I would suggest Plex HTPC on the deck instead, since it works really well with the deck’s gamepad in the normal gaming mode. Touch also works but should probably be considered a last resort IMO

I like having options and the versatility personally 😁

The 3.5mm jack can also be used to record video audio with a much better microphone, attach a HW infrared blaster, or use your device as a crude oscilloscope im a pinch with appropriate software

The more common use case is people with existing wired headphones - there’s honestly no need to cast aside perfectly good cans for no reason. Yes USB-C DACs exist, but IMO that’s a completely manufactured expense and inconvenience, considering almost all phones still have the 3.5mm dac and amplifier components physically present on the mainboard: only now you must purchase a dongle to access the output via passthrough, or purchase a third party dongle that includes its own DAC.

My pain point though is the fact that users with wired headphones are now being forced to induce more usage cycles on a single connector port (which is not always economically repairable on modern devices), and all the avoidable e-waste produced by these things when the unreplaceable, consumable batteries give up the ghost after two years of ownership

Some TL;DR from the Verge’s coverage of this:

• Leadership has connections to CyanogenOS and an ex-Playstation CEO
• Ayaneo is looking into releasing a device with this OS at the end of 2024 (free salt grains here)
• A handful of celluar providers are interested in connected hardware running this OS
• No desktop mode
• Beta releasing in the next 60 days
• Target audience is likely casual gamers - those who may consider a Switch instead of a Deck

The following is my response copied from the original post in the Linux Gaming community:

Sounds very interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling that this company is looking to profit from Valve and the OSS community’s contibutions to Linux gaming without contributing much back.

On the plus side, at least the Box86 developer and a couple others they’ve hired from various Linux gaming projects are now getting paid for their contributions 👍. They also managed to get The Witcher 3 running on an ARM device which is pretty cool.

Playtron hasn’t quite decided just how open source it’ll be, though, and how much it will cater to Linux power gamers versus the next hundred million that Playtron hopes to bring into the fold.

Seems likely that Playtron would follow Valve’s apprach where the client application/shell is proprietary IMO, with the rest of the OS remaining open source.

There’ll be no Linux desktop mode.

Hard pass for me, since the deck is also a partial laptop replacement in my case. The article also mentions wanting power users to debug the alpha version of the OS they’ll be releasing in 2 months or so - not too sure how they expect that to happen if they’re not providing a DE besides their Playtron shell.

I’ll be following the progress of their OS though, will be interesting to see if they’ll aim for Valve’s pretty tight hardware integration or whether they’ll keep things on the more generic side like we see with the current Windows handhelds

Edit: Fix quotes

Third party apps like AirGuard will track all BLE devices and beacons around you, recording the detection location on a map. I just checked mine and it’s full of random iPhones, “Find My” tags, AirPods, and just 1 Tile

It also has a separate risk analysis section for tracking tags whose identifiers may be randomized for privacy

Nice. I currently play Enshrouded on the deck, and the framerate is just barely tolerable, really glad to hear improvements are on their roadmap 👌

Nah, I feel cheated by Fairphone. With the whole FP3 and FP3+, they were leading with the idea that they have settled on the form factor, and then just evolve the separate mainboard/camera/display modules independently

Fair enough. From my perspective it was ambitious thinking anyway: I was actually curious as to how Fairphone got things like the replaceable camera to work (had a peek in their git, it kind of works: they init the old driver and try to turn on the camera, if it returns an error then they load the new driver). The truth is though, a 100% truly modular phone, in the same way a PC is modular, cannot happen without some serious standardization.

Unlike webcams that use USB internally, and laptop displays that use standardized connectors and protocols (like eDP), mobile phones are almost entirely proprietary devices with a finite hardware-limited range of peripherals they can support at a low level.

Qualcomm in particular doesn’t care about backwards compatibility when it comes to their SoCs, meaning the MIPI interface for the phone display on one SoC may be moved to completely different pins on another Qualcomm SoC, or may use a completely different number of pins. The same applies to the camera interface, although the main concern there will be the SoC, as it ultimately determines what resolutions/framerates etc you can achieve within the limits of the camera module.

Those are both solvable problems though. The real issue in my eyes is the lack of a proper BIOS to build a device tree and the other stuff that an OS build would need to be device-agnostic, like closed-source blobs for fingerprint scanners, display brightness control etc. These essentially limit mobile ARM devices to OSes made specifically for that hardware, preventing drop-in upgrades for cameras and the like from being a thing - unless you take Fairphone’s approach and handle it in user space

With the FP4, they scraped all that and just chased whatever was trendy at the time and cranked the “but the environment” marketing.

I agree. To me most of the FP4 marketing material felt a bit like greenwashing, and the excuse for the headphone jack removal was pretty poor considering they also released completely unrepairable earbuds shortly after. The materials used may be fairer, but the pros end there as far as the buds are is concerned.

The FP5 marketing material is not as bad in that regard I think, and the Fairbuds XL should have been what they released originally compared to the unrepairable buds cash grab, even if they offered it discounted (IIRC) with the FP4.

I paid the Fairphone premium knowing that the specs were crap, but that at least in the future I wouldn’t need to upgrade by buying a whole phone. Promising to have software upgrades for 8 years is nice, but it’s worthless if you can not upgrade any of the hardware in the meantime.

For now I will just go buy a “budget premium” Android and pray that the people from frame.work decide to extend into phones as well in the next 2-3 years.

True. I feel unless the software updates are optimized to take advantage of the phone’s hardware as it ages, the performance will fall off a cliff, especially as consumables like the EMMC storage uses up its write cycles, and takes longer to identify suitable areas of its NAND to use for operations.

A Framework phone would also be something I’m interested in, especially if it follows the likes of Project Ara’s design

Ifixit has FP3 displays in stock in my region.

As for a replacement… I don’t think there’s much devices that will fit the bill unfortunately. Closest thing is going to be a Pixel device IMO

I personally use a FP3 too, and can’t see a device that I can upgrade to whenever my FP3 kicks the bucket. I came from a Galaxy S5 and this was the only device available that offered all the same features, except the heart rate sensor, OLED display and ANT+ support (for connecting to Garmin fitness sensors Etc).

Fairphone does make some really odd decisions, like none of their new devices having a headphone jack despite there being a DAC output still available on the mainboard. The main saving grace is that they know how to make a device you can actually own, and historically they were proactive in getting their OEM to implement user requested features into the OS.

I’m not planning to move anywhere tbh.

Mozilla is almost 100% financially dependent on Google right now, if that funding goes away then so will Firefox, the Gecko engine, and likely all the forks. With all the layoffs happening in the industry, we can’t rule out Google shareholders looking elsewhere to cut costs too, such as the massive subsidization of Mozilla. The little we can do is allow Mozilla to find other sources of funding that are optional for users IMO

Yes, stuff like pocket is garbage. But at least Mozilla allow you to turn it off, which is more than can be said for Google: on Android devices manufacturers have to pay a hefty “fee” just to allow users to remove the Google search bar from the launcher.

Regarding AI, mozilla’s memorycache is completely local (runs on the user’s machine) and does not call out to any servers. The new translation feature is the same. The only exception to this that I’m aware of is the AI helper on MDN, but the target audience of that site is already in a position to determine whether that is a useful feature or not.

My personal deck arrives tomorrow - had the lucky opportunity to experience one and that pretty much sold me!

I’ll be playing mostly 2d/isometric games like Project Highrise and Overcrowd, maybe a bit of Palworld too.

Or also possibly discoloration, I had an OLED display on my last phone, and while it was amazing in terms of deep blacks and vivid colors, the screen looked kind of tired and green-ish after 6 years of use… rip Galaxy S5

I never really got burn-in because I mostly ran my display at lower brightness levels, however pretty much everyone else I knew with an OLED just treat it like a normal display left cranked at max brightness 100% - safe to say I’ve seen a few devices with some pretty noticeable burn in text and UI element outlines 😅

My current phone is an LCD, and I may actually end up staying with LCD due to the extra brightness - particularly outside because I now use it as a bicycle computer too.

I’m a little disappointed Steam discontinued the LCD edition of their Deck (besides the 256GB model) but it’s pretty understandable looking at how competitive the handheld gaming PC market is getting, and how much of an improvement the OLED display is for colors, HDR, and battery life in particular

Set the battery usage of your essential apps to Unrestricted and your persistence problem is solved

The background app battery usage feature (otherwise known as “allow background activity”, “battery care”, or “Adaptive battery”) is a different feature to what I’m talking about here sadly AFAICT, and doesn’t affect the relative importance weight of apps when Android’s memory management is looking for things to kill.

The only thing that the background app battery usage restriction does is stop “inactive” apps from running in the background if they are using up a lot of CPU time, and if the app is not being interacted with frequently: either directly by the user, indirectly via Google Cloud Messaging, or by another app on the device. From what I can tell, it’s completely separate to Android’s memory management and solely exists to extend battery life.

Android has vastly improved its security by cutting off the workarounds shady (and legit) apps have used to persist.

Shady apps already persist using Google (Firebase) Cloud Messaging, and this change does not impact them. Even if they are killed by the separate background battery app usage feature, a simple push message typically brings these back.

The hacky workarounds you speak of to maintain persistence on A14 should be killed off to improve everyone’s privacy.

I wouldn’t exactly categorize this as a hacky workaround, since it follows the documented relative app importance weights used by Android’s memory management. Users can even bypass this themselves by swiping on the persistent notification, and hiding those types of app notifications.

If anything IMO it forces apps to be less transparent about their activity, since they cannot communicate to the user that they are running

If I’m wrong about the background battery app feature’s seemingly lack of impact on Android’s memory management please do let me know - I’ve yet to come across anything suggesting it does ☹️

Since Android 10 the OS has really gone downhill IMO.

IIRC they have also been ripping out workarounds that people use to keep their apps open, so expect things like Syncthing/OpenVPN/Element/Termux etc to no longer be able to survive in the background - I believe the non dismissable notifications are a part of that too. To me this also means apps using their own push services are now being forced into a position where they’ll need to consider Google Cloud Messaging.

The OpenVPN one is pretty poor because unless you have it set to be always-on, Android can kill it freely now, then completely bypass your VPN preference because “it’s not working”

These new changes in A14 kind of show everything wrong with having an ad company in charge of a mobile OS

I’m going to be completely honest - I have no idea what other word can be used in its place to convey what it means in this context.

The intended audience will know that your post didn’t intend to offend IMO

Glad I picked up Assetto Corsa instead. That sim is 11 years old and has amazing graphics, a thriving community, and isn’t “always online”… GTS is only 6 years old in comparison.

I think GTS and FMS are going to eventually be a struggle to sell once people catch on to the fact that these franchises are being turned into very expensive recurring game subscriptions, which is a shame given how much these types of games have been decreasing in popularity since the peak of the early 2000s

It’s Valve’s IP and assets being utilized at the end of the day sadly, and looking at the last time they got involved with Nintendo, as well as Nintendo’s hatred towards emulation and reverse engineering, I wouldn’t be surprised if Valve’s legal team considered the options before issuing a C&D to the two N64 fan projects.

From Nintendo’s perspective these are both unlicensed homebrew, implicitly allowed by the IP owner Valve… who they were in legal correspondence to fairly recently. It would be very unwise for Valve to let this slide given the circumstances, although admittedly it is not a great outcome at all

Mini USB has to be one of the most robust connectors I’ve used tbh. All my original cables from over a decade ago still work flawlessly, as well as the ports on the devices housing them.

As for Micro USB… not great. I hope USB-C is more durable, so far I haven’t had any issues with ports going bad that wasn’t down to some ultra cheap adapter or cable

I’ve used Florisboard on my device for a few years now, and completely shocked at how barebones the stock Android and Samsung keyboards are…

It can undo, redo, cut, paste, select all, view/insert clipboard history, clear clipboard, and swipe to move the cursor within text. Standard stuff like voice input and swipe typing are here too.

Admittedly it’s not perfect, and probably not ideal for most casual users in its current state, but I just can’t go back to a standard keyboard after using this feature rich one for so long