This can also be practical in places where the police can force you to unlock your phone with biometrics but not with the PIN.
Ever since I’ve seen the police here force people to delete the videos of them abusing citizens, I have been very wary of biometric identification.
So far my ‘emergency’ procedure would be to restart my phone, as it’s asking for a PIN after a reboot.
AFAIK Kodi can use pulseaudio and probably pipewire. I use Kodi too on those computers and I just leave it to use the default PA device that I’ve set. I switch the default devices with pasystray.
What’s usually breaking for me is paprefs. Every so often after an upgrade, the options are greyed out and I can’t share or access my devices over the network.
I never tried to setup simultaneous output before because I just switch from device one to another, but I just enabled it in paprefs and it’s working too.
I never noticed any latency when I’m not using bluetooth. And no, the devices do not speak to each other. For PA/pipewire, this is just an audio sink as any other.
There is latency when using bluetooth but this is pretty standard. It just doesn’t increase (or not noticeably) when streamed to another computer.
Windows is doing all this. The computer does not.
After having a TCL smart TV that constantly smells like burning plastic, even a year after using it, I’m not sure I would want another of their product in my home.
But with a dead battery you have to haul it plis your stuff, which was supposed to be there to make it easier in the first place.
And by fast charge, I mean like an electric car, that can fully cjarge in about 15 to 20 minutes instead of hours.
I pull my inflatable kayak with a bike trailer and thought about an ebike but then, I also do touring and the places I go to are beyond battery life. For example this weekend I’m cycling 90 km to my camp site and there’s no electricity. And I need to get back.
And the second issue with this is that AFAIK there’s no fast charging on most ebikes. So if I need to stop somewhere to charge it when the battery will be dead after 75 km, it will take an eternity to charge.
So in the end, for my case, as someone cycling a few thousand kilometres a year, for “longer distances”, it’s wouldn’t be very practical.
Bah. I’ve been using Linux for 25 years, started with a derivative of Slackware, then used Slackware for about a decade, and switched to Debian. I used 5.25" floppies and manually set IRQs so I’m quite comfortable with Debian and tinkering in general.
For friends and family I prefer LMDE. Snap packages can go to hell.
Audio over the network is a feature of pulseaudio/pipewire from a module aptly named “module-simple-protocol”, and as simple as it is to make it work on Linux (when it works), it’s unfortunately not as easy on other platforms. Technically speaking, it’s possible to do that on Android with an app called “Simple Protocol Player” but it’s apparently very glitchy and you’re going to need some patience for the setup. It’s from someone that wanted to stream audio from an HTPC with Ubuntu to an Android phone, but the author states that it’s pretty buggy. Here’s the link to their blog: https://kaytat.com/blog/?page_id=301
So the short answer is unfortunately “no”, unless you want to practice your patience on a project.
Hehe, I knew that if I wanted stability I had to stay on Slackware! That’s the price we have to pay to use a bleeding edge distro like Debian where everything is fast paced. 😏
When it works (!), it’s one of the reasons I brag to my tech friends about Linux, and why I switched to Linux many many years ago. In fact, it was when Esound was a thing. But once in a while it stops working after an upgrade or a dist-upgrade, and I have to spend time trying to fix it.
I like to joke around with tech minded friends that Windows keeps breaking with every updates, but then I have to spend an hour finding out why my sinks disappeared after an upgrade, and I’m forced to realize that… sigh… these things happen with Linux too.
Mainly because of bluetooth headphones with multiple computers. That way they are paired to only one computer and I can use them with other computers at the same time. Just right click on paprefs system tray icon, change the sink and the audio is sent somewhere else. I know it’s now possible to have bluetooth headphones that have multiple connections but it wasn’t the case a few years ago and I still find it much more useful this way.
But it’s also useful when I have my laptop near my main computer and want to use its much better speakers instead of the crappy ones on the laptop. Right click, select another sink, and that’s it.
It’s just nice to have the option to send the audio from one computer to another. It’s a shame that it’s apparently a niche thing.
Alternatively,
Setting up an ad blocker for a whole device often requires root. I gave up with my new phone and just have ublock origin on Firefox but that’s the point. I can’t easily install something that will modify the DNS because I have no admin access on my phone.
That’s why I also do give up on certain apps. For example I don’t like the ads in Boost so I stopped using it. Sometimes I pay for the version of an app without ads. This doesn’t happen on Linux.
Also being heavily pushed towards apps for websites like YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook… Lemmy, Mastodon… They are all “best experienced” in apps, and most of them will probably try to push you ads or make you pay.
Again, I’m relatively tech savvy so I can find other ways, but it’s still annoying and disappointing to have to constantly find ways around the system. It doesn’t happen in Linux.
Android is the enshittification of Linux.
Free software. Try to use apt on Android, or run software that you can use on a desktop. And no ads in every app.
Root access, that is, being admim of your own device.
Being able to access the file system and support for different types. For example Android doesn’t support NTFS and needs FAT. Plugging a simple USB drive has mixed results.
This is from the top of my head. I use both but I really don’t like how Android is locked down and so limited, even for power users. I really wish I could have a real “pocket computer” instead of this thing that feeds me ads.
Many many years ago, it’s one of the things that made me switch to Linux. Moving and renaming files while using them was kind of a game changer.
I’m using Android but I can give you a few personal examples on why I still prefer mobile websites to apps.
The place where I take weather has a shitty app full of ads and always sending notifications. They don’t have PWA offered on their site but just going through a browser instead of the app is significantly better.
YouTube’s app is also full of ads. So I use the mobile website in Firefox with uBlock Origin.
Again with awful apps full of ads. Twitter is also much more tolerable through the mobile website. There’s no autoplay on FF and again, ads blocked.
I still use IRC and my client is web based, so that I can see pictures and videos in my chats. The web based IRC client (The Lounge) offers PWA and it’s very nice to have the thing in a “clean” browser.
Again, I don’t use Apple for reasons like this, but Firefox is already pretty bad with PWA and having those possibilities mangled or removed wouldn’t be acceptable to me.
Maybe you don’t use a browser on mobile and just do everything through terrible apps. Maybe most people do the same. But if you don’t use it, why do you care if those using it want to retain the possibility to do so?
I personally don’t watch TV so nobody watches TV anymore, right?
The poor.
For the nostalgic, there is Qmmp that looks and behave like XMMS/Winamp and is still maintained.
More like it doesn’t want to get the money to maintain those infrastructure by going into further debt.
I’m not following German politics very closely but the article mentions that this restriction is in their constitution.
There was something in that genre in my province decades ago when a government dedicated itself to ‘zero deficit’ by cutting on infrastructure maintenance for many years. A bridge eventually fell. Classic story. It seems like a common thing.