At that time, I genuinely believed that the N9 had the vision and design to beat anything Android was - at that time. Till date, it's still the best UX i experienced in a phone. Even a lot of Nokia managers I talked to called Elop a trojan horse from Microsoft.

But given how Android's source was open while Meego was anything but.. along with the whole Nokia + Microsoft drama... It's just a shame

From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration

I think that was around 2022-23.

I remember this affecting my laptop video watching a lot. Google meet feeling sluggish on Firefox is also something I remember until very recently..

Most, if not all, of our current work happens on remote cloud vms. Now I'm stuck with carrying a 3KG monstrosity to work.Every day.

Absolutely no positives compared to my ThinkPad that weighed less than half in my previous job.

Remote development is "good enough" these days. With VS Code, Development containers etc... Having a light weight, portable laptop is so much nicer than a laptop that you can't even rest on your lap for long duration.

The only thing you need to be mindful of using light weight laptops is not having enough RAM to fit all your browser tabs..

A lot of tasks which need a bit of intelligence don't really need that much compute. Just good enough documentation / skills, tool calling and a good enough local model.

Not sure what exactly this means for all those data centers that are getting built... But exciting times.

Especially if it gives us an insight into what prompts were given to generate something we approve of vs. something we disapprove.

For eg. If you're generating a whole document with a single prompt, say "write a document on how to implement this"

vs.

"Find various approaches to implement this. These are the approaches we already have. These are the constraints we currently have."

Then verify the generated text, remove useless hallucinations. Use the same AI to verify the generated output.

It's not just for clients with no smart phones. It's also clients who activate developer mode on their smartphone etc... clients who use VPN. Clients who run AdBlocker. Clients who use Firefox.

There needs to be a severe push back against this.

Things have gotten so crazy that the homeless here are walking around with QR codes printed out when begging for money. I'm guessing they're a network of people who share the same smartphone/payment method..

Drivers doesn't just mean the kernel. It's the user space binary blobs and services that need to talk to the kernel to enable the hardware.

Other than that there's waydroid, alien dalvik etc.. that run another Android instance in a container.

The thing is a lot of Android applications use safety net/other methods to make sure they only run on. "Approved"/stock hardware.

For eg. There's no browser based alternative to make UPI payments that i know of.

A couple of issues , back from my sailfish os porting days (haven't touched it in half a decade so things might have changed):

1. You would still need to run a lot of Android user space to make use of these drivers. We had a separate second init system that runs a stripped down version of Android init, starting enough services to make use of these drivers.

2. These binary drivers are tied to the kernel and Android versions that were released with the phone. So if you wanted some of the newer kernel features (back then it was like better container support), you're out of luck.

Usually, all this means you rely on a lot of hacks to fix some bugs... And porting takes a lot of time and effort.

Maybe I'm just losing interest in phone tech - but to me, it was only down sides and no upside.

The phone was bulky. Fragile.

The larger screen you get when you open the phone - was absolutely useless for most of the content I watch. The screen is 4:3 and most of the content I watched was 16:9. The black bars at the top and bottom of the video meant that the actual video content is exactly the same size as my non foldable Motorola Edge 40.

I used to auto set the watch into DnD / battery saving mode at night, and used the "raise hand to turn on the display" functionality.. I used to get 3-4 days of continuous use.

Charging used to be like "put the watch into charger after waking up. It'll be ready by the time you get ready for office".

I did miss the 30 day battery life of my Amazfit bip and 2 week battery life of Pebble before that.. but charging once a week wasn't all that bad...

But again, I mostly used my Pixel watch as a fitness tracker. Didn't really care for most of the apps - except maps.

They don't sell steam deck/it's parts where I live. So the next time people visit me from far away, they'd have to bring one along.

That being said, steam deck isn't as powerful to play some of the games like Spider-Man 2. The stuttering is quite high on that.

After my steam deck battery puffed up and my RX580 became too old to play any modern games, I had two choices:

1. Upgrade to a new GPU - this was costing me $300 at the very least for a 3 year old card

2. Hope to get a steam machine - but the crazy queue and the $1000 price tag really soured me on this

3. Get a bc-250 for $150 and make do for a year or two before upgrading.

I'm so glad I went with this option. I just used my old atx power supply and old PC case. Everything almost just works. It consumes lot less power than my previous gaming PC. It's a lot more silent. Some times there's a crash or two. I'm waiting to upgrade the power connector before unlocking it's full potential (40 compute units, and the two extra cores). So far I've finished playing Spider-Man 2, Hogwarts legacy, now playing 007 first light.

I haven't had enough motivation to sit on my couch and game after a long day ..

But the same game, in bed, on my deck was so much nicer..

All I can now say is having a dedicated device, that's not your laptop/computer to play games is definitely a market - be it Steam machine (/custom builds), hand held gaming, or just regular consoles..

You might have a better luck with network level ad blocker like pi-hole or adguard for eg