Pixels have a pretty strong warning on boot for unlocked bootloaders and an easily-typed URL with a detailed explanation.

That seems like enough to me from the manufacturer side. Of course I can imagine someone ignoring the warning; people sometimes climb into tiger enclosures with predictable results, but it shouldn’t be on device manufacturers (or zoo management) to prevent all possible negative outcomes.

A design that results in a hard brick on “tampering” is unusually destructive.

Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft, and LG tried similar ideas and none got much traction.

I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea even now that phones have enough CPU and RAM for an adequate desktop experience. It’s certainly not a good idea running Android as we know it, where apps are data silos and have UIs that don’t cleanly transition from the palmtop experience to the desktop experience.

You can do that today with a Linux tablet and Waydroid. It’s more like running the Android apps in a VM than something really well integrated with the Linux environment, but perfect is the enemy of good.

I got my first tablet this year after a long time as a skeptic. It runs Arch, BTW.

Most of the time it has a keyboard attached and I use it like a laptop, but it’s nice to be able to watch movies on flights during taxi, takeoff, and landing because tablets and phones are allowed, not laptops.

Gnome is really nice on a touchscreen aside from the terrible onscreen keyboard. KDE is a little rougher, but its onscreen keyboard is decent.

I remember making a note to look into it several times, and thinking I should buy one (exactly one) when it was about $600. If I had, I imagine I would have sold at 10x rather than holding until 100x or its peak at 200x.

I actually did think it or a successor would become important as a consumer payment method. I was wrong there.

I remember playing with a Motorola Atrix in a store. It seemed like a really cool idea.

I thought people would learn how to use computers.

It seemed as if most of the millennial generation in wealthy countries did learn to some degree and I expected it to be even more true for younger generations. Those more sophisticated users would enable more sophisticated and flexible applications. Technology would empower individuals while weakening corporations and governments.

Instead, the most reliable recipe for popularizing tech is to dumb it down. Millennials represent a peak of digital literacy (in wealthy countries) and those younger tend to have weaker technical skills.

LLMs don’t understand things. They repeatedly predict the next token given previous tokens.

I don’t think something without predictable patterns is likely to work as a language. A very complex grammar probably means the LLM will make grammatical errors more often, but that’s probably the most that can be done to make a language hard for LLMs. Other comments mention languages without much training data, but I don’t think that’s what you’re asking.

I haven’t checked numbers lately, but my impression is that the shift is complete. The primacy of phones is clear, but most households in the EU have a PC, and people who own PCs aren’t going to further decrease their PC use over the next five years.

My claim is that having a PC is also very mainstream in the EU, not that smartphones aren’t dominant or socially problematic.

According to Eurostat, a majority of people in most EU countries used a laptop or desktop computer to access the internet in 2025.

you now do literally anything on a mobile OS with more convenience

I disagree with this claim. Some things are more convenient on mobile operating systems than desktop operating systems, but small screens and the lack of physical keyboards are significant limitations.

Having a PC is also very mainstream in the EU. What you’re describing aligns with my understanding of how things are in the global south.

“If you put money in a vending machine and got two items instead of one, would you put additional money in for the second item?”

No, I fucking wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t like to work for anyone who wouldn’t hire me because of that fact.

Masks are better than nothing if the wearer is sick, but respirators are far superior. Disposable N95 and FFP2 “masks” are respirators.

Microsoft tried to make Windows Server popular. Apple sold a server OS and even its own rack-mount servers for a while.

The people using servers, and often the people making the decisions about what to use have a high degree of technical knowledge and skill. The things that drive popularity in consumer operating systems such as being preloaded on devices and having a polished GUI don’t have as big an influence on experts.

Customizability, reliability, and performance do have a big influence on what experts choose, and Linux wins on those points. There’s also the history of proprietary Unix being big in the server/supercomputer market, and Linux is an obvious successor.

He got mad at me for texting him an anti-CCP joke (both US Phone Numbers)

He’s right to be concerned. You should be using Signal far any communication you don’t want sucked into a mass-surveillance system (i.e. most communication). He might not want to have Signal installed when he enters China though.

When I can’t use the old one anymore. Every time so far, that’s been because of a hardware failure.

I’m currently on a Pixel 4A. It’s running Android 16 (LineageOS), and I limit battery charge with AccA so that it doesn’t wear out. It’s currently showing 92% capacity, which seems pretty good for five years. I don’t think I’d actually like a new phone; it would be faster and have a better camera, but my current phone isn’t a bottleneck, and a new phone’s camera will still be worse than my Olympus. It would have 5G, but why should I care? Most new phones are bigger, and as an adult, my hands are not growing.

I love that answers like this are popular here. There was a time when phone tech was improving fast enough that frequent upgrades made a lot of sense, but now is not that time.

I’m a little surprised that’s an active decision from carriers instead of whatever has compatible radios just working.

Most 2016 era smartphones have 4G.