Hey Mickey, I ask this without intending or meaning to offend, but why do you enjoy “haha, hate my wife” boomer humor so much?

The CEO of Commodore appears to be completely out of touch on people’s perception of AI use, as they’ve been using it a fair amount in videos and the advertising for this phone (AI music and AI video generation) since buying Commodore, and poorly justifying it in the comments of their videos with links to their FAQ.

AFAIK they’ve already fully paid off the commodore IP acquisition from C64 ultimate sales, but as you say, that cannot sustain them forever.

The phone is pretty much entirely just the CEO’s personal opinion of what a phone should be, which he’s been making videos about from before the acquisition, and they appear to have done almost zero market research what the customers would want and be willing to pay…

One of those spray-can extension poles would probably work pretty well.

You’re quite right, though I’m being a bit more uncharitable personally, and assuming they are only marketing it as 99% since they are explicitly blocking very popular utilities as a selling point. Were they not doing that, I get the feeling they would’ve just said it is fully Android compatible despite it not being true for the reasons you outlined.

The C64 Ultimate, the new production model that Commodore sells, has Wi-fi built in.

It apparently will be able to remotely control some aspects of the C64 ultimate.

I think they gave Tramiel’s son an honorary role in the company.

Bitwig included a restricted version of their DAW with a midi keyboard I bought that’s restricted to 8-tracks (called Bitwig 8-track) and a limited amount of plugins. I had been considering their paid versions in the past, but I found I enjoyed the limitations, so I’ll likely not upgrade it. Works a treat on Linux, too.

They actively hardcoded all web browsers and most social media (except WhatsApp) to be blocked from installing, hence the 99%.

The social media I understand, but the web browser block is going to severely limit market appeal.

Yeah, I mean, if they’re not into doing something a little out of the ordinary, how can you know you’ll be compatible?

Ah, I didn’t realize the Voyager app worked that way when using it to share links, which is really weird and awkward. I edited my comment to a direct lemmy link now that I’m on a PC. Thanks for the heads up.

And for others reading, I linked to my older comment since I briefly explained how I used blocktube to be effective, but I’ll add it here as well:

At some point she had an appointment to go somewhere and I happened to have an opportunity to access her computer for an extended amount of time.

What I did was subscribe her youtube account to a bunch of left-wing news sources, and more critically, I installed the browser addon BlockTube, which allows you to create a blacklist that seamlessly prevents videos or channels matching any keywords you choose from displaying on youtube. I added words like Trump, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Fox News, Sean Hannity, etc.

Fox news is specifically designed to target the elderly as their critical thinking skills are fading, targeting their most triggerable fears. Fox Brain is a known phenomena, one which can usually be reversed if easy access to Fox News is removed, as seen in this documentary.

I myself was able to stop my mother from going down that path with the help of a browser add-on that let me block right-wing rage bait news from showing up in her YouTube feed, which had an almost immediate and lasting effect.

One of those spray-can extension poles would probably work pretty well.

Unfortunately, Sailfish OS uses a proprietary (closed source) android compatibility layer, as well as a closed source UI.

For the parts they have open-sourced, they implemented a CLA that contributors must sign. It’s the HA-CLA-I-ANY license, which specifically allows them a perpetual Copyright and Patent license, and permission to re-license your code contributions to a more restrictive license which enables them sell or package it into a closed-source proprietary app.

Personally I’m be more comfortable supporting the development of PostmarketOS instead, since it is completely open-source with no CLA, meaning no chance of any rug-pulling in the future.

GrapheneOS is great, and it’s what I currently use, but it is ultimately a hardened Android fork. One downside of that is it is completely reliant on manufacturer updates to continue to support a phone. Once a manufacturer drops support, the Graphene team must also drop support, as they are reliant on the closed source GPU/hardware drivers that are tied to specific android kernel versions.

PostmarketOS is not based on Android whatsoever, it’s a Mobile focused Linux distro using the mainline Linux kernel. It uses open-source drivers for the GPU and hardware which can be maintained and supported for decades, and is completely independent of Google’s influence. However, it’s still currently rough enough around the edges that it isn’t ready as a daily driver, which is why it’d be so helpful for us to donate to it so they can hire more developers to polish it up, as they recently did to improve the audio support of Qualcomm devices.

Please consider donating to PostmarketOS to build up a pure mobile Linux alternative that is completely free of Google’s influence. It’s the best long-term option we have.

Ah, another Captain Planet villain added to the roster.

If you go deep enough, there’s still windows 3.11 dialog boxes in Windows 11 for some core functionality.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240102024352/https://ntdev.blog/2023/01/01/state-of-the-windows-how-many-layers-of-ui-inconsistencies-are-in-windows-11/

It suffers from that less now since Canonical abandoned the project. UBPorts is AFAIK just a community project to keep it alive. I would’ve assumed they would drop the CLA stuff, but I guess they didn’t want to or couldn’t for whatever reason?