aMockTie

I hope the launch goes well, I’ll certainly give it a try.

I didn’t find anything wrong with it on Mac, it was a perfectly cromulent browser. And anything that can help dethrone the chrome monopoly is a win in my book.

I’ve used it on both macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and iOS.

On macOS it’s been fine, but nothing about it was unique or beneficial enough to make me switch to it as my default browser. I imagine the experience on Linux will be similar.

On iOS, I’ve been daily driving it for almost exactly a year. At first it was very buggy, and I once lost all of my opened tabs. But for the past 6-8 months it has been very solid, and is the only browser on iOS that allows me to use both ad and sponsor block plug-ins to my knowledge. Tab groups are also fantastic and easy to manage.

Already done!

LoRa is a low power radio communication protocol that is very useful for warehouse and farming equipment, among many other things. I currently use ESP32s for GPIO, LoRa, and Wifi, and occasionally FPGAs for various tasks. But ad-hoc testing and diagnosis can be a pain for these devices, requiring multiple different dongles, power adapters, and converters.

If I can consolidate 75% of that gear into a single, handheld device, it will easily pay for itself in productivity gains.

I already have a work laptop running Linux, but it doesn’t support GPIO or LoRa without additional dongles/accessories. Working on industrial equipment while occasionally in remote locations, makes this device appealing to me specifically.

I’m also fortunate to have my employer willing to foot the bill, especially when they can also see the utility of this device in our line of work.

If you don’t work in this specific niche, your mileage will obviously vary.

I personally can’t say that I agree, especially in current economic conditions.

Many people do buy the shiny new things regularly, but I would argue that most people can’t afford that luxury and try to get the most life out of what they own.

On a separate note: I can’t speak to Linux phones, digital music gadgets, or AI hardware, but raspberry pis and flipper zeros on the second hand market are absolutely not cheap, and regularly sell for MSRP of new devices.

I’m sorry to hear that you’ve struggled to find regular use of those 20 random things, but that doesn’t mean your experience is representative of most people.

Having a dedicated handheld device with the features of a smartphone, running Linux natively (not just android), and also GPIO and LoRa are what make this especially appealing to me. Everything being open source brings this from “I’ll probably buy this” to “shut up and take my money” for me personally.

Sure, I could probably get accessories to achieve the same thing with my work phone. But if something catastrophic happens and the phone is damaged, I’m having a very bad day. Damaging a $300-400 device sucks, but I can still call my boss and ask him to order a replacement and receive calls from customers at the end of the day.

Of course these specific benefits are unique to me and my line of work. I also thankfully have a boss who trusts my judgment when purchasing new tools and tech, and a budget that can easily accommodate this kind of investment and risk.

I don’t need it… I don’t need it… I don’t need it… I don’t need it…

(M.2/NVMe, LTE and 5G, GPIO)

I don’t…

(Planned support for LoRa, Meshtastic, and FPGAs)

I…

(Everything open source, useful for me at work, employer will pay for)

Sold!

It doesn’t seem to be especially performant for games based on the videos they’ve put out, but a solid handheld with these specific features, and separate from my mission critical work android phone will hopefully be very useful.

VB.NET app that was installed on every employees computer to capture time sheets. Required VPN access so it could talk to the accounting DB using raw queries, zero input validation, and it used a pirated library for the time input grid control.

The IT staff who would install the program on all new machines (it didn’t work with their imaging system) had a script to suppress the message requesting a paid license. There was nothing special about this control, it was basically a rip off of built in winforms controls.

Source code was long lost, but reverse engineering and decompiling CIL/MSIL code is thankfully relatively straightforward.