FWIW, Nokia did develop a pretty good Linux phone back in the day (Maemo/Meego) with Nokia N9 (it even received rave reviews from consumer tech sites like engadget), but it did get killed off as they got absorbed into Microsoft (we all know that didn't age well).
Similarly, Palm Pre, and especially HP Pre 3 was a wonderful WebOS incarnation.
Ubuntu Touch did seem like it had a future, but it was a massive sink for Canonical so it was defunded as well.
The user experience was there on all of these: the apps, not so much.
Ubuntu Touch is not dead though, I use it happily on my primary device for 8 years. It's working like a charm. And waydroid allows you to run APKs, even if some bank apps may not work.
Do you have any source for that claim? That would be a pretty serious security issue even unrelated to any security hardening (eg. on a multi-user system, one user could read out the password from another user — even with desktop usage, second user could be SSHed in).
As a datapoint, everything in /dev/input/* is owned by root:input on my Debian Bookworm install, and my main user is not a member of the "input" group either.
Biggest problem with most security hardening for Linux desktop is that it breaks the natural usage pattern: I store my files by their content, not by their format (eg. I might have a folder for my project containing image files, spreadsheets, FreeCAD files, maybe even some code or TeX/ODF files). If programs are restricted to access the entirety of my $HOME though, there is not much benefit to that protection since that's where my most valuable data is. If they are restricted to per-program folder, I need to start organizing my data differently and unnaturally.
Android mostly does not use the "files" metaphor and basically does exactly that (per-app data): coming up with a security model and file management UX that does both is where the challenge is.
It comes from a history of using mostly trusted application sources like Debian/Ubuntu package archives with manual review being the norm. And few supply chain attacks.
But both Flatpak and Snap offer this new model from the two biggest desktop players in the Linux world: Red Hat and Canonical.
As the sibling comment said though, being an administrator for your own computer (including a phone) does not mean that you will be running untrusted applications as one: on the contrary, if you assume an administrator role and run an untrusted application, naturally, all bets are off. But even as a power user, I'd love to be able to safely run programs I do not necessarily trust, feeding it only data it needs and no more.
Again, Snap/Flatpak provide this model, but we need to see more application authors take them up to ship their software.
Flatpak and Snaps are built to solve this. They do conflict with some expectations from users to be able to play around with things, though, so they do not have the penetration one might want.
They only cover the user-facing app part of the story. The rest of the system needs isolation and safeguards, too, including things like the desktop environment and whatever random daemon.
A solution that's integral to the system and not just loosely taped on is required.
If you are in taller than 95% for men, and reasonably fit, you might need a bigger waistline (think 36 or more), which is still the same length for pants (up to 34) with your socks showing even when standing (depending on your individual proportions), but much wider around hips and legs than you need. I imagine for shorter men, it's the inverse but equally bad.
Some brands will carry slim and extra long trousers, but if I find a model that fits (not all models from the same brand do), I immediatelly buy a few. Otherwise, I try to get tailored stuff, but that's slow and annoying.
For shirts, it's even worse: unless you can find an extra long version, you are going to be wearing a sail and your underpants/ass will pop out when you sit down. But these are easier to get sewed for you as you can just have a single tailor make many of them as needed.
So it's probably easier for median men, but sizes scale exactly the same without regard to actual proportions for simply bigger people.
> I imagine for shorter men, it's the inverse but equally bad.
Not really, as a quite short guy, many shops will offer me to have the clothes fitted, and if not it's pretty trivial to fit them myself. Maybe on the most extreme end of short it's more of an issue, but in general I suspect shortening pants and shirts is signficantly easier than lengthening them.
I'm a 5'5", 110lbs man. I shop at the teens section and get larges. I may not get the trendiest looks, but I get cheaper clothes that fits and looks good on me!
I also tried Stitch Fix, they had a surprising amount of stuff that could fit me (both fashionably and size wise), albeit not as cheap as kids' clothes.
I might grab something like sweatpants from kids section, but for normal clothes I generally prefer a bit more quality. I work remotely so a good pair of pants can last me more than half a decade, so I don't mind buying quality and having it fitted. But yeah, I feel as a short guy there's actually more than plenty of options for us, I never felt that clothes were an issue. Well, there was a shop once that put the smallest sizes on the highest shelf, I don't know if they thought it was funny, but I didn't go back.
That's fair. I work remotely as well and to be honest I just cycle through the same two pants I got from Stitch Fix and a few collared shirts, and some concert merch for more casual outings.
I was speaking more to waistline — I have a 28 inch waist and the smallest I usually find is like 30 or more, so even a belt can't fix that.
Thanks both for the perspective: yeah, even if simply scaled down proportionally, you are left with too long garments that you can fold/shorten, so a much better situation than tall men who can end up looking like cartoon caricatures if dressed with widely available garments.
And don't get me wrong, tall girls (my sister is 6'1") have it even worse.
If we used MacOS throughout the org, and we asked a SW dev team to build inventory tracking software without specifying the OS, I'd squarely put the blame on SW team for building it for Linux or Windows.
(Yes, it should be a blameless culture, but if an obvious assumption like this is broken, someone is intentionally messing with you most likely)
There exists an expected level of context knowledge that is frequently underspecified.
Humans ask each other silly questions all the time: a human confronted with a question like this would either blurb out a bad response like "walk" without thinking before realizing what they are suggesting, or pause and respond with "to get your car washed, you need to get it there so you must drive".
Now, humans, other than not even thinking (which is really similar to how basic LLMs work), can easily fall victim to context too: if your boss, who never pranks you like this, asked you to take his car to a car wash, and asked if you'll walk or drive but to consider the environmental impact, you might get stumped and respond wrong too.
(and if it's flat or downhill, you might even push the car for 50m ;))
If I understood you correctly, this might be an issue if you have multiple strokes (so multiple mins and maxes that you need to stay within) on a row of pixels (think all strokes of an N).
What I'm suggesting is just a way to do less computation to get the same result as before, it doesn't change the correctness of the algorithm (if implemented correctly!). Instead of testing every curve segment at each (x, y) pixel location in the target bitmap, you only need to test those curve segments that overlap (or, more precisely, aren't known not to overlap) that y location, and what I described is a way to do that efficiently.
Black text on white background with no backlight is easier to read. Think black text on paper.
When it comes to computer screens, usually set too bright to accommodate varying ambient lightning conditions throughout the day/year, it's not as simple, and I am not sure there is a study to confirm it.
And even if so, any individual's case might be different.
While you are right about the many misconfigured monitors, the right solution is to set an appropriate brightness and contrast, not to invert the text.
Too bright ambient lighting is better handled with monitor shields, not by increasing the display brightness, especially when the screen is glossy.
Not disagreeing (my external screens have never been set higher than 30% brightness, but they've also always been matte, except a couple instances I had to use Macs for work).
But I am sure none of this has been part of an actual study with screens.
Spot on. The theory of optical balance is well-documented in traditional typography.
The bottleneck I'm tackling isn't the design theory itself, but the computational translation of it: how to convert that human visual intuition into a deterministic set of math rules for dynamic generation.
If you know of any resources that specifically bridge type design heuristics with programmatic geometry, I'd love to check them out.
Similarly, Palm Pre, and especially HP Pre 3 was a wonderful WebOS incarnation.
Ubuntu Touch did seem like it had a future, but it was a massive sink for Canonical so it was defunded as well.
The user experience was there on all of these: the apps, not so much.
reply