As we reach the second half of 2023, what are some of the supposed releases, or news you’re looking forward to?
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- Debian Bookworm.
- OnePlus Foldable phone.
- FairPhone 4 Plus? Maybe a new Camera Module?
- KDE 6 … whatever the early stages look like. But I’m not going to switch until Debian does.
- K-9 Mail/ThunderBird app merge for Android.
- More distributions to support Flatpak and Flathub to become the central repository for Linux desktop applications.
- Continued adoption of Mastodon to replace Twitter, and Lemmy to replace Reddit.
Exciting times.
And hopefully Cosmic
Absolutely. Thanks for mentioning; I thought about editing the post to add it, but then didn’t.
I’m hoping for the new fairphone, I think its gonna be my next phone after my oneplus 9 kicks the bucket.
You’re gonna downgrade to an LCD screen and snapdragon 750g and still pay more than $500?
You must really love the planet.
You joke but yeah, I really do
Its also about not using slave labor for the manufacture of your next phone, and about having an open unlocked bootloader with multiple OS options when standard support is no longer possible.
If its entirely about sustainability, we would keep the same phone we already have until it dies. Fairphone is good at this, probably the best in the Android market, although the iPhone is better because they support their phones a little bit longer if you include security backports.
Regarding the LCD; there are real problems with people having eyestrain from using OLED phones; it’s why /r/pwm_sensitive exists. So for a lot of people, myself included, Fairphone 4 hit all the right spots except the camera could use improvement.
I paid something like $700 for my phone. If I keep it for two years from purchase, that’s less than a dollar a day for my pocket tricorder and it doesn’t cause eyestrain for me.
Really there with you on Debian bookworm!
Less with Flatpak. It is, IMHO, the wrong solution to a real problem; I install n flatpaks and suddenly I have n+1 openssl, libpng, etc. library versions to worry about, and unknown capabilities and policies for responding to security issues in each of them. Give me Debian unattended-upgrades any day!
Seriously, Flatpak is nice as a “backup repository” for when your actual repo lacks a certain package, but it is a workaround rather than a true solution. It’s the problem of “we have too many standards so let’s create another standard”. It just adds extra copies of dependencies on top of your system’s packages. The thing that I loved about Linux’s package management most when I first switched is just how damn efficient it all was. One package manager updates the ENTIRE system and dependencies all get properly shared. Why are we all clamoring to go backwards?
Has OnePlus improved? I have the 7 Pro but their newer phones and customer support got terrible.
They have gone backwards in my opinion, I’d rather hold out and see what the Nothing Phone(2) will be like. (Using a OP6T)
Have been waiting for a new device from Nothing for quite a while c:
Oneplus is dead for me since der Switched their underlying OS to ColorOS. On month after the update my device bootloped and the only option was to wipe all the data. I don’t rooted the device everything was stock. Second thing is I got only 2 mayor Android updates on my Oneplus Nord.
OnePlus was wonderful, it was just the kind of support (helpfully and covertly making apps slow down to increase battery life) that I needed to switch to Apple iPhone.
Wait, did you mean you switched from iPhone because they do that, or did OnePlus start doing it too?
I switched to iPhone because the OnePlus brand-enhancements was the “last straw” of my experience with devices in the Android ecosystem. Other problems:
- Updates. Major operating system updates maybe only lasted about a year. With OnePlus I think they even tell you that you’ll get two major updates and after that, the “device” is practically “end of life” if you wanted to avoid security issues.
- UX jank. Even if you had infinite major Android updates, Android itself was perpetually moving goal posts with how applications “looked.” This was most prominent when you tried to assist someone with a different (older or newer) version of Android. “Where things were supposed to be” for settings etc was always different between versions. If you asked them which application they were using for a function, you invariably got a “blank stare” because they did not in fact know because they were using the default…
- Shovelware. Every phone came with uninstallable applications which were nearly always crap, but somehow essential and were configured to be the default for messages, calling, contacts, etc.
I’m not going to say that iPhone does not also have these kinds of issues, but combinatorially iPhone has less of them because you are not multiplying configurations with different screen resolutions, microprocessors, Android versions, manufacturers, carriers and promotional rate plans. I won’t buy locked devices, because for me, it is better to consider the mobile phone as a tool you buy, and not a flavor-of-the-season vessel for a carrier’s service plan. The prices of unlocked devices are closer to the true value of the device.
The rumored Deckard standalone VR headset from Valve sounds exciting.
I really don’t think it will come out in 2023 though. Overall the PCVR tech seems to be stagnating at the moment. Which is a real shame because I am on the lookout for a headset but all the available ones don’t work for me. Basically I just want the equivalent of the PSVR2 (OLED screen, decent resolution, eye tracking) as a PC headset
The HTC Vive Pro can be retrofitted with eye-tracking and has decent OLED screens. But the real problem is that there is very limited software support for eye-tracking on the SteamVR side and that will probably only change once Valve releases something new with eye-tracking support.
I wasn’t aware that the vive pro has OLED displays. Really sucks that the pro 2 doesn’t, I would want a higher resolution than the vive pro
Technically 2024 but the Apple Vision Pro headset is blowing my mind
Even with that price tag?
For new tech like that price point is expected to be high. The key point that I’m excited about their headset is that they ironed out a bunch of problems so now other companies can mirror the solution and lower the cost eventually.
A good blow jobs sometimes costs good money.
The expansion of the more robust mobile gaming handheld sector. Systems like the ROG Ally and Steam Deck are an awesome new direction for gaming and I’m pumped to see that sector expand and mature.
I was considering pre-ordering an Ally, but the battery life on it is a little underwhelming. I know it’s a similar capacity to that of the Steam Deck, but it packs way more computing power than what the Deck offers.
I wonder if they put such a small capacity battery in it so it’d weigh less than the Steam Deck. I know ASUS was citing it’s weight as a selling point.
Just a crazy thought. Have you watched WWDC? The new development tools for conversion to native metal is so exciting. I was just thinking that I would totally buy a hypothetical M1 steam deck passively cooled huge battery. That’s s just a dream though haha.
I haven’t seen it but the shift to ARM for heavy computing really excites me from a mobile gaming standpoint. Do somewhat worry about how emulating all our existing game libraries on a new architecture is going to work though.
box64 and FEX Emulator are making big strides on the emulation front.
Anything about porting games to Apple APIs is completely disinteresting to me. M1 is a great chip, but MacOS is a terrible OS (and I say that as I type on an M1 Mac Mini I use as a TV PC) especially where gaming is concerned.
Much more exciting IMO is the work being done for Asahi Linux. Getting the M1 to run proper OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan along with the work being done on Linux X86-on-ARM emulation (box64 and FEX) is a much more promising direction for gaming on M1. I hope we also see other ARM chips from other vendors with the same amount of computing and graphics performance that could actually find their way into gaming handhelds not owned by the worst company for consumer freedom in tech.
ThirdParty support for managing PassKeys. Especially the password managers BitWarden and Enpass. Having a main stream pubkey based authentication mechanism will hopefully vastly improve security and reduce ugly attack vectors.
- Emacs 29 (featuring improvements to the built-in help system)
- NetBSD 10.0 (which has been in development nearly 3 years!)
- The FreeDOS 28th Anniversary Ebook (the working title is Why We Love FreeDOS)
- Long shot: better support for GNU Guix to run on GNU Hurd
Found the foss enthusiast, can’t wait for emacs
I was hoping for a switch 2 this year, but that is seeming less likely now.
bro yuzu on steam deck and u’r set for life xd
I haven’t found the firmware on the high seas and I’m not keen at the idea of dumping it myself
Just search for “switch keys” or something and you’ll find it. I dumped my actual games on my Switch but I found the keys online somewhere.
There are rumours of early to mid 2024 with the second Pokemon dlc
I’m curious how the foldable Pixel will turn out. Especially if it’ll still be so moddable and have a relockable bootloader… Kinda doubt it
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A foldable for mobile Linux would be amazing, I love my PinePhone Pro with keyboard case, but you could use a foldable as a mini laptop with a touch keyboard on the bottom half (maybe not the best experience though). Having a bigger screen for doing productivity stuff especially with an external keyboard would be amazing, but I don’t want Android anymore.
Regarding the keyboard on the bottom, I can imagine some physical keypad accessory for the bottom half, like what Lenovo is doing with their foldable tablet/laptop thingy, just on a smaller scale.
That’s basically what the PinePhone keyboard accessory is. The phone clips into the top half and the bottom half is a physical keyboard. It is essentially a pocket sized laptop. I’m typing on it now and I can actually type much faster on this than any normal touch phone keyboard since you can properly touch type on it.
That looks sweet. Like a Psion 5.
Not what I’d personally have much use for (kinda like using phone in vertical an in-hand), but yea, leave it to small indie companies to come up with important things.
Ed: but I was referring to this where the keyboard can be attached right to the bottom screen.
MNT Pocket Reform will ship end of year
ROG Ally. Finally a good device which lets me play any of my indie games on my commute. This is important to me as I’m the dad of a 7 week old girl, and my commute is the only time I have for gaming now.
Genuine question, why not Steam Deck? I enjoy playing indie games (Into the Breach, One Step from Eden, Into the Void, etc) on my Steam Deck on bus.
It’s not available in Norway, and probably won’t be any time soon. I could have it sent to a collection point in Sweden and pick it up there, but then I’d have a lot of trouble dealing with a warrenty claim if something doesn’t work.
Norway is an odd country to miss out. I kinda just assumed they’d released it in every stable European country.
We’re a really small non-eu market. I completely understand why they haven’t bothered launching it here.
:(
Sorry to hear that. It makes me thankful that even in a small Asian market like Hong Kong I can get a steam deck through official channel.
I’d definitely have gone with the SteamDeck had it been officially sold here. A more console like experience and the trackpads would have been great for RTS games. Bought a steam controller from a colleague, so at least I can use that for RTS when connecting the ally to a TV.
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I preordered one. I love my Steam Deck and am interested to see how much better it performs, but I plan on installing Linux (some form of SteamOS) because I really hate Windows. SteamOS is an amazing interface for a handheld and with the Ally running AMD, it should run Linux very well. ETA PRIME did a video on Linux on the Ally and it looks very promising.
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Libcamera development is probably the most exciting thing for me. Phosh is pretty usable as is now and web browsers work fine on Linux mobile, but camera support is a giant mess with v4l2 and having to manually wire up the camera pipelines in a device-specific way. Offloading said mess to a library and having a standard API for applications to use for camera access should allow for easier integration of mobile cameras into apps that already support USB cameras (uvcvideo). I know the PinePhone has partial libcamera integration already (qcam works but not well) and the PinePhone Pro also has partial support as it shows cameras as available but have not been able to get a picture yet.
Second gen. Pixel Watch. Not expecting anything groundbreaking tbh, but skipped the first one and have $$$ burning a hole in my pocket.
I want to love a smart watch but i just don’t feel like they’re worth it tbh
I have the Samsung Watch4 and it’s cool and all but the battery life sucks (lasts like a day max) and i don’t get any really useful information from it that is accurate enough for me to use
I just ended up using it to see notifications and changing the music but i feel like i could have done that for a lot less than $250.
Is there a use case that i might be missing out on? What do you use them for?
Pebble was one of the good ones. I’ve gotten an inexpensive one running Android Wear, but I find myself seldom wearing it compared to my dumb watch. I wore my Pebble every day since it could last a damn week or more without charging, and the screen was very pleasant to the eyes.
Haha I feel that. My Casio digital watch is all i use nowadays
Charging is too much of a hassle for me for what i get in return
I have a Fitbit versa 3 that I also use for a very limited number of things, but those things are critical for my day to day:
- notifications: my phone is always on vibrate, id never know when I was getting messaged or called without it.
- alarm: I wake up before my partner, who has sleep issues, so it’s perfect for that, reliable and unintrusive.
- sleep tracking: I’m not sure I trust the specific numbers (although generally I do think it’s pretty accurate), but it is helpful for establishing a baseline and informing me if the reason I feel like garbage is because I didn’t get enough sleep or not.
And actually I think that’s it. I thought there was more, but that pretty much covers it. Oh also, sometimes helping with calories tracking.
I guess it’s good, affordable presence detection which could enable some really cool home automation use cases.
Cheaper LTO-7
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