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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • All I have to ask is why though? They already have access to skinned aosp and from there can(and do)quite a bit of tweaking on their own. Fireos has been a worse version of android for some time now and Im unsure what the benefit of making their own in house OS would be.

    If it’s a true GNU/Linux OS with compatibility with linux programs, then that would be kind of neat, and if it’s open enough to let advanced users install flatpaks(I suspect it’s going to be immutable so at least flatpaks would be nice) then that could be neat. Currently it’s very easy to sideload on fireos devices and even install the play store in full so it’s possible the end product could be more like the steamdeckOS which is very much a user friendly store front end with a power user true linux experience underneath.

    That said, for some reason I suspect that they will be locking things down even more and its going to be one of those many user facing linux devices that’s technically linux but very limited. Like a smart fridge interface or something. If this is the case then dropping android support would be a bad move. You lose easy/lazy portability to your store from developers who already have a product to sell and you lose many apps that already exist, and for power users you lose access to the many apps that can easily be side loaded like tachiyomi(though I imagine amazon would rather you buy from them than buy their subsidized $80 tablets to read pirated manga/comics and library books on libby)

    But who knows if they actually do an OK job this could lead to a new wave of GNU compatible touch forward apps for the rest of us. Linux has gotten a lot better at touch forward design over the last 4 or 5 years on its own, but its still fairly rough.












  • If you’re in the US a lot of public libraries connect with hoopla which you should be able to access for free with a library card. It gives you a set number of things you can “check out” a month depending on your library(usually around 5 or 6). This includes books, audiobooks, comics(single issues and volumes both count as a 1), and of course a week of some subscription services like nebula oddly enough. Worth checking out especially since nebula is more for independent creators to actually get paid and not big name media studio.

    edit: Just double checked it isnt there. I feel like there was more last time I checked but I may have also just gotten confused with great courses plus and curiositystream which do seem to be there


  • It feels like this has been an issue for some time now with the internet ballooning in how resource heavy it is despite many websites not becoming all that more functional. It’s the reason there is a meme of people being surprised that their browser tab is taking up so much ram. I mean yeah that news website may function similarly to how it did 10 years ago, but that tiny thumbnail is technically autoplaying a 1080p video, and despite being zoomed out in frame the photos uploaded in the background and thumbnails are also fairly large and high res even before you click on them, and there are countless other things running in the background that just arent worth it.

    There was a period in the late 00s and early to mid 10s where the rise of the smart phones delayed this trend and forced developers to reconsider more minimal global experience. Flash was killed off and things got lighter weight and the new media rich features were better optimized for performance.

    I think it’s also not just that the developers tend to have better devices as much as it’s a result of time and energy and resources put towards building software. Its similar to videogames. In the old days to save on resources a 2d game might use a single texture tile that could be mirrored, rotated, or color swapped so that precious ram space can be spared. Once the baseline or average hits a certain point(or a new console gen appears) a lot of that “optimization” goes away because it’s not needed. Sometimes it’s obvious and we’re better for it like clouds no longer having to play double duty as bushes, but othertimes it means that we move onto something that technically looks marginally better but absolutely leaves a good chunk of contemporary hardware in the dust.

    I think the most frustrating things about websites is that things arent that different for all the under the hood changes we get. Google maps is a lot slower in firefox than it used to be, and the android app uses more resources on mid range hardware than it used to(I’d know I remember using it on my HTC Dream/G1). Functionally I have been able to do the same things I can do now on google maps for probably more than a decade now. New technology has been introduced in the backend to make maps “better” but it is at the cost of CPU ticks and snappiness. Likewise a lot of news and article websites dont look that much different than they used to 10 years ago. Sure things are laid out differently and aesthetics change, but the navigation is fairly steady. But we have all this javascript and bandwidth sucking media autoloading and creating a slower experience. Even modern hardware can suffer from this.