What exactly is the point of rolling release?

Newer features. At the cost of a higher risk of stuff breaking.

Or is it for security?

No, point release OSs do have security updates. It’s feature updates that they avoid.

No it’s like a duel where one person keeps shooting himself in the foot and the other gets increasingly confused.

I just looked up smartphones with headphone and SD card slots on GSMarena, and there are 159 models even from 2025. That’s more than I expected. And most of them are actually affordable and worth the cost - I wouldn’t recommend half the devices on this list purely based on price to performance ratio.

I actually like it. Smartphones in India are usually a little cheaper than elsewhere, since they assume they can make up the lost revenue with ads. And at least on Xiaomi devices, you can stop all OS-side ads by removing just one app.

Gameplay? Xiangling (Genshin) - She does more damage.

Story? Focalors / Furina - peak character and peak storytelling

This silly meme tells you everything you need to know about Xiangling (apart from ‘every team becomes 10x better with XL in it’) and everything Furina wants you to know about her.

Can’t you just switch off Play Protect entirely?

The Radxa Rock 5 series use RK3588s and have USB, ethernet and 4-32 GB RAM.

Not sure about this specific model, but I read elsewhere that BYD is developing long-lasting fast charging batteries by combining lots of small cells and liquid cooling.

OS bloat can mostly be fixed with ADB (terminal) or UAD (GUI).

Tl;dr - their shit’s affordable.

Xiaomi recently blocked bootloader unlocking

For some devices

Agreed on the process being convoluted.

China is betting big on it because it’s cheap.

It’s not about the money. The patents for amd64 and arm are with US / UK based companies. RISC-V is open-source, so China cannot be legally stopped from using it. Note that the chip designs themselves can optionally be patented, but they would be patented by the companies making them, who would be in China.

This doesn’t really make sense. Why would your computer give the GPU / NPU access to GPS location? Unless Nvidia is somehow embedding GPS sensors in their chips - which would be obvious to Chinese cybersecurity - this should be a simple software fix. Intel Management Engine is a genuine risk, but I think China has banned / restricted Intel CPUs already.

You discuss the CPC while playing video games? Weird flex, but okay.

1. There’s an uptick in ‘Unknown’ (currently at 26%).

2. Linux adoption might have slowed down because India - US relations have improved since then, because Trump can be distracted by promising him trade deals. Of course the deal he wants (giving US agri companies access to the Indian market) will face opposition from farmers’ unions, so I’m not sure what the govt’s long-term plan is.

One good thing is that when a govt dept switches to Linux, it sort of sticks. And govt contracts are very profitable, so we’ll likely see greater interest from both hardware and software companies.

9% in India. But this is down from a peak of ~15% late last year when the govt was worried about US sanctions and was pushing for Linux adoption.

The rules for transport of batteries are based on the size of the cell rather than the size of the battery package in total.

That sounds like an obvious loophole?

The nerds are missing the forest for the trees. This isn’t meant to stop missiles. It’s meant to line pockets. And it will do that.

Face, meet leopard.

I don’t get it. 3900mAh battery and 25 charging is not okay for a flagship costing over 1 lakh. If the aim is to make a light phone, why not use a weaker SoC and make it cheaper as well? This is neither here nor there. Who even is the target audience?