Android has done a lot of great desktop windowing work. For a while stuff like boringdroid has been great, its supurbe to see android accept this kind of usage more.

I want a phone that stops falling out of my hands man…

This is not traditional VRR how we think of it. VRR how we think of it is changing the “frame rate” of the monitor to better suit the frame pacing of the received frames, this is not whats happening here. This is how things like freesync works. It takes your device framerate, say 60fps, and slows it down to better match the frame pacing of the content, say 48fps. Now the monitor doesn’t physically change states or anything, it just allows flexible updating to match the frame pacing.

You don;t get this with this adaptive refresh rate method

Here you are effectively getting a noop every refresh cycle it doesn’t need. It’s still good, but not as good as what most people think of as VRR (Freesync/vesa adaptivesync, gsync etc.). You are limited to the steps your display can output. For this to be useful you require a high refreshrate display like 120hz because each application needs to align with a frame refresh.

IE. say you have a 24fps video, the display won’t change it’s frame pacing, but rather you get a noop every 4 frames and a refresh, (24 * 5). Now assume you have a 90hz display, 24fps has no solid divisor in 90fps, so you have to either wait for sync, or get tearing. The first one leads to judder (which can probably be mitigated using offset sync waits?) the second one is well, tearing.

says “true variable refresh rate” support, is not true variable refresh rate support…

Well thats click bait and a half

I have one in a box somewhere, I should pull it out again, but I can’t get over how little storage it has

Don’t get me wrong. I love Aurora store. I love what they do and I donated a couple all the counts that I no longer use to them. But that does not mean I believe that this move is correct at all in any way.

Putting aside the extremely slippery slope of forcing Google to allow app stores on their store, You have actually rather significant security issues too because of the catalog.

This means any app store that is now can now download the apps, patch them with great features or malicious features and serve them as legitimate.

Security has already been such a massive headache because no matter what you do, you just can’t stop people from shooting themselves in the foot. But Android, that’s their target market and they need to do their best. And this is going to be such a massive issue. Now they did say individual apps can opt out but quite frankly I doubt many are going to unless their applications like banking apps which are almost definitely going to because attestation is extremely important for stuff like that.

Pardon me if I said anything that doesn’t make sense, I am using Speech to text.

I don’t agree with this. Anybody can send a link right to the APK or even a QR code. The Epic Game Store could have a nice button right there that says install it and boom, you’re installed and off to the races. And unless you’re doing that Samsung bullshit, it’ll just work on the vast majority of devices after you click one pop-up box.

I honestly don’t know anybody who couldn’t do that. Unless it is Samsung because Samsung does have that new bullshit.

It’s one thing because you have to know about fdroid. You have to go explicitly look for fdroid, someone and so forth. But if you’re epic and you’re trying to push people to your game store, you’re going to have it right on your front page.

Google will have to distribute rival third-party app stores within Google Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually.

what the fuck. I don’t like google, I run fully Foss, and only recently installed microG, but I don’t agree with this garbage.

It’s easy enough to install any third party appstore. I don’t agree with this at all.

*code blocks are broken and have a fairly degraded UI *accounts and settings are hidden behind a show accounts that’s terrible to reach with one hand. *the new sidebar is also terrible to use with one hand *settings is also hidden behind show accounts.

these are the issues I remember off hand, I already deleted the app

Try it at the other day. Not gonna lie, it seems like a total downgrade versus K9. I’ll not be upgrading.

at the very least, you can easily install some TV oriented apps.

Finally, a phone I can actually read!

Do we really need to be so constantly cringy about it? Yes, custom ROMs are great. I run one. Lots of other people run one. They’re great. Don’t get me wrong. But you have to realize most people simply don’t care for one, Most vendors also don’t really support their phones well under GSI, so things like camera and stuff like that hardly ever work properly.

In a lot of cases, it is quite a bit of work to get a custom rom flashed and have it working well. The technological skill gap between most people who will run an Android phone and even enthusiasts who will so much as think about installing a custom ROM is so massive that you may as well be a hacker to them.

I use it a lot, I keep a little dock with me and a small bluetooth mouse and keyboard, when I’m typing on the go, I can just plug in when I come home and everything is there.

exact same thing with my emulators. I can also chroot into arch and get a full blown desktop environment if needed

this would be… somewhat possible, you can’t really boot GSI images, however the folk at BlissOS do have an android generic project that makes porting custom roms to x86 a lot easier. By porting android images to generic x86, we can serve them as temporary VMs, just like https://distrosea.com/ (I’ve actually been thinking about doing something like this for bliss specifically but funding says no lol).

This is contingent on roms being ported to x86 though, off the top of my head there are images floating around for

• Bliss (Obviously)
• Lineage OS,
• Vanilla AOSP,

and specific verisons of

• Project sakura (A11 iirc)
• CarbonROM A10
• Bootleggers A10
• RessurectionRemix
• Pixel Experience
• Dirty Unicorns
• Tesla

I believe there are also images of LMODroid and Calyx floating around… somewhere

Exactly that. While most apps do offer X86 versions, there are some that don’t. Every now and then you will come across an app or two that doesn’t.

I wont say there is no jank, there is certainly a degree of it, particularly around arm apps due to needing libhoudini or libndk for arm translation (some games, not all with pick these up as “emulators” and block you or simply not work on a couple games) but generally most arm apps work fine. if you are living with a fully x86 ecosystem like myself, I have zero complaints, everything works fine and dandy. that I myself have tested. but ofc, bugs do exist and we try to help out as much as we can on the bliss telegram or matrix as it is an actively developed project.

It only really works well with 2 in 1 machines that have decentish linux support. there are specific builds for some surface devices. however if your device like mine has decent linux support, it’s pretty much a plug and play solution. Bliss uses a the android common kernel which has very little modifications to upstream kernel so typically support for hardware is simply dependant on how new the kernel is.

Bliss also relies on mesa for graphics, so intel and AMD have great support, and Nvidia is quite lack luster, but this may change with the new foss nvidia driver stuff.

Honestly might be a bit of a “shill” moment, Grabbing windows 2 in 1 and flashing bliss to it. Currently have a chuwi hi10x which can boot into Bliss and it’s nice.

considering that apple and adope are supporting it in full force now, with DNG even supporting it to compress certain types of data, I have no doubt that Chrome will eventually be forced to re-implement it

webp is only marginally better then jpeg in lossy mode, arguably not better due to lack of features, and in lossy mode has many restrictions that make it hard to actually call it lossless in many cases.