The "Post-PC" era (smartphones)

[Gemmaugr]

Off-topic:

Daddy Government and Big Brother corporations "looking out for you", making sure you don't see or hear anything offensive

I have only one question for daddy government and big corpos: How do you know what I find offensive?

Exactly. But a lot of vocal "youth" (to continue to allegory) will let them know and repeat back what they've been told to think. To receive praise and participation trophies. Of course it all sounds good to "protect the weak children and include everyone on the playground". Frankly, I'm surprised that it's not readily apparent that it's just sanctimonious pious platitude couched in emotional appeal. Offense is taken, not given, most of the time. Freedoms removed is rarely given back though, but have to be taken.

[Mæstro]

Regarding Australia ban on smartphone use for younger folks and all the stupid — people do on these things...what happened to personal accountability? Good bye common sense values and ethics...

The fox guards the coop. I have documented already that most Australian adults are (at least somewhat) addicted to their smartphone or SNS. Your own article from the LLM thread notes the same. Parents, mesmerised by their oblongs, thrust them before their children and marvel that they are the same. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. (CS Lewis) Nobody will admit the actual problem, for it would expose himself to a great deal of soul-searching and reveal his own hypocrisy or weakness. Hence the reforms which we see, approved by the masses, who we know disregard online privacy.

[frostknight]

I have only one question for daddy government and big corpos: How do you know what I find offensive?

Off-topic:
They don't care what you think probably, all they care about is obedience if I had to guess.

Same as most governments that are like that.

You probably live in a less privacy invasive country though I am betting.

Btw, with all linux's faults, I would think it would still be better than Windows 11 and windows 10 too for you. Or at least I would have thought that, but then again, I have heard you gripe about 11 but said 10 was workable.

All I can say for sure is that linux shines at two things in particular, security and using a lot less resources cpu wise and memory wise. Also it doesn't control how you use your OS like microsoft does. Backdoors? nope not unless you use a lot of proprietary software from non-free repos.

I hope the day will come when you can ditch windows though. They sadly don't care about their users unless they are rich or super rich.

Anywho, I don't think that will be soon, due to what you have said in the past, but it could be better in the long term. Microsoft and their OS do cost money anyhow in addition to their surveillance of course.

[Gemmaugr]

Off-topic:

I have only one question for daddy government and big corpos: How do you know what I find offensive?

You probably live in a less privacy invasive country though I am betting.

Sadly, not as much as one thinks;

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%B6rs ... ntroverser

https://cyberinsider.com/5-eyes-9-eyes- ... #h-14-eyes

https://nyadagbladet.se/it-overvakning/ ... ervakning/

[frostknight]

Off-topic:

Sadly, not as much as one thinks;

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%B6rs ... ntroverser

https://cyberinsider.com/5-eyes-9-eyes- ... #h-14-eyes

https://nyadagbladet.se/it-overvakning/ ... ervakning/

But is it as bad as the five eyes countries?

Also, usa authorities and probably other five eyes ones tend to be aggressive with trying to keep the leash on their public ie they try to aggressively spy to the point of arresting privacy advocates. I wonder if sweden is as bad on those levels as well.

[athenian200]

I actually have somehow wound up dating someone from Gen Z while in college, and it's been... kind of revealing. She told me that as a teenager, she got her first personal smartphone and had little experience with laptops, but she very much preferred laptops for things like, say, typing documents despite not knowing much about them. I've noticed that for whatever reason, she constantly fumbles and accidentally does things she didn't mean to do on websites because her fingers slip and she's on a touchscreen, but she thinks nothing of it and regards it as normal. I managed to talk her into having a relative get her a new Windows 11 laptop somehow.

The response was... interesting. She did exactly the kinds of things I did when I first got a laptop as a kid. She found a Paint program and had fun with it, figured out how to play around with the time and date, a lot of basic stuff. She figured out the laptop surprisingly fast, saying it was really easy and intuitive to use. Over time as she was using it, she told me she originally got the laptop just to write essays, but has found herself doing other stuff on it, like shopping and using Discord. She found that when she uses Discord on it, she no longer accidentally calls people like on the phone because she hit the wrong button (something that she used to do at least twice a week). She was basically impressed that she could do more than one thing at a time, or see so much at a glance... particularly things like having music play in the background while working on a document, apparently that's a feature people have to pay for on smartphones or something. Eventually she was messing around with a work-related website on her phone and accidentally deleted her direct deposit info because her fingers slipped, which resulted in a check being delayed... now she's really finding she wants to stick to the laptop in a lot more situations. She says it leaves her in this sort of frustrating situation where it's harder to go back to the smartphone now that she's gotten familiar with Windows, but a laptop isn't as convenient, so it feels like a choice between something inconvenient that is a much better device, or something convenient that doesn't work very well, and she finds herself carrying both and switching between them a lot now.

Anyway, the reason I share this story is mostly because it really has helped me understand what's going on with younger generations. It's not necessarily that all the people involved have consciously compared the two experiences and decided they love smartphones, but rather that a lot of people don't know there's anything better than a smartphone and don't realize how much it sucks unless they encounter some older computer nerd like me that still does a lot of stuff on a laptop and rants about touchscreens all the time. I mean, from what I'm gathering, a lot of people aren't significantly better at dealing with touchscreens than before, they just accept the clumsiness and awkwardness as normal because they have no frame of reference to notice it from.

The closest analogy I could make... is the look on her face while I was showing her how to use a computer was a lot like the look I used to see on my Mom's face or my Grandma's when I first showed them how to do stuff on the computer as a kid. Like they'd never seen such a thing before and they were impressed by how much they could do on it. The only difference being that in their case, it was because they were coming from analog world that didn't include computers at all, while in the case of Gen Z, it's because they only know these very locked down, limited computers that can usually only do one thing at a time. Which in a lot of ways is like not having a computer at all.

But yeah... honestly I think the "Post-PC" era is overhyped as a concept, and there is definitely room for laptops of some kind to make a comeback. Smartphones have stopped improving, and people may be slowly realizing they weren't ideal for everything and never perfectly replaced laptops. In the 2010s, people were all excited about mobile-first and making everything as smartphone-friendly as they could. I think at this point it's a mature market and isn't as exciting as it was, and now the big focus is on AI, which could well mean the aggressive push towards mobile will scale back a bit, and the unrealistic expectation that they're perfect for everything might subside.

[Night Wing]

About four days ago, Apple iPhones were targeted by malware operators. I think it affected around 1.8 "billion" Apple smartphones and iPads. My wife has an Apple iPhone and iPad and she had to update those two devices the day this warning came out.

BTW, you might have to use a different browser than Pale Moon to read the article below since the scrollbars are missing and my mouse wheel does not work either. If you do use Pale Moon, you will have to use the "arrow keys" on your keyboard which I do not like using on that website.

I used Waterfox for the link below.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech ... pdate.html

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Anyway, the reason I share this story is mostly because it really has helped me understand what's going on with younger generations. It's not necessarily that all the people involved have consciously compared the two experiences and decided they love smartphones, but rather that a lot of people don't know there's anything better than a smartphone and don't realize how much it sucks unless ...

The closest analogy I could make... is the look on her face while I was showing her how to use a computer was a lot like the look I used to see on my Mom's face or my Grandma's when I first showed them how to do stuff on the computer ...

But yeah... honestly I think the "Post-PC" era is overhyped as a concept, and there is definitely room for laptops of some kind to make a comeback.

Let us hope (the latter).

I have no particular contact with younger generations except in peculiar environments. I mean, the students and graduate students I may meet in my (former) institute would never imagine to do their thesis work on a smartphone. And actually most of them have their own laptop. In the past we were concerned in procuring a "work position" (i.e. a desktop computer) for them, because "we cannot force a student to buy a laptop or imagine one has one", but this seems not a problem nowadays (when I was a university student, I got my first pocket calculator, the wonderful RPN HP-31 type, when I graduated. When I was a 4th-year high-school student (4 out of 5 years ending at 19 in this country) a schoolmate brought one that his father, a physicist and science journalist, had got for evaluation, and we played with it. BTW his father did not buy it. With the same schoolmate we went to computer trade fairs ... his father had said to go the DEC stand, DEC was sort of a newcomer at the time !).
In my institute sometimes we get high-school students for the so called "school-work alternation" (they spend a few days working on a project). They seem not afraid of computers. Some years ago I put a couple of them on assessing optical identification of celestial X-ray sources. Maybe they'd never seen a text editor, but they knew how to use a spreadsheet. The difficulty in finding a viable project are other ... for instance mine were 3rd year students. I had a little nice self contained project (writing java code for a World Coordinate System "type") but never managed to find students for that ... they would need to know trigonometry, so they should be 5th-year.

Of course neither me nor my older colleagues had been afraid of computers, we grew up at work with them. But even an older secretary (retired 1999) in 1990 got quite skilled using her first Mac (it was more of a trouble for me to get accustomed to the one-button mouse usage ... I was used to terminals, function keys and joysticks. A mechanical designer in the same years insisted in getting an HP-UX workstation with a graphical tablet for CAD.)

Personally I prefer using a desktop PC with a large screen and mouse to a laptop. I feel ill at ease with a touchpad and so attach a mouse to the laptop when I use it. And I would be (are) afraid of finger slips using a small touch screen.

I'm helping an older disabled friend. He is disabled since birth, but, before he got an ictus, he managed to use a desktop computer. They changed his plain mobile phone with a smartphone, which he keeps attached to an "arm" to his wheelchair. But he can barely tap to answer a call (to make a call he uses voice commands). But he needs the smartphone to access home banking or other public services. And I have myself difficulties using it. Yesterday it was a nightmare to do a bank transfer. One has first to log in to the bank site (numeric username and PIN password) on the PC, then scroll sideways on the phone to find the bank app, tap on the bank app without logging in ... when communication is established, press "confirm" then wait for a numeric keybard to appear on the phone and tap the PIN again (the screen is very sensitive and there is no way to cancel a wrong number). Once one is in, one fills a form on the PC, then click "proceed" and "confirm" ... this triggers, or should trigger, another 2FA sequence on the smartphone ... first a message, then "confirm", then the PIN ... but sometimes it times out, or gets out of synch (in the meanwhile the phone screen saver might have locked it so one has to press a button on the side, then tap and slide up on the screen to resume). Yesterday the PIN screen never appeared. At the end we reset all (logged off, exited the browser, and resumed form beginning).

For me I am lucky I can still use OTP SMS for the bank. For other public administrations (most of them) I use my national health service card with a smartcard reader attached to an USB slot of the computer. I recently got a new electronic identity card (which should work for all public administrations), but this requires an NFC card reader (of course one could use an NFC capable smartphone if one had one) ... and the one they sold me proved to be not Linux-compatible ... now I'd have to buy a new one.

[Mæstro]

I've noticed that for whatever reason, she constantly fumbles and accidentally does things she didn't mean to do on websites because her fingers slip and she's on a touchscreen, but she thinks nothing of it and regards it as normal… [P]eople aren't significantly better at dealing with touchscreens than before, they just accept the clumsiness and awkwardness as normal because they have no frame of reference to notice it from.

This is more revealing than you know. I have said before that I have always found touchscreens painful to navigate. Because I struggle with small, slipping surfaces in general (opening polythene packets or bags is also hard), I understood this strictly as relating to my disability and supposed normal people were dextrous enough to use these devices without difficulty. My supposal was wrong, One can understand the maddening UI design often encountered today as intended to guard against such accidental taps: (eg) a traditional menu almost guarantees a clumsy user will select the wrong choice, with unpredictable results, so as many choices as possible must be suppressed. We can also feel smartphone influence in browser monoculture, which is even worse there than among desktop computers.

She was basically impressed that she could do more than one thing at a time, or see so much at a glance... particularly things like having music play in the background while working on a document, apparently that's a feature people have to pay for on smartphones or something. [Gen Z] only know these very locked down, limited computers that can usually only do one thing at a time. Which in a lot of ways is like not having a computer at all.

Comparing smartphones to typical personal computers of the eighties like the Commodore 64, only capable of running one programme at a time, had only been a diffuse thought until you said this, if it had occurred to me when considering windowing in iOS. The old computers were clearly hobbyists’ toys, which discouraged me from pursuing the analogy much further. It seemed an insult to them. The real difference is that the earlier computers gave way to ones which were capable of managing many tasks at once, genuine progress, whereas the shift from desktops to mobiles undoes this. It is literally regressive, much as the move from local applications to ‘cloud software’ reverts to the old mainframe-client order.

Reaching into the past can offer context in other ways. Mobile phone addiction antedates smartphones, and existing forms of Internet addiction become easier if the internet is available anywhere, as does television addiction, even if we disregard the fact that smartphone applications have been designed for years to form habits.

[mr tribute]

The disadvantages of Flathub (Flatpak) software in linux. I'll list a few.

1) Larger disk usage because of bundled libraries
2) Sometimes slower start up times
3) Integration issues which involve theming
4) Security concerns where third party packaging is involved

As for Snaps, you got it half right. Snaps are proprietary, but they are not from MS (Microsoft). They are from Ubuntu which is a "walled garden" which ties the application to the Ubuntu store.

When I was running Mint, not now, but back then, there were no Snap applications installed by default. If you wanted a Snap application, you had to download it and it did not come not from the Mint repository, but from Ubuntu.

Your statements about Flatpaks are true. However, this isn’t an either/or situation. You can have as many different package formats you want and only use those that suit you.

For developers Flatpaks can be rather convenient. Instead of targeting multiple distros they can target a specific Flatpak runtime. This means any Linux user will use the same binary and support libraries so troubleshooting will be easier.

The Flatpak eco-system is absolutely huge and growing. More than a billion Flatpaks are downloaded/updated each year.

If it stands between not having access to a piece of software or installing it as a Flatpak I definitely prefer having it available as a Flatpak.

You can install from flathub-verified to (mostly) avoid third party packaging. Snaps aren't proprietary per se, but the delivery mechanism is (either snapd or the Store).

[Mæstro]

Could you imagine an ‘Ubuntu S Mode’ which only allows installing Snap or Flathub, justified by claiming it would be more familiar for smartphone users? (Chrome OS does not count.)

[mr tribute]

Could you imagine an ‘Ubuntu S Mode’ which only allows installing Snap or Flathub, justified by claiming it would be more familiar for smartphone users? (Chrome OS does not count.)

Distros that only use Flatpaks for apps already exist. One could argue that 100 % separating apps from modifying the base system isn't a bad idea. I think this was also one of the original ideas behind Microsoft Store.

[Mæstro]

Distros that only use Flatpaks for apps already exist.

Could you please name some? I am not surprised to hear they are there. My earlier posts should make it clear where I stand on such a design doctrine, but there is no point in debating it.

[Night Wing]

The (so called) "next-generation" distros use an "immutable" file system. The core OS is read-only if I'm not mistaken. Users are encouraged or just forced to install almost all graphical applications through the Flatpak system.

Since Ubuntu brought to the fore "snaps" via their Snap Store, I think Ubuntu would be as close to a Snap distro as one could get. I may be wrong on this though.

But for me, I would never choose any linux distro which is strictly Flatpak or Snap only. Again for me, I tend to think that is like "putting all of your eggs in one basket".

As the old adage says, "what could go wrong with that"?

[Mæstro]

The (so called) "next-generation" distros use an "immutable" file system. The core OS is read-only if I'm not mistaken. Users are encouraged or just forced to install almost all graphical applications through the Flatpak system.

Thank you! Immutable is the word I needed so I could look up examples, such as Carbon OS, on my own. (Atomic seems also to be used to describe these.) I am reminded of how Windows XP (but not 2000 or 7) marked certain system directories as hidden, advising the user they be left undisturbed and to (un)install software instead through the control panel. This was no more than a one-time toggle for each folder concerned. I had forgotten about this when returning to XP through my virtual machine until I encountered it again for the first time in years; I felt mildly incredulous and patronised at first, but got over it quickly and even re-enabled it while knowing I would have regular business manually editing hidden files, for it was fun to see the graphic. This is nothing at all like these immutable systems. Locking down the system is what truly separates mobiles and tablets from traditional desktops, even more than single-task or remote operations.

[mr tribute]

Distros that only use Flatpaks for apps already exist.

Could you please name some? I am not surprised to hear they are there. My earlier posts should make it clear where I stand on such a design doctrine, but there is no point in debating it.

Well, I can name two distros that only offer Flatpaks from their stores. If you want to install apps as native packages on these distros you have to use the terminal.

ElementaryOS
https://elementary.io/

Bazzite
https://bazzite.gg/

[Mæstro]

ElementaryOS
https://elementary.io/

It is a pity. I could see screenshots of Elementary before, although I have never tried it myself, and was impressed both by how perfectly Pantheon (its native DE) mimicked early Mac OS X, in the way Cinnamon and Xfce can imitate any Windows version, and how it possesses a default interface in 2026 which does not make me wish to gouge my eyes out. My only cause for pause (for thinking it a fair OS, never one I would consider using myself) had been the use of a shopfront to represent what I supposed to be a package manager, but which I see from the site’s own screenshots sells software for money. I cannot quite deem this regrettable choice, in Elementary’s case, to be imitating smartphones, for Apple has long kept up the App Store, with Gatekeeper to dissuade independent software and Homebrew to install it regardless. Because the former two were already implemented by 2011, for the sake of integrating Macintosh and iPhone use as part of their walled garden doctrine, without regard for who else might imitate them, perhaps I can blame Apple for inciting the trend of making desktops like smartphones, if not for flat design.

Speaking of Homebrew, Windows 10+ carry a proper package manager also, proving that the big firms mind the difference between a package manager and an app store. It is hard for me to treat the latter as characteristic of smartphones, not least when the original iPhone had none and I see today otherwise feature phones which include Facebook or WhatsApp, but no way to install other applications. It would be nice to reduce my impressions of whether a given (anti)feature is smartphone-like into a list of rules.

[UCyborg]

Typing on the phone sucks indeed. I almost never make any forum post on the phone.

[UCyborg]

Indeed, I have a friend like this. Rarely, he might use an ordinary computer to prepare a slide show, but in daily life, he appears only to use his mobile. For a while, I thought that computer games would preserve home interest in traditional PC among many, but just a few days ago, I have heard about what is, in effect, an ordinary Linux computer designed to be used as a console. Nevertheless, I think the needs of business should keep traditional computers alive. Businesses need their files, no matter how much smartphones try to abstract them away, and Britsh surveys show few even try to use their smartphones thus.

Some time ago, a co-worker told me he prefers playing games on a phone rather computer. He's from gen Z.

I played Doodle Jump many years ago and tried a bit of Assassin's Creed: Pirates, but generally, playing games on a phone doesn't appeal to me. Bigger screen is just better.

Though these days, I just can't get into it anymore like I used to. It sucks as it was one of the few things I could genuinely enjoy.

[Moonchild]

Some time ago, a co-worker told me he prefers playing games on a phone rather computer. He's from gen Z.

Most likely he was given a phone extremely early in his life; so it's become something he grew up with and it being his entertainment from a young age.