I have two friends who helped me switch from Win10 to Debian. A lot of things were rocky, and I’m not going to sugarcoat that. Linux is still a niche system with a high barrier of entry. That said, now I got it to a point where I’m happy with what I got. I could always do more stuff if I wanted too, but I am content with what I have.

My programs and games for Windows run with Wine Staging and I don’t need any launchers to manage them. I’m even more comfortable messing with the terminal.

Basically Linux is like a Bethesda game. You need to download mods and mess with them a bit to be happy with your system.

I once read that uninstalling packages with ADB on Xiaomi phones would make it even more painful to unlock the bootloader. It’s probably just a one off half truth but even that made me be wary of just uninstalling things - but yeah this means whenever someone wants to sideload something on a Samsung they need to follow a tutorial at best, that’s blegh.

As in, no side loading at all on Sammy devices? I find that hard to believe. You mean more restrictions on installing just some but not all APKs, right? That’s still scummy either way if true.

I have a GOG library specifically because it’s not tied to a stupid Valve Epic Games Uplay Launcher. This is their competitive edge. Plus, all of what you mentioned can be done with GOG through any semi-modern web browser.

I guess since GOG doesn’t have an official launcher, we will be like, very totally unable to create and use wine prefixes. No siree.

The strings mentioned are worrying. The developer verification requires an internet access - what if there’s no internet or the connection is spotty? Does that mean you can’t install the APK without Uncle Google having the internet first?

If all these scare tactics didn’t stop you, there’s nothing more Google or the manufacturers could do without stripping even more of what made Android great in the first place.

You don’t need Galaxy. Use Heroic or better yet, don’t use any launchers. GOG games are DRM-free.

No, what you mentioned is just one of the options. They literally go over “bare metal” installs even if it’s just a skim. I always find their article funny because of that.

Does it really freak them out?

I think you might be underestimating how some people type really slowly when given a full sized QWERTY keyboard, numpad and all.

Then again the one limiting factor of phone keyboards (touch or physical) is that they’re designed for two thumbs, instead of just whatever fingers happen to be closer to the button you want. Though I’ll admit I do miss when Nokia, BlackBerry, etc, came up with unique solutions for how to get a small physical keyboard attached to a phone.

An online friend of mine recommended it to me as the one distro I should be on. I agree. We’re both under 30 and my friend is younger than I am.

If it works, it works.

Might be an unpopular opinion but

In the late 2010s or early 2020s, I wrote a short story in the Notes app on a Nokia C3-00. It was one of the budget offerings with a QWERTY keyboard and WiFi support, and it was pretty awesome for the time, and still is to an extent.

By that point I cycled through a few touchscreen phones beginning from tiny Samsung junkers to mid-range Chinese phones we would have called “phablets” a few years back and got used to touchscreens. I’m typing this right now on a touchscreen and it’s pretty nice, yeah autocorrect is wrong some of the time but it is solid most of the time, and I can type really fast. Typing on a phone with a small physical keyboard was eye opening in a way. It felt slow, and I had to actually put some effort into pushing the buttons to make them register. In all fairness, it could be the age of the phone making the buttons stiff.

Something else is how the labels on the buttons eventually wear out. If this was a physical keyboard I could just replace it, but a small panel of keys built into a phone? Yeah not really replaceable.

I get that all those very tall, very flat slabs of plastic and metal can get boring very quickly, but I guess because there’s not so much more left to perfect that form factor.

Debian.

I’ll raise you one and say I’d rather pirate games than use either of them. At least there’s GOG, itch, Zoom-Platform, putting aside games that never come there until a decade later.

How’d it get enshittified? Last I used it, it was essentially the same ol’ reliable one, but some things randomly break when you switch the launcher on HyperOS.

Yeah, no. EGS is a piece of shit DRM launcher, just like Valve’s own piece of shit, but it has the Epic logo. Heck, they even have free games and not even that is enough to kill the vitriol, so yeah it’s just “no steam no buy” all over again, or Steam would also be chided for many of the same things - which would be very dandy if it happened, after all, neither of them respect us enough to own our games without having to phone them home first.

I swear, the whole outrage over EGS can only be plainly and simply explained as the stupid “no steam no buy”. When a game remains exclusive to this DRM launcher made by an American corporation for 50 years, all is well in the world, but when the game becomes exclusives to that DRM launcher made by that other American corporation for a year, suddenly all hell breaks loose. They’re both the same toxin! Just blind devotion to a company that only did very pro-consumer things like make lootboxes really popular and making it hip and cool to give up ownership of your games.

For the record, the Tim should really just shut up. Or really, any American wealthy CEO for that matter, their grand standing over freeze peach isn’t worth the oxygen required to produce it instead of just… not enabling CSAM like normal platforms do?