Comic books. And those weird bathroom readers.

stronger products need less advertising, so an over-advertised product is likely inferior.

syncthing is the easy option if you have some files you always want to have on both. if you just want to access your desktop files from your phone, I recommend Cx File Explorer for Android, it’s a file browser that supports various network file share protocols including Samba and SFTP.

I’m impressed that you found a way to give an answer less helpful than ‘just google it.’ Where do you think chatgpt (and google) get their knowledge?? Threads like this one.

I would avoid the .us domain unless you have a good spam filter. If you register with .us, you get put on a public list, and you get calls from people begging you to hire them to design your website.

I dont. Its honestly not great. I’d rather that effort went to preserving and repairing the existing tools of the free and open web – the old protocols are extensible. Imagine if we had an RSS client with a “reblog” feature!

“Federation” adds overhead and honestly creates as many problems as it solves. It’s not a selling point, its a price tag.

ah, yeah, if you have an android game without built-in controller support then you’re out of luck right now, sorry.

Retroarch and Steam Link both have android apps and support controller mapping, but I don’t know of any OS-level tools.

I finally hacked my 3ds, using the tools at https://3ds.hacks.guide. It was surprisingly easy, and gives you access to

• homebrew!
• emulators!
• online play for most games! (see: Pretendo Network)
• custom home screen themes!

I waited until Nintendo shut down their servers 'cause I was worried about bans, but now there’s no excuse. Go liberate your 3ds, it takes less than an hour.

Tra-la-la!

Starting anything from scratch is a huge risk these days. At best you’ll have something like the python 2 -> 3 rewrite overhaul (leaving scraps of legacy code all over the place), at worst you’ll have something like gnome/kde (where the community schisms rather than adopting a new standard). I would say that most of the time, there are only two ways to get a new standard to reach mass adoption.

1. Retrofit everything. Extend old APIs where possible. Build your new layer on top of https, or javascript, or ascii, or something else that already has widespread adoption. Make a clear upgrade path for old users, but maintain compatibility for as long as possible.

2. Buy 99% of the market and declare yourself king (cough cough chromium).

optional autocomplete is a nice-to-have, eager autocomplete is a pain in the ass. as long as it only completes when I ask it to, I don’t mind.

My experience with pacman was via rwfus on steam deck. I was coming in as someone with experience with apt, npm, pip, even choco and winget on windows. My expectation from pretty much every other command line tool is that commands are verbs, flags are adverbs. So having to install with “pacman -S” (or is it “pacman -Sy”?) just feels unnecessarily cryptic. Same with “nix-env -iA”. I understand that there are some clever internals going on under the hood, but you can have clever internals and sane defaults. For instance, “npm install foo” both downloads the package to node_modules and updates package.json for me, so I can see what change was made to my environment. Nix should do that.

I’ve also seen it as pacman -Sy and pacman -Syu and so on. I really just think “install” should be a subcommand, not a flag. That’s really my only issue I guess, I’ve only ever used pacman via rwfus on steam deck so maybe my usability problem is with that.

pacman and nix are both really neat conceptually but they both fail at the most obvious usability test, which is “I just want to install a package”; its like exiting vim all over again.

edit: yes, I know you can set an alias to pacman -Sy or whatever, but if you need to set up an alias for a command to be usable, then I can’t in good faith recommend that OS to anyone, and I don’t want to use an OS I wouldn’t recommend to others.

If you’re gonna dismiss it like that then I’d love to hear what your pain points are. What’s so bad about containers for multi-platform applications?

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Device automation is neat, but I mean more like data processing, web APIs, python stuff.

Hrm; I use the Minimalist Home phone screen so I have no widgets; is there a way to launch scripts from a regular app?

A built-in scripting language. The TI-83 line of calculators have an app programming language that requires you to side-load code from another computer, but they also have TI-BASIC, which allows you to write a wide variety of scripts right on the calculator itself. This should be standard on all ‘smart’ devices. It’s so stupid to have gigahertz of computing power in your pocket and not be able to do anything without writing the app on another machine.

I know Termux for Android exists and that’s a good start, but I’d like to see something baked right into the OS that has access to all my device’s cool sensors and gizmos. The camera, the microphone, the aux port, the usb port, the accelerometer, the bluetooth antenna… all of those things should be exposed to the user. This would be a really good use case for ‘visual’ programming ala Scratch, since you could assemble a script right from a touch screen instead of having to plug in a keyboard.