Finding a BifL smartphone

activistPnk@slrpnk.net · edit-2 1 month ago

Finding a BifL smartphone

unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 months ago

The real answer is giving up on the concept of phones sadly. Laptop for life is much more realistic.

activistPnk@slrpnk.net · edit-2 2 months ago

I’m with you there. I have defunded phones for sure and minimized the role of phones. I don’t even use smartphones as phones (no SIM chip). I think the only absolutely essential use case for me is to run OSMand (navigation) because it’s far too impractical to get a paper map for every city I set foot in.

OSMand is a resource hog. Crashes chronically when overworked. So maintaining OSMand seems to require keeping pace to some extent. Certainly the FOSS platforms will at least enable a phone to stay in play as long as possible – or so I hope.

solrize@lemmy.world · edit-2 2 months ago

You could try Organic Maps as an alternative to OsmAnd though it’s not so great either.

The other demand that makes BIFL phones and even laptops difficult is web browsing, because of the mutually recursive escalation of web sites’ and browsers’ appetites for machine resources. A 2005 laptop that tops out at 512mb of ram simply can’t run browsers needed to use the modern web. I’m still using a Thinkpad X220 from 2011 with 4gb of ram, but I have older ones that are no longer viable because of memory and CPU limitations.

Added: video codecs (if you want to watch youtube) are another area where old cpu’s can’t keep up, and the reasons for that are somewhat more valid than web bloat. The new codecs really do have better video quality at a given bit rate, in exchange for the increased cpu cycles.

activistPnk@slrpnk.net · edit-2 2 months ago

I had some immediate objection to Organic Maps when I first heard of them. Was their website Cloudflared previously? ATM I don’t see what my issue with them was. Superficially they look like a decent 2nd option (which I say having not tried their software yet).

The other demand that makes BIFL phones and even laptops difficult is web browsing,

Web browsing is such a shit-show even with the latest Debian on a PC that I have almost entirely rejected the idea of browsing from a smartphone. I simply will not invest 1 penny of money or 1 minute of my time chasing garbage services with a garbage device. There have been rare moments where “Privacy Browser” on my old AOS5 phone manages to reach and render a webpage but I have mostly given up on that idea. Even captive portals are a shit-show so I usually cannot connect to public wifi. Fuck it… it wasn’t meant to be.

Added: video codecs (if you want to watch youtube) are another area where old cpu’s can’t keep up,

I’m on the edge of scrapping Youtube altogether because of Google’s hostile treatment toward Tor users and simultaneous relentless attacks on Invideous nodes. But up until a couple months ago I could usually fetch a video via Invidious and store locally. My 2008 Thinkpad has been able to handle every video fine so far. I have the Newpipe app on the phone but I’m not really driven to use the phone for YT videos.

solrize@lemmy.world · 2 months ago

Browsing on a phone or with Debian works ok for me with Firefox, though I don’t like Firefox that much.

I found Organic Maps preferable to OsmAnd but neither are that great. It should be possible to do something reasonable without a lot of CPU demands, given how dedicated GPS map navigation devices existed ih the early 2000s.

Yes if you ditch Youtube and anything else that requires modern codecs, that solves another issue. I’ve found Newpipe has broken a few times but it usually works, so that is what I use.

Modern apps and games (requiring GPU even) are another story, but let’s assume you don’t want to run them.

This leaves the question: if you want a BIFL smart phone but you don’t want to make phone calls with it, don’t want to run a web browser, and don’t want to watch videos on it, what DO you want it to do?

Chewie@slrpnk.net · 2 months ago

What are peoples’ issue with Organic Maps? (seriously - it would be interesting to know) I use it all the time, and it’s great. Some of the routes are sub-optimal, but not often. Finally you can search with postcodes (that has been a problem in the past).

Maybe it’s not perfect, but I only ever have to default to google maps when someone sends me a crappy shortened link to something. Once I get the actual address, i can swap back to Organic Maps. It used to eat battery on my Fairphone 2, but I had other problems with that phone too!. I love it, and the offline maps are perfect for when I am travelling.

solrize@lemmy.world · edit-2 2 months ago

I get terrible (not “suboptimal” but genuinely ridiculous) routes enough of the time to call the program not fully working. There is also a thing where if there are two routes of roughly equal quality, instead of choosing one and sticking to it, OM will keep trying to switch between them, asking for a lot of crazy U-turns. The POI search is also lame: if you enter “McDonalds” and there are 10 of them in the area, it shows them in some weird random order instead of nearest first.

I do use OM in preference to Google Maps because privacy and offline etc., but it is only usable maybe 75% of the time. If I’m in a hurry or otherwise unwilling to make some wrong turns, or if OM messes up, I end up using Google. Google simply works a lot better. Ugh.

It would also be nice if OM’s voice directions included street names, and that map updates didn’t download entire new maps, but those are features to be engineered. Still, the California map data is over 1GB all by itself, that has to be re-downloaded once a month or so. De Lorme Street Map in the Windows 95 era fit all the US streets on a CD-ROM (700MB) so while OSM data might be richer, there’s still a bunch of bloat going on. And streets don’t change that often, so the monthly update should be tiny compared to the initial download.

Chewie@slrpnk.net · 2 months ago

I get terrible (not “suboptimal” but genuinely ridiculous) routes enough of the time to call the program not fully working. There is also a thing where if there are two routes of roughly equal quality, instead of choosing one and sticking to it, OM will keep trying to switch between them, asking for a lot of crazy U-turns. The POI search is also lame: if you

That’s weird, I only see 1 route choice when I use it.

enter “McDonalds” and there are 10 of them in the area, it shows them in some weird random order instead of nearest first.

True, that is a bit annoying, although it’s getting better, if you move the viewport over the area you want to search on (if you’re not there already), it seems to try and show local stuff first.

I do use OM in preference to Google Maps because privacy and offline etc., but it is only usable maybe 75% of the time. If I’m in a hurry or otherwise unwilling to make some wrong turns, or if OM messes up, I end up using Google. Google simply works a lot better. Ugh.

That’s a shame. It’s pretty good where I live, and I can find most things I need to travel to, although yes, the index could be better.

It would also be nice if OM’s voice directions included street names, and that map updates didn’t download entire new maps, but those are features to be engineered. Still, the California map data is over 1GB all by itself, that has to be re-downloaded once a month or so. De Lorme Street Map in the Windows 95 era fit all the US streets on a CD-ROM (700MB) so while OSM data might be richer, there’s still a bunch of bloat going on. And streets don’t change that often, so the monthly update should be tiny compared to the initial download.

Fair enough. I’m in the UK, and both here and in Europe, sub-country areas are available for download, which helps. Maybe the streets don’t change often, but load of POIs change from one month to the next. This is just 1 day of changes from https://osmstats.neis-one.org/?item=countries:

A lot of it will be “trivial” metadata i’m sure, but still, there’s quite a lot of change going on!

solrize@lemmy.world · 2 months ago

I don’t mean OM gives me a choice of routes. Rather, say there are two reasonable ways to reach the destination. OM chooses route A, says turn right, ok fine, I turn right. Then after a few seconds, OM changes its mind and wants route B instead. So it says take a U turn and go this other way, oops! But if you do that, it changes its mind AGAIN, and you end up going in circles.

Re downloading a subset of the maps: yes I can do that, but then I have to predict which ones I’ll need, just another thing to remember. I have all the California maps installed so that if I suddenly decide to drive to Barstow or something, I don’t have to figure out which counties I’ll traverse, since they are all already downloaded. What I really want is to download ALL the maps, the whole world, might be 50GB or whatever, but that’s ok, we can buy 2TB microSD cards now. If that download was a one-time event with occasional small updates I could deal with it, but I don’t want to do the whole thing every cycle.

Anyway, as a development snapshot I guess OM is pretty nice, but I can’t call it a finished product,