Well yeah, of course people are focusing on Flock. Out of all of the various systems, Flock is the one that is most clearly and brightly against the US Constitution. It is blatantly illegal with no possible excuse... and yet it still exists. WTF?

>"Yes, buying a Google phone to escape Google! Hence various folks are excited Lenovo are joining the effort."

Yeah, I have always wanted to run an alternative Android. However, only one of my past phones could do so because the alternatives only supported very few phones. And, ironically, the best-supported ones are Google's phones.

There are a few features I have wanted by having an alternative. The main would be the ability to force/control all permissions and with spoofing. Example- location services. I should be able to restrict all apps to how granular the location provided is, or completely off. And since apps can refuse service if the permission is off (even though most don't need it), there would be a setting to have it "on" but automatically provide a random incorrect location. Same thing with phone number (although hopefully the fake option would be able to pick only invalid/out of service numbers).

But the other main problem with alternative Androids would be lack of trust. Some apps will be able to detect rooted and/or detect non-official ROM and then refuse service. So a bank app, streaming app, auth app, or other stuff won't work. And you won't know what doesn't work until you are stuck.

Then heap on the complexity and risk of actually installing it, possible voiding of warranty, etc, and it is no wonder the number of people actually doing this is practically nil.

That's the sort of curious thing about this announcement: at least in theory(I assume things are uglier in practice) the X1 parts that they shipped for windows-on-ARM/Copilot PCs already use UEFI/ACPI in line with what MS wants for booting Windows.

That obviously doesn't mean that there's a working GPU driver; or that naive power management doesn't cause the system to run at 90% of maximum power and hammer the battery flat; but the theory was that the last gen was already doing the "big kid ARM that has embraced PC standards" thing; very similar to the 'standards base' that ARM encourages ARM server part vendors to use.

I'm always a little curious what the thinking/strategy is with the Chinese outfits. I don't necessarily expect much from the OrangePi guys; they ship a surprising number of different SoCs, including multiple architectures and multiple vendors, for their size, so are likely to be mostly at the mercy of the SoC vendors; but is the situation for someone like Allwinner such that people who want linux to work on their stuff could be a resource for them and they are just not taking advantage of that very well; or are they actively annoyed by GPL-related claims and really just want to shove minimum-viable android out the door as cheaply as possible to win cheap tablet tenders and really do not want to hear from SBC hobbyists.

SOP at Qualcomm. It has been literal years of hammering on them by Google and basically every Android handset OEM to even keep parts that ship with android support in support for more than a few years(I think the current timeline, at least for 'snapdragon 8 elite' flagship parts, is a princely 8 years from release; and that is with the 'project treble' stuff that attempts to reduce the number of changes that might potentially need to be supported). Especially with the, um, raging success, of Copilot+ AI PCs they are probably ready to pretend that X1 never happened and call it good. I'm not even sure how long the windows support on X1 is expected to last.

Both Gnome and KDE were busy growing from almost nothing. They were scrappy and usable.

Then, just before 2.0 (?), both projects went insane simultaneously and started talking about how confused users were and how much hand-holding the users needed. The number of processes exploded and started eating up stupid amounts of resources. It started looking a LOT like Microsoft style engineering where everything is fucked up and unmanageable.

Now, we are here. Both projects have never recovered from what happened in the early 2000's. Both projects are a mess. Neither projects gets any support from me.

Linux on the desktop was successfully subverted. How? I don't know. I absolutely blame Microsoft.

Rules will not work when the governing body does not respect rules for itself.

Would there be outrage? From who? We already have Flock and the only people pissed off are the hundreds of millions of citizens. The tens of thousands that we "elect" to lead all seem pretty happy with it and are willing to suppress stories of outrage by the vast majority of people.

Honestly, I find KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, and XFCE all good. And I tend to use a mix of them on different machines, and sometimes just change my desktop for the fun of it. If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably still be KDE/Plasma, since it is the most complete and configurable of them all. But it is also a bit more heavy and complex as the tradeoff.

However, I am not a fan of "modern" Gnome and when Gnome 3 came out, I refused to ever look at anything Gnome again.

This is the real problem with these systems. Just as Flock, a non-government system, can be misused to throw you in jail.

Do you ever feel like you are an innocent white tourist who is lost amidst an island of cannibals?

The question you are asking implies that you probably shouldn't feel terribly comfortable at Slashdot as many of the folks here understand WHY this person did what they did at a very fundamental level. You do not. That means that many of the motivations that occur here are a complete mystery to you.

You are very welcome here; however, I have to wonder why you want to be here.

Long story short, some people have a motivation to do certain things. When those things align with physical reality, magic happens. Money, power, etc are NOT motivations in this scenario. Just learning is. Doing what is in the mind with real physical objects. It is an orgasmic experience. The why is not really explainable with words. You either know, or you don't.

Don't freak out too bad here, but I have some news for you: There are lots of things you do not know. Even if you lived for a million years doing nothing but learning, there would still be things you would not know. No matter how complete you think your internal representation of the world is, it isn't complete.

Just quoting for entertainment purposes.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner reference. Anyone who listened to Iron Maiden would recognize that line instantly.

Obscure references like that is what made Family Guy and American Dad so entertaining. They seem to have lost that with Seth McFarlane not writing those shows anymore.

Simple, a group of people got together and decided they wanted this all to occur, so they worked to make it so.

It gets political when you try to identify the group and its members and its goals. It is all a conspiracy because they know, as a whole, the population would reject their efforts.