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Comment by rangestransform

7 hours ago

I used to be a custom rom guy in high school, and I also used to develop apps for my nexus 5. Now I have an iPhone and I save the tech nerding for work hours. I definitely would not have gotten this far without my custom rom days, but now my phone just needs to do phone things so I can work on robots instead.

This. I was heavily involved with the Maemo community back in the day and even made an Ubuntu 9.04 port to the Nokia N800/N810. These days I'm juggling multiple responsibilities and I need to conserve my mental energy for work. I certainly credit my career on that tinkering, but these days I just want something that works so I can put my energy elsewhere.

  • >I need to conserve my mental energy for work.

    Is perhaps the saddest sentence. Whats the point of working when you don't have enough energy left to do the fun stuff?

    • You might be reading into that too much. It's more likely that this person's definition of what is "fun" has changed since they were younger. Spending time with family/friends or engaging with new hobbies might be how they have fun now, and that's perfectly fine.

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    • Dealing with broken Linux installs might be your definition of fun, but it's very possible to be a nerd and not find that particular thing fun, and prefering Macbooks

Android phones do phone things. They work perfectly fine - in many ways better than iPhones, and in others not as well.

  • I switched to an iPhone more in an act to protest Google and I regret my decision. Things didn't get easier, they got harder.

    I mean for christ's sake, there's no universal gesture for "back". Do I swipe from the side? Press the x button at the top left? The top right? Is there no option I can find so I just force close the app? When I swipe to text with autocorrect turned off why does it change the word I swiped AND the word before it that was already correct? Why can't I swipe the word "racist"? Why can't I swipe the phrase "killed himself" and instead it "corrects" to "Lillies himself" or "milled himself"? (Made for a very awkward conversation about Turing...). Why can I swipe the word "suicide" but not "suicidal"? (These are phrases I've found to be easy to reproduce but it also happens with mundane everyday shit) Holy fucking shit how the fuck is this thing even a phone, it doesn't even do phone things well? I mean as far as I can tell there is no setting which will ever capitalize a singular "i", making it trivial to recognize an iphone user since well... iphones came out...

    Not only that, with things like Termux they just work better. Want to sync files to your computer? Easy, rsync. With a few lines in a bash script my phone does daily backups locally. With a few lines I have a script that means my phone is a keyboard for my computer. With a few lines I have I can turn my old phone into something useful instead of garbage. Maybe these things are tech nerdy to the average person and "too much work" but for us? Come on, this shit is trivial.

    • I switched from iPhone to Android and I was fully expecting a world of pain but I was (am?) pleasantly surprised.

      The back button thing is real. When I have to use someone else's iPhone I immediately feel the lack of consistency.

      And KDE Connect is fantastic to use. So many things on iPhones are just annoying for no reason. I don't want to buy a 1000 dollar computer to look at my photos, come on now.

    • Swipe up from the bottom (which goes to the app switcher), and then swipe up any app you want to force-quit.

I like iPhone and won't go back to android because I am comfortably using a 6 year old iPhone on the latest operating system with no real issues. Planning to keep using it until it stops getting security updates, or the hardware fails.