Swanye
I got a new phone yesterday; my old one, a perfectly functioning OnePlus 6, was forewarned by my carrier that it would no longer be supported so I needed a new one.
This creates a dilemma (though not the one I'd like to primarily highlight).
I could buy one specific to a carrier; this forces me to get a new one or trade it in, if I ever switch: this either wastes money outright or inadvertently by depriving me keeping the device I paid for to begin with.
Swanye
Agreed, @fullstackthaumaturge, but I always figured I'd use Swanye, once it was in a state enough for use.
That way, I can also dog-food it, in the process.
Matthew Graybosch
@Swanye This should be a blog post, too.
Swanye
or you have to use it because it's the only thing that does what you need but just /barely/ – I can understand why some people say they literally hate technology.
And it doesn't have to be that way. There's no reason we should have to settle for it.
Swanye
is out of your control. The things we could do – lower the degree of effort, increase accessibility for the elderly and the disabled, create new experiences – and how little of all that is explored because someone can make more money more easily by doing nothing.
I started writing this because, after finding the Fediverse, it was practically painful to go back to using propriety social media like Tumblr.
Software that feels more like you're fighting it
Swanye
yet…
As a child, tech. was liberatory for me; I didn't have control over much but give me my computer and I had an environment /I/ could define.
When I discovered GNU/Linux, I didn't know it, at the time, but the software was built with me in mind; there were so many settings because the creators, building for their users, designed them that way.
Using a smartphone reminds me how much that isn't the norm, how much what you get to use and how you use it
Swanye
had supposed as I had missed that OxygenOS was being replaced with ColorOS.
There was one feature I really loved with OOS which was just rendering the battery as a circle; displaying the percentage takes up too much space for my liking and I found the circle easier to read as an indication than the default battery icon.
And now I can't even use that; and I can't pitch it as an idea to ColorOS (easily) because it's propriety.
It's such a small thing; and
Swanye
Alternatively, I could buy an unlocked device but still run afoul of a carrier simply saying, "No; we don't want to allow you to do that." In both scenarios, retaining my freedom from these companies requires quite a bit of money at my disposal.
And this is a problem but one that's much harder to solve, at least at an individual level.
I got, for my replacement phone, a OnePlus Nord N20 because I enjoyed the OxygenOS; I had not done as much research as I
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