The OP13 will probably be better long term in terms of performance. The Pixel phones are all 3 generations behind in performance compared to the contemporary Qualcomm chips.

In the US, iPhones and Samsung phones are highly subsidized by phone carriers. Motorola to an extent (mostly low end models). Also, Verizon blocks other phones from their network. Check what they sell on their site and you’ll see what’s available to buy as an American. Americans have much less disposable income, so you’ll notice there’re huge subsidies for consumerism; Americans have to be goaded into spending money with discounts or else they won’t buy; it’s a cultural thing.

I’ve stuck to KDE because it’s more customizable and the devs don’t try to actively remove features from updates. Gnome might be a cleaner experience, but I don’t want to have to search for alternatives when my favorite gnome extension gets unexpectedly killed by an update.

KDE appears to be much more stable in that regard in that they’re actively trying (Union) to make themes more resilient over time.

America didn’t have widespread contactless payments until Covid started. Covid surged adoption here, but Walmart is the only big box retailer holdout left that I can think of. Walmart wants to sell your data, and that’s harder if you use emulated card numbers (contactless payments or Apple-like cards with no set number).

deleted by creator

AMD gfx cards cannot meet or exceed 5080/5090 cards. That said, I think a 9070xt is the best choice right now, because it’s probably going to be cheaper overall to just upgrade in 3-4 years rather than buy a 5090 and hold onto it for 10 years or whatever. You do you, but for me, I think upgrading early is the better choice since 2 flagship AMD cards should equal the price of the nvidia 5080.

As far as distros are concerned, Bazzite is a fantastic starting point because you almost certainly can’t go wrong. If you run into programs that need a kernel module or superuser permissions, just distro hop. It’s very likely that in your first time using Linux that you’ll not need those power user things, so Bazzite will be rock solid for you.

Also, in Linux, best practice is to set your home folder to be a separate partition on your HD. You can point your distro to the existing home folder so if you distro hop and you won’t lose your desktop environment prefs/setup or your files.

Here’s my notes on this for Fedora if you need a guide:

/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=geekbench6 com.geekbench.Geekben
ch6

I got a good bundle deal from Microcenter on a mobo with a wifi card that took over a year to be properly supported by the Linux kernel (or whatever relevant entity). This is good advice, but it’s likely that since we’re at the end of the AM5 generation, no new mobos should come out needing updates to function properly.

I see across the board frame drops in the UI from time to time. If I turn on low power mode, it gets real choppy. My expectation is 120FPS, no stutters, no frame drops ever; that’s how this phone was when I bought it.

Phones in general plateaued, but the pixel line has been sitting comfortably at a plateau 4 generations behind Apple/Snapdragon flagships which is unacceptable. I have an iPhone 15 Pro that I’m looking to replace because it’s starting to lag and stutter; the pixel 11 pro benchmarks LOWER than my 3 year old phone.

I’m pretty sure any Rpi is more powerful, smaller, and more efficient than any computer hardware from 30 years ago lol.

AT&T started using a whitelist too at some point. T-Mobile is the last major carrier left to not care what phone you use.

Verizon is very protective over their network and always has been. They used CDMA for years just to lock out outside competition amongst other walled garden bullshit. When they moved to GSM they still tried to lock their network to a whitelist of phone IMEIs they control. They do not want you to buy an unlocked phone from a brand they do not get paid by to be put on the whitelist support.

Android devs spent years optimizing for tall aspect ratios and now we’re straight up being sold a device that is squat and won’t show all of the user view on the outer screen? I’m so confused who would want less onscreen lmao.

I find it hilarious that people are flocking to a device with less repairability and durability… if I had to guess, normies are ditching their laptops/tablets and getting a foldable instead.

My thing is that I use the iPad app with the pencil. The last time I tried GIMP it was great.

Leaving this here for Photoshop converts

https://github.com/Diolinux/Photogimp

I use Affinity full time at the moment, but if they ever go paid, I’m running straight to GIMP.

I stayed on my iPhone 🙁 I really wanted to switch now that AirDrop and Universal Clipboard are coming to everyone. Samsung is a nice alternative, but I’m turned all the way off by them using non-flagship tiered chips in the Galaxy pad since I was going to buy the whole ecosystem. I’m taking it year by year, considering that there are other annoyances I’m unable to cope with.

Pixel phones are a nonstarter because Tensor is so unbelievably underpowered. I’m not paying full price for a chipset that lags behind 5 year old snapdragon phones.

Frankly unacceptable results 🙁 guess I’ll check back in with the pixel next year.

Background blur is one of the things making me stuck on iOS. Blur algorithms run performantly on hardware older than what you have, so don’t sweat it.