Proprietary drivers and the lack of a hardware abstraction layer seem to be the main problems. The big, popular desktop environments on Linux have also grown pretty heavy, but there are plenty of alternatives.

I have a five year old Pixel 4A running LineageOS. I limit battery charge with AccA to ensure it doesn’t wear out.

The phone reports its battery capacity at 93%. I have no plans to replace it unless I break it,

It didn’t have to be this way. I can run modern Linux on 20+ year old PCs.

I’m pretty happy with my P14s (essentially a T14). It’s even worse in that all the RAM is soldered, but as I understand things, AMD had legitimate performance reasons for doing so, and the trend is likely to continue.

IBM did the same thing 25 years ago on the Thinkpad 600 series.

KDE has a bigger team now. Gnome doesn’t have a Windows-style panel by default. I was thinking of projects like Xfce and LXDE.

The bit about apps having to reflow seems nonsensical. They have to reflow any time the user resizes their windows.

I’m not accepting any excuses from MS about limited resources when Linux desktop environments built by hobbyists have the feature in question.

In most languages, I would agree with that. In Lisp, I think I might not. If Common Lisp didn’t come with CLOS, you could implement it as a library, and that is not true of the object systems of the vast majority of languages.

You don’t even need to define a class to define methods. I’m sure that’s surprising to people coming from today’s popular language, but the original comment was about syntax.

Whether Lisp syntax is ugly is a matter of taste, but it’s objectively not unreadable.

I imagine the tricky part for someone unfamiliar with Lisp would be that there’s no syntactic clue that a particular thing is a macro or special form that’s going to treat its arguments differently from a function call. Someone who knows Scheme may have never seen anything like CLOS, but would see from context that defmethod must not be a function.

Entirely readable to someone who knows Common Lisp, and unreadable to someone who doesn’t know any kind of Lisp. Mostly readable to someone who knows Emacs Lisp, Clojure, or Scheme.

Being able to correctly guess what the syntax does without knowing the language is a function of similarity to familiar languages more often than it is a characteristic of the syntax itself.

However, there are no limits to political donations in the US afaik, which I guess means the rich and powerful ones can invest as much as they can to denigrate the other side, usually a democrat (correct me if wrong).

Almost right. There are limits on contributing to candidates, but not on political action committees advertising anything they want, including a candidate. PACs aren’t allowed to coordinate closely with a candidate’s campaign, but that hardly matters in practice.

Is it possible for local candidates to run against their own party and actually win? Like a republican that lost his party’s nomination for a district, then becomes an independent and actually wins against his former party?

Yes, but it’s extremely rare for it to succeed due to the voting system in use and in some states, ballot access rules biased against new parties. The governor of Alaska was elected that way in 1990.

Do candidates have to give back the money that was given as a donation that wasn’t actually used to try to win an election?

No. They can, but they can also donate it to charity, make (relatively small) contributions to other candidates, hold it for future campaigns, transfer it to a party committee, or give it to a PAC.

Can a politician actually pretend to raise money for a campaign and then simply pocket it?

That’s illegal, which doesn’t always stop them from doing it.

As I understand it, the practice remains common in the USA. Verizon, the carrier in the article agreed to limitations, but other carriers routinely finance phones and lock them until they’re paid off.

You could get a €2000 euro phone for €500, pay that up front, and walk to the local guy with a serial cable who unlocked your phone for €20.

A world in which telecoms can’t use SIM locking to offer financing on ultra-expensive phones to people who would otherwise be bad credit risks sounds like an improvement to me. Most people who can’t pay cash for a 2000€ phone are better off not buying one at all.

people like this make phone deals worse for the rest of us.

Verizon can get exactly the same amount out of most customers by either:

• Charging more for the phone and less for the service
• Unbundling the phone financing from the phone service

People… don’t care about being able to switch phone carriers while keeping their phone? I think you’re quite mistaken.

Even if few people actually do that, they certainly care about the effect of the resulting competitive pressure on the market.

That is a separate issue. This is a lock to prevent use with other service providers,

That sounds like a very negative experience, pretty much opposite to my experience with the same model.

She got 50 USD back. Not worth it at all.

50 USD was one of the compensation options Google offered; a battery replacement was another. The latter might have been wise if she wanted to keep using the phone.

Be sure to give it a one-star review.

So far, Magisk and Play Integrity Fix have been sufficient for apps that don’t like it.

Messaging, web browser, podcasts, navigation, a couple services that require a phone to access. I tend to not install apps that could be websites.

Hardware drivers are surely dated. Android, on the other hand is 15, and I assume getting updated to 16 soon. I think I’m pretty good with regard to the sort of zero-click exploits I’ve heard of used for targeted attacks. If somebody slipped a trojan into a software update, I could have a problem, especially if it was a privileged app like AccA or Adaway. Of course, updated drivers wouldn’t protect me from that.