Personally, I don't like 11 because of telemetry as well as missing features, particularly with its new desktop shell. I can't see how removing useful taskbar features (resizing, changing position, ungrouping window buttons, etc) and turning the start menu into an abomination with less functionality then my phone's damn app drawer is an upgrade. To top it off Microsoft still just can't seem to resist the temptation and decided to include "sponsored" applications in the Start menu pinned section on a fresh install. An average user doesn't know they're not really installed, but it looks like it. When you click on them it installs the application without consent similar to how they did it in Windows 10. They never learn...
> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices?
No, people do the same things with every new generation of smartphones. Call, text, scroll social media, take photos, or make Google searches. That kind of stuff. None of those activities require powerful hardware, so I will never understand why some smartphones need processors more powerful than the damn PC I'm typing this on. It's equally stupid in my opinion that the software we use to accomplish those activities is constantly becoming more and more bloated and have ever increasing hardware requirements to run smoothly! At the end of the day many common mobile apps do the same damn thing they did 7 years ago, but good luck running some of them on hardware that old (assuming you can even find a phone that has a new enough OS).
Anyway, I'd love to support Fairphone as well, but I'm upset that they removed the headphone jack in order to sell their new wireless earbuds. For a company that's supposedly all about sustainability, repair-ability, etc. that's a pretty stupid move. Removing a basic feature in order to sell another product is the opposite of sustainable. It's greedy, and I thought Fairphone was against that.
> Call, text, scroll social media, take photos, or make Google searches. That kind of stuff. None of those activities require powerful hardware, so I will never understand why some smartphones need processors more powerful than the damn PC I'm typing this on.
They don't "require" it per se, but the power does help. Apps will load and start faster, scrolling social media will stutter less, more processing can be applied on photos to make them look better, more processing can be done locally to avoid latency, and everything will be generally more responsive. More powerful hardware doesn't only serve compute-intensive tasks, it helps for everything. If you have money to spare, it's worth it.
So what happens is that phone A has a latency of 0.2s to perform a task and people are like, that's fine. Then phone B comes out with a latency of 0.05s and people are like, oh, that's so snappy, I love it, so they buy that. Then developers are like, we know 0.2s was fine, so we've got 0.15s of budget to add some features. It's kind of a vicious circle, because every step is logical: it's logical for people to buy faster devices to get snappier operation, and it's logical for developers to use the margin between snappy and slow to add new features.
TBH, if we could freeze all hardware development at all levels for a few years, it would do wonders for software and I think we'd ultimately come out ahead, but we all know that's never going to happen.
> No, people do the same things with every new generation of smartphones.
People who use the same apps and do the same things as 10 years ago don’t upgrade until it fails them, or they upgrade anyway because of other reasons that were worth the money. People who do benefit from the improvements do upgrade. People who do benefit from the improvements and can afford them do upgrade and are happy with the power and features.
Why is it even a discussion, and who among us can categorically say “yes” or “no” beside what we see in our small life circle ?
You run just native Linux games, and the times they aren't available, you run them using the Proton compatibility layer (built right into Steam). There is also Lutris for Windows games not available on Steam.
Yes, but if someone is set on pirating the game, they'll just wait until its cracked in a month before playing it. So really, publishers aren't going to gain any sales compared to not including DRM to begin with. If they do it's going to be a tiny, tiny fraction.
