I’ve been slowly migrating a lot of screen time from phone to laptop.
Phones can do some neat things, and they’re the best device class for one-handed use – and that does matter. You aren’t gonna poke at a laptop in the car to pause music or something. If you’re waiting in a line, easy to pull a phone out. And they have very low power requirements.
But a laptop running Linux is just a far more-open and configurable platform.
And even aside from the software restrictions, the hardware is generally a lot more capable. It’s a lot more-comfortable to type on a laptop than a phone.
A smartphone is dramatically better than a laptop at being a portable phone. Laptops don’t have a super-low-power-but-a-5G-modem-is-active mode.
But for most other things…a laptop is just a considerably-more-capable option. Web browsing. Posting on Lemmy. Editing text. Games. Has better hardware expandability and connectivity. Easier to repair. Better diagnostic tools. OS doesn’t EOL in a few years; I can probably run current Linux distros on truly ancient computers.
And I don’t really think that the smartphone industry is going to dramatically change on this direction in the foreseeable future.
Over two hundred phones have been ported to postmarketOS and every person giving it a shot will improve it. Together with grapheneOS, there are huge possibilities to mix a phones versatility with the freedom of linux. Combined with manufacturers like fairphone and pine64, phones also become more easily repairable.
The issue currently is that we have become ver accustomed to phones being very polishe. a lot of folks dont appreciate the free and open source phones and OSs due to their freakishly expensive, subscription ridden devices being optimized better.
If tech interested folks would default to repairable phones and open OSs, we would make a considerable jump towards being mainstreamable.
I‘m not saying people are at fault. Its just the way it currently is. We‘re seeing big improvements. I hope this continues.
I’ve been slowly migrating a lot of screen time from phone to laptop.
Phones can do some neat things, and they’re the best device class for one-handed use – and that does matter. You aren’t gonna poke at a laptop in the car to pause music or something. If you’re waiting in a line, easy to pull a phone out. And they have very low power requirements.
But a laptop running Linux is just a far more-open and configurable platform.
And even aside from the software restrictions, the hardware is generally a lot more capable. It’s a lot more-comfortable to type on a laptop than a phone.
A smartphone is dramatically better than a laptop at being a portable phone. Laptops don’t have a super-low-power-but-a-5G-modem-is-active mode.
But for most other things…a laptop is just a considerably-more-capable option. Web browsing. Posting on Lemmy. Editing text. Games. Has better hardware expandability and connectivity. Easier to repair. Better diagnostic tools. OS doesn’t EOL in a few years; I can probably run current Linux distros on truly ancient computers.
And I don’t really think that the smartphone industry is going to dramatically change on this direction in the foreseeable future.
I agree on all points but the last.
Over two hundred phones have been ported to postmarketOS and every person giving it a shot will improve it. Together with grapheneOS, there are huge possibilities to mix a phones versatility with the freedom of linux. Combined with manufacturers like fairphone and pine64, phones also become more easily repairable.
The issue currently is that we have become ver accustomed to phones being very polishe. a lot of folks dont appreciate the free and open source phones and OSs due to their freakishly expensive, subscription ridden devices being optimized better.
If tech interested folks would default to repairable phones and open OSs, we would make a considerable jump towards being mainstreamable.
I‘m not saying people are at fault. Its just the way it currently is. We‘re seeing big improvements. I hope this continues.