due to it’s processor not meeting minimum specs. So I thought it was finally time to see if Linux would improve it.

First of all, I had a hell of a time installing various distros without having them boot to a black screen after installation completes. Took absolutely forever to finally sus this out on the various distros I tried. Then I find that the couple extra buttons on my basic Logitech mouse don’t work. These are essential buttons for me that I use constantly. I go through a million troubleshooting steps before finding out that it’s a Wayland issue, so I switch back to Xorg and everything is cool. But then I start running into lag issues which never occurred on my Windows install. I also tried playing some games I had in my Epic Games library. I could not for the life of me get it to work, no matter which platform I tried. I get that Steam has better Linux compatibility, but not all of us have all of our games on Steam.

Finally got tired of the whole ordeal and switched back to Windows. Did a bit more troubleshooting and seemed to have resolved the blue screen issues and now it seems to work perfectly and much better out of the box than Linux. It’s not an old enough device a Linux refresh to be worth it yet.

I get that Lemmings are die hard Linux fans, and I think Linux has some fantastic use cases…but for many users it actually isn’t a good alternative. I find it works best when you want to breathe new life into older hardware or if you have every component specifically built to work for a particular Linux distro. But when basic features don’t work properly without hours of troubleshooting (if you can ever get them to work at all), it’s a little hard to just recommend it to your average Joe whose Windows/Mac computer works just fine.

This “everything just works” Linux experience a lot of people talk about on Lemmy/Reddit has absolutely never been my experience, even though I’ve been a casual Linux fan for over a decade now. Meanwhile, I’ve had the opposite experience with Windows (unless you’re talking really old Windows versions like Win XP and older).

I thought some of these things initially, but then I noticed I wasn’t constantly accidentally getting the cord hooked on things and yanking them out of my ears all the time. That bit has been super nice. Plus I have a pair that sounds absolutely fantastic…no issues with sound quality. Maybe I’m just a klutz, but freeing yourself of wires is super nice.

Note that if you only use headphones in a stationary position, a wire isn’t very obtrusive. But if I’m doing something like laundry, the dishes, cleaning up, getting some exercise, or even just being seated at my computer (where I would always forget I had wired headphones on and I would yank them off when I stood up), going wireless has been great.

HOWEVER, one of the biggest downsides to wireless headphones has been gaming. The latency makes them unusable for that purpose imo. We just aren’t there yet in terms of that tech.

I think it requires 1GB and it’s an incredibly recent requirement that that does not show up well in most search results. I had the same issue on a recent install and I had to go searching around the internet to figure out the actual size like you did lol.

I have a 6 year old Dell laptop and was hoping Linux would make it snappier. Ubuntu ran the best on it of the distros I tried, but it still had lag issues that I didn’t experience in Windows. I was able to to troubleshoot some other issues I had to get everything running mostly pretty good, but not that one.

I feel like if you want to go the laptop route, it makes a bit more sense to buy something officially supported.

That’s actually a bit disappointing to hear. I have always been interested in system76 since their existence, but I’ve never actually purchased anything from them. Was about to impulse buy a desktop PC from them, but ultimately decided against it because it wasn’t really what I needed.

Idk…I had to throw out my first gen Chromecast because it does fuck all compared to literally any other streaming stick and it could no longer play HD videos without lagging to shit. When they added Android TV, it became a hell of a lot more useful.

Sorry, I think you meant to post this in the “best distro” thread

I was an Ubuntu fan many moons ago. Then I fell in love with Mint when it was just all around a better version of Ubuntu.

Then I ended up with a new Windows laptop for years and forgot about Linux entirely. But this year, I’ve actually returned to Ubuntu. I like how it has a fresh and different look and it still performs well on my now aging laptop. Mint is always my go to recommendation to others, but I just wanted a different look than your standard Windows-like look that Cinnamon has. I was initially turned off way back when, when Ubuntu switched to Unity, but now a difference in look appeals to me. We’ll see if I get annoyed with Snaps or not. So far, everything has been running smoothly.

If there was a GNOME fork of Mint, I’d likely be using that. I get that you can technically install whatever desktop environment in whatever distro you want, but for compatibility sake, it’s best to roll with what your distro comes with.

They are intro distros, sure, but don’t ever think that you have to move to anything else if you don’t want to. Mint is probably the best Linux distro there is if your goal is ease of use, support, and “it just works”. I’d say that’s more than enough for what people want in an OS. I recommend it to anyone looking to hop into Linux, be it temporarily or permanently. People jump into other distros for specific use cases or because they feel like fucking around with something…but that’s absolutely not required or necessary to be a Linux user or advocate.

I’m ignorant to all this, but I found that weirdly my mouse’s gesture features are broken on Wayland. So X11 it is then.

I was staring at it a minute confused because it looked like warfarin to me lol

God I can’t stand servers that are Nazis for that. Guess what…natural conversation will change topics over time. I’m sorry I can’t keep up which of your 100 channels I need to jarringly break away from the convo and hop into whenever the topic even remotely, slightly drifts from what it started with. Discord channel Nazis don’t understand how human conversation works.