Right?

Something this old is going to be power inefficient compared to newer stuff, and simply not perform as well.

I would know, I just booted up a 10 year old consumer router last night, because the current one died. It’ll be OK for a few days until I can get a replacement. Boy, is this thing slow.

Where were these?

Because I don’t recall ever seeing ads like this.

Unlock has nothing at all to do with root.

Root is dependent on unlocking, not the reverse, as root is part of the installed OS.

My standard response to “just go Linux” :

I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it’s still no competition to Windows, even with this awful shit going on.

As some background - I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I’d stuck with Cobol).

I had my first UNIX class in about 1990.

I run a Mint laptop (for the hell of it, and I do mean hell) . Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won’t even POST.

Windows would never do this, no, Windows can never do this. It is incapable of running a battery to zero, it’ll shutoff before then to protect the battery. To really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero.

There no way even possible via the Mint GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions. None, nada, zip, not at all. Command line only, in the twenty-furst century, something Windows has had since I don’t recall, 95 I think (I was carrying a laptop then, and I believe it had hibernate, sorry, it’s been what, almost thirty years now).

There are many reasons why Linux doesn’t compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.

Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. The devs of open office refuse to support tables, saying “you should manage data in a proper database app”. While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, no, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people. I do this several times a day in excel.

Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? Again, in the 21st century?

Networking… Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t say “save creds”? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. In the 21st century?

Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won’t even recognize it. You have to search for a solution and go find a third-party download that makes it work. My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of Windows since Win2k (at the least) and would probably work on Win95.

Someone else said it better than me:

Every time I’ve installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it’s gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn’t look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works… only it doesn’t save my preferences.

So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically… but that doesn’t work, so now I can’t boot… so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that… then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution… wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it’s been four hours, it’s 3:00am and I’m like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.

And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren’t supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can’t wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?

I just can’t do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I’ve loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.

I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.

Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM’s on Linux (Proxmox) because that’s better than running Linux VM’s of a Windows server.

Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.

Linux doesn’t even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it’s own way), and that’s a massive barrier for users.

If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.

These are what MS did in the 1980’s to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.

All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).

Really?

Because nothing I use works in Linux or at least doesn’t easily.

My 10 year old Logjtech mouse doesn’t work, at all, until I Google how to make it work.

Then there’s OneNote, which syncs directly with every machine, no server required.

Or excel - got Tables in Libre office yet? You know, what 97% of people use Excel for?

I could go on for days. At every turn, Linux is inferior to Windows as a desktop.

And I use Linux every day as a server: Truenas, Proxmox, Freedombox, Rpi, etc. It’s briliant for purpose-built systems.

My experience is the opposite.

Took an hour just to get a mouse to work on Mint

But hey, I am sure it will be completely different this time.

Exactly.

The main feature is a global search which… [also searches]… on web services like Wikipedia or your Nextcloud Instance.

Right in the description you posted. 😁

At least one of the devs is an arrogant, condescending prick. Remember Nick the Computer Guy from SNL? He’s like 3 times worse than that. I’ve experienced it first hand - as in his second reply to me was to blame me: “you’re doing it wrong”. He’s exactly like some people I worked with 30 years ago. Smh.

There’s far more than that, though. In general, the Graphene team says everyone else is wrong. Classic idealist attitude.

I run DivestOS now because of that interaction, I will never use Graphene. That dev can go fuck himself with a pineapple - had enough of his kind of childishness decades ago.

It does, but it’s a step in the right direction.

I’m as guilty as anyone for allowing pursuit of perfection be the enemy of good.

As an older hobbyist, exactly.

I’m as guilty as anyone, but I promise I’m trying to be better.

Where was the topic change?

If anything, you’re the one being disingenuous.

“Pointing out what a moron this guy was is not the same thing as agreeing with Nintendo’s shitty legal practices.”

We know what these corporations will do, they’ve been very clear about it.

At a minimum don’t go advertising that you’re copying their roms and selling them. This guy advertised to the world who he is and what he was doing.

Is Nintendo still shitty? Yes. But geez, don’t make it blindingly easy to figure out who you are.

Oh, yea, I’d just forgotten what specifically voyager used.

Ye, I didn’t know that when I first tried it. Oops!

Just a happy little accident

Clearly you’ve never lived in Tick Central (anywhere along the US East Coast, or up by the Great Lakes, northern Minnesota, or down south, Alabama, Louisiana).

I mow because if I don’t I just have a Tick Farm right outside my door.

Plus I’ve had Lyme Disease once already. You can take my mower from my cold, dead, hands.

Nah, I don’t like having a tick farm right outside my door.

Lol, oh ko, this is about a foot too short.

Lineage and a fork, DivestOS are very close to Graphene, and run on far more devices.

The search for perfection is the enemy of good.

I’ve run Lineage for years on some spare devices. Battery life is so much better without Google Services.

My most recent device (Pixel 5 with DivestOS) is averaging 1.1% battery consumption per hour over the last day. That included an hour of navigation, using Google maps with microG services.

One old device runs longer with DivestOS than it ever did with stock, and the battery has lost 40% capacity. That’s how bad Google Services eat battery.

Plus Lineage permits you to use a number of old devices, unlike Graphene. It’s good, it gives you far more control than Google.

My final thought on Graphene - it needs to be taken over and lead by some professionals. Those folks act like stereotypical geeks of 30 years ago, arrogant, condescending (I worked with their type 30 years ago, and was a little like them then). They also denigrate anything less than what they deem “perfect”. The very definition of hubris.

Their attitude is “if you have a problem you must’ve done something wrong, why did you do something wrong”. Having that experience with them has put me off Graphene permanently.

Edit: I can re-lock the bootloader with Divest, so the condescending Graphene folks are just plain wrong about being the only OS that can do this. I don’t lock it, because my threat model doesn’t require it. The odds of my phone being grabbed by someone with state-actor-level skills being after me is non-existent, and there are easier ways to get the same data from me.

First, don’t buy new phones. You’re paying a massive premium to be first. Especially since you’re going to flash a rom, which has a little risk anyway (I’ve bricked phones by flashing, though not for years).

I just upgraded from a 2017 flagship to a Pixel 5 (only because my cell company decided to stop it working on their network, when I can throw a different Sim in and it works fine). I was able to buy 3 Pixel 5’s for less than you paid for your new phone. Which means I have a daily driver, a hot spare, and a test device for a little over $400.

If my daily breaks, I pickup my spare and swap the SIM, since I keep both phones synced with Syncthing. I don’t even have to login to anything because that’s all done. (I had 4 functional devices of my 2017 phone, they had become so cheap).

So pick a 1-2 year old model that you like the features, and pay far less for it.

Before (finally) coming to the pixel, I would look at the Lineage device list, then check those phones out at gsmarena.com and phonearena.com to see which I’d prefer, because Lineage has the broadest device support that I’ve seen.

Today I run DivestOS, a fork of Lineage with some changes to a few things. I forget now exactly what I preferred (I’d have to pull up my comparison spreadsheet), but average battery consumption is a staggering 0.5% per hour, with microg services installed and a couple apps using it. Consumption average increases to about 4% per hour when I’m doing a lot of intensive stuff - copying files over the network, using nav, watching a video, etc.

That changes it, and obscures the past; whitewashing.

There’s no argument to be made for a remake, it’s good because it’s part of the time in which it was produced.