Markaos

On non-corpo linux syslog can be disabled

systemctl disable --now systemd-journald

I'd prefer to just symlink/mount /var/log to a memory filesystem instead

Set Storage=volatile in /etc/systemd/journald.conf

manufacturers can put it where your hand naturally rests, meaning that you can unlock the phone BEFORE you have even taken it out of your pocket.

Idk, my "unlock" finger naturally rests wherever the fingerprint scanner is on my phone. When I had a rear fingerprint scanner, I used to have my phone's bottom right corner planted into my palm near the thumb and used the index finger to support its back near the scanner, so I was always ready to unlock it.

Now that I have an under-screen scanner, I use my pinky as a "shelf" for the phone's bottom side, ring finger to hold it on the far side and index finger along the near side (which makes me suspect this grip would work for in-power-button scanners too), and that makes my thumb naturally rest exactly on the spot where the scanner is. With (one) tap to wake, I have no problem unlocking the phone while taking it out of my pocket - literally just a quick double tap. Although it's true that you can't unlock the phone directly in the pocket like this, because the proximity sensor should prevent the tap to wake from working.

I used to have a phone with a scanner in the power button too, but I can't remember how I held it - I don't think it was the same way as now, because I'm pretty sure I never used to rest my thumb on screen like this.

So now I’m looking at that kind of parasitic situation with this FRP bypass lock. It’s almost as if the manufacturer wants phones to be thrown in the garbage so users are forced to buy from them rather than aftermarket. Noooooo. /s

It's a theft deterrent, so it would be kind of pointless if there was an intentional way to disable it other than to log in with the owner's account. The people providing the tools to bypass FRP want their cut of the stolen goods, that's all.

I'm not saying that your specific phone is stolen (although if you got it in this state... yeah, it most likely is, FRP triggers when you do a factory reset from the recovery instead of going through settings), but you have to understand that what you want is exactly what a thief would want, and the proce of the tools reflects that.

Your mileage may vary - your experience might be different for one reason or another

Google definitely has the ability to do that, but I don't believe it's currently happening. First, it could get them in pretty big trouble in parts of the world that have the concept of consumer protection if anyone ever got ahold of any proof (and Google seems pretty terrible at keeping secrets). Second, have you seen ANY negative review of a phone? Every time I was researching which phone to buy, all the reviews were always very positive and avoided talking about its weak spots.

For example, my old Nokia 5.3 - every review I found, both in English and in my native language, made the phone sound like it is an acceptable phone for its price - nothing terrible and nothing outstanding. I doubt most of them even tried using half the features, because the rear fingerprint scanner was completely unusable (it got a nice 50/50 success rate if the air was dry and I had perfectly clean non-sweaty fingers, and plummeted down to maybe 10% success rate if any of these conditions wasn't met), the touchscreen had ghost touch issues in even slightly humid air (meanwhile other phones work fine even with droplets of water on the screen in light rain), the camera app took 5 - 10 seconds to be able to take a picture from cold start (and Nokia/HMD didn't bother to keep it in memory like other OEMs).

The last point might not sound like much, but it actually made me pretty much stop taking photos because anything that moves at all was simply a no go unless I had quite a bit of time to set up. I took a grand total of 732 photos and 28 videos over the three years I had that phone, which is ridiculously few compared to the over 6k photos I took with my previous Xiaomi phone. (talking about the 8k photos I took in a single year with my current phone would be cheating, literally any phone camera would look like a technical miracle to me after Nokia's shitshow).

(edit: also, after one of the updates, the camera app would often get killed after taking a photo and the photo would be lost - so if you really wanted to take a photo of something, you would often have to try several times until it actually saved it. This was never fixed in the later updates, and the final update even introduced a fun feature where factory reset is now guaranteed to irreversibly brick the device in case you wanted to sell it. This is confirmed by HMD to be a wontfix because the phone is now EOL)

Oh, and the promised updates (it was Android One ffs) were all about a year late and generally very poor quality (also security updates were sparse), but that's not something a reviewer could tell at the time.

Sorry about the rant, my experience just made me really hate HMD/Nokia. The main point is that all the reviews were incredibly positive even for a crappy phone and a brand that doesn't seem to be paying off the reviewers - even tiny local reviewers who couldn't have possibly be on HMD's radar were way too excited about it.

And my last point: we're not talking about reviewers here. This is about "#TeamPixel", Google's "organic" marketing campaign. They get a phone and hype it up, they're not even meant to compare it to other stuff.

It's even worse, they're not getting paid. These shills only get rewarded by getting the phones slightly before general availability (but after actual reviewers)

How is it open source?

How is it not? Open source doesn't mean you have to accept other people's code. And it is perfectly valid to only dump code for every release, even some GNU projects (like GCC) used to work that way. Hell, there's even a book about the two different approaches in open source.

So whatever benefit you were hoping to get from Nvidia's kernel modules being open source probably is not there.

It allowed the actual in-tree nouveau kernel module to take the code for interacting with the GSP firmware to allow changing GPU clock speed - in other words no more being stuck on the lowest possible frequency like with the GTX 10 series cards. Seems like a pretty decent benefit to me.

I know people say that you don't NEED an SD card if you buy the most expensive version and rely heavily on cloud services but it's definitely an intentionally worse customer experience.

Honestly, this depends entirely on the user. My previous phone had 64 GB internal storage and an SD card slot, but I never felt any reason to use it - all I need is enough storage to hold the photos I take until I get home and copy them to a hard disk (which then periodically gets backed up to another hard disk stored at a relative's house). Then I can delete most photos and videos and keep only a few that I think I might want to share.

I'm not saying this is a workflow that everyone would find acceptable, just showing that different people can have vastly different needs. I personally definitely don't need an SD card if I have 20 GB+ available for my photos, and that doesn't seem to be a problem with 128 GB being the baseline for current Pixels.

Of course that doesn't mean I'm going to stop ragging on Google for taking away features with obvious intention of creating problems for a portion of the userbase and selling the solution. There's no reason Pixels can't have an SD card slot at their current price.

Now it feels like I'm limited to Samsung or Google if I want a flagship SoC...

Google's Tensor is definitely not a flagship SoC (Tensor 5 is rumored to change that, but its launch is still far in the future and there's no guarantee it actually lives up to these rumors), so it seems like deciding on the vendor should be pretty easy if you don't mind Samsung's OneUI

By taking away the MicroSD slot to force users towards expensive cloud storage?

No no no, that's what the crappy modem is for

Vista's problem was just the terrible third party drivers and the fact that it was preinstalled on machines it had no business running on. 7 didn't improve much on it (except fixing the UAC prompt so that it no longer made you feel like you're using Linux with misconfigured sudo timeout), but it had the benefit of already having working drivers from Vista and proper hardware capable of running Vista/7.

Zig didn't come to my mind when I was writing my comment and I agree that it's probably a decent option (the only issue I can think of is its somewhat small community, but that's not a technical issue with the language).

My argument against Go and Java is garbage collection - even if Java's infamous GC pause can apparently be worked around with a specialized JVM, I'm pretty sure it still comes at the cost of higher memory usage and wasted CPU cycles compared to some kind of reference counting or Rust's ownership mechanism (not sure about the proper term for that). And higher memory usage is definitely not something I want to see in my browser, they're hungry enough as is.