This. If it was as great as promised it would also work if done legally.

A big one for me is choice of apps. Only apps made for Android Auto are available, and that’s not a lot. Especially pretty much nothing from F-Droid. Open source apps for Android Auto are very limited.

Sideloading is not a thing for Android Auto either. So I can’t even choose to work around the limitations as I can on the phone itself.

The ancient Android Assistant sucks. It constantly doesn’t understand what I ask it and so far I haven’t figured out when exactly it can do a google search for me and when not. Especially considering how far LLMs have come in terms of answering simple questions (e.g. if a name comes up in a podcast and I want to know a little bit of background information to that person). And when they finally add LLM support it will be Gemini only with no choice past that.

Then there’s stupid design decisions in apps, e.g. that Google Maps doesn’t show GPS speed when in Android Auto mode. I also hate that Google Maps decided in an update a year or so ago that speed camera warnings (which are illegal in some of the countries I frequently drive in) can not only not be disabled but are so important that they need to take up half the screen and hide the navigation directions while they are up. This is especially crappy when I come up to a busy highway intersection where I have to get off and suddenly there’s no navigation on my screen but a stupid warning I don’t care about because I obey speedlimits anyway.

And lastly (that’s likely down to the implementation in my car or my phone), there’s constant connection issues.

It’s so painful, because it could really be good. But they went out of their way to make it suck…

Was going to say this. Second hand phones don’t give money to corporations (except via usage, of course).

Now I want to see the plug.

That’s generally the thing with decisions that don’t matter much. If one option is much better, there is no discussion.

But if the benefits of either option are marginal at best, you get tons of discussion and no decision.

For example, the EU decided almost a decade ago that they would get rid of daylight saving time, and everyone quickly agreed that DST sucks, mostly because changing the clocks sucks.

Since then, the whole EU has been arguing about whether to keep summer time or winter time, even though that matters so little that we have been using both of them for decades. A week after switching DST, nobody even notices the time shift.

That’s why at work if a discussion goes on for too long I usually point out that that’s the case because all options are almost equally as good and thus we should just pick a random one instead of continuing to waste time discussing in circles.

No, that’s not the point of a platform like Lemmy, because you can do exactly that on a platform like Reddit too.

And stylizing fragmentation as something desireable is a pretty bad take.

In general, I really don’t like that style of argument. It’s like “No, you are not allowed to bring up negative points that can be improved, because you can instead just DIY the whole thing.”

Would you say the same when someone complains about an issue they have with their car? “If you don’t like your car’s entertainment system, you know, you could just build a car from scratch.”

It’s a stupid argument used by people who can’t stomach the concept that the tech thing they base their identity on isn’t seen as absolutely perfect by everyone.

Add to that that some major instances have disabled downvoting, which actively disables people’s ability to filter stuff like that by voting.

When you know which xkcd it is before you click it…

Wayland has been around for many many many many more years than Wayland has been good enough to use. I think that’s about it.

I think that’s mostly it. When Wayland was first released, it was barely in an alpha state, with many major use cases not being supported at all. Since Wayland is a deep system component, it requires apps to adjust to them, and in the beginning this hadn’t happened at all so far, so really nothing worked.

And this didn’t change over night. That easily took a decade, and still today some use cases still don’t work well (e.g. accessibility/screen reader compatibility).

Doesn’t change the fact that they are in charge of dictating the choice of OS.

Until you accidentally delete the taskbar panel.

Yeah, that’s rather obscure hardware. I can imagine that you need some drivers for that.

Btw, while this dialog asked for a floppy, it actually used the regular file system, so a CD or even an USB drive worked as well.

Try Reddit or Stackoverflow for a contrasting experience.

I don’t miss that time. Especially on laptops that weren’t supported by the manufacturer and you had to hunt for individual drivers.

Today that only happens if you run Linux and have an Nvidia card. Especially one that’s not supported by the newest driver version anymore.

I skipped 2000, but I installed XP a lot of times and I never had to insert a floppy. IDE and SATA drivers were preloaded, maybe you had some really weird storage system?

Not exactly. The GUI variant of the updater that you tried also didn’t work well.

CLI mostly works ok (unless a bug causes your DE to be uninstalled if you try to install steam), but GUI is very hit-and-miss.

Just the other day I had a bug in XFCE where I want to scale up the contents of the screen. So I use the GUI display config tool, set the scale to 0.5 (because for some reason they scale the wrong way round, <1 enlarges, >2 makes things smaller). It does work, the display gets scaled up.

After I’m done I want to scale back down and the GUI display config tool just locks up on startup and only shows a blank window with a few blank dropdowns.

A bit of googleing later I found the config file where I can change it back and once I changed the scaling to 1 again, the GUI tool worked again.

I’ve been using Linux exclusively for many years now, but without google I couldn’t have fixed that.

May I remind you that 20 years ago was actually 2005? What you are referring to was more like 30 years ago.

Asking for Linux help online is still just as toxic and useless as 20 years ago.

Yeah, that’s the second option.