The promise of the smart phone was a mini computer in your pocket. I think we got it, but then the vendor locked the user out of admin on their own bought and paid hardware 🤷♂️
This sums up my frustration these past decades. Smartphones were originally limited due to lack of power and resources, I was ok with that. Working on the iPhone and having access to the internals, as an engineer it made sense they were limited until security was figured out. You want an always online pocket computer to be secure.
...but we figured it all out, and instead of the phone becoming more open like the Mac, the Mac started becoming more closed like the phone. Gave up on the platform, at least Android was open-source and open hardware, mostly...
...but then they copied Apple and started making closed source binaries to replace the open ones, now Google doesn't know what they want to be when they grow up, after their "everything is free through ads" business model fell apart. Apple, Google, and Samsung now just copy each others' stupid decisions and true innovation has mostly died in that space. (Especially right now with them all snorting the "AI" cocaine.)
...pretty much gave up on the dream of a pocket computer and started collecting watches, went back to a laptop. (Which I can't get Debian to run on natively due to a glitch in how the mobo handles NVMe SSDs, disk randomly falls off while running. Didn't have patience to troubleshoot after a few weeks work and a corrupted OS.)
Would like a nice early 00's dumbphone with a decent camera now, but all the "dumbphones" today are terrible by comparison. They just shoehorn some mediocre linux or Android lite on an underpowered SOC and call it good. And carriers have rushed so hard to get to this 5G future, a future where many are stuck in non-standalone for the foreseeable future and selling home broadband is the only real use they've come up with, so real dumbphones no longer work on their networks.
Thx. I have limited use for it then. I tend to carry my laptop anyways and just whip it out once I need to type in long terminal commands with pipe symbols, extra characters and press Ctrl-C. I don't think my phone has an adequate form factor for terminal tasks. Though, I occasionally use it to ssh into machines and do some quick fix. But I already have an app for that.
As a first step definitively, simply because such a feature needs to start somewhere and text mode is easier than writing a wrapper for graphics systems.
Or does that make me able to run LibreOffice, Kdenlive and whatever I like?
I'm thinking that this is the end goal. Google struggles to get desktop-like apps onto Android tablets. Many people use iPads as primary work computer these days. My employer is switching to them and we're late to the party.
An audacious step for Google would be to distribute Flatpaks in the Play Store. That's very unlikely but it's technically a possibility.
Also, Steam integrating an x86 emulator for ARM devices makes even more sense now. I thought it's mainly for ARM Chromebooks but Android tablets getting an "Install Steam" button and becoming more compatible to games than Windows on ARM would be so bonkers.
Okay. I mean I already have Termux for that. And I don't think a phone or tablet is a good device to operate the terminal or type in VI key bindings. They're much more made for graphical applications and touching buttons and graphical elements. Let's see where this is going. I still like using computers and having like 105 proper keys accessible for my fingers. Especially if my mode of interacting with the device is typing in text. And not clicking on things. But I get that nowadays lots of people use tablets and phones and stuff. And this certainly is a necessary first step.