Honestly they would have made it a lot farther if they had just shown a fully functional device that could make calls and receive them from deep sleep. All drivers and basic functionality "just working."
They are fighting an uphill battle against the frustration that was the PinePhone. Nobody wants to buy a flagship-priced brick thats a neat trick for a hobby project.
Meshcore also has a paid license to use the full feature set and if Plex has taught us anything, it's to stay away from garbage like that. I'll stick to Meshtastic, thank you.
Everything is artificially inflated by 1.7x to 2.4x ever since covid. The inflation you are seeing is not real inflation but rather manufactured by those in high-up positions at most fortune-500 companies.
I don't think it is. I know a few people like this, and im heading in that direction myself. The only kinds of "ads" that work on me are when a number of equally nerdy people I know find a new thing, and they've demonstrated that it has helped them with something or they are genuinely enjoying using it. Like 3D printing. Its semi-pointless most of the time but it is a genuinely fun hobby, which when combined with 3D modeling and post-processing skills becomes an actual craft. I didn't get into it until a good number of people around me did.
This is the same or similar situation as OpenOffice → LibreOffice or OwnCloud → NextCloud (and to a lesser extent but more similar scenario, Audacity → Tenacity or various other forks).
This is what true open source looks like in action.
If it has google play services on it, at all, there is absolutely no privacy.
If you can manage to stick to an F-droid+Aurora+Obtainium setup (maybe with IzzyOndroid enabled in F-droid), you can probably pull off privacy, but in my experience there are at least three major streaming services ive encountered that refuse to run if Google Play Services aren't running and you can't pass the SafetyNet authenticity/security check thing (which raspberry pi is missing the firmware and hardware to be able to support.) Netflix being the biggest of them, I think Disney Plus has issues, and it's been a while since I tried but either crunchyroll or hbo Max gave me a hard time.
That's what I do. I have a bunch of .desktop files that just open Firefox in kiosk mode to whichever website I want, and a bunch of .PNG files to make them look like apps. I installed them system-wide.
I'm a pretty big KDE Stan but I decided to give Gnome a go since Plasma Bigscreen is virtually impossible to install for a normal user at the moment. Its not perfect but it gets the job done, and I love the basic parental controls it has. Still absolutely awful in terms of settings though.
Its a TV-remote-style device that works like a Wii remote to control the mouse, usually has a keyboard on the backside, and connects to a USB 2.4ghz or Bluetooth receiver depending on the model you get.
I got a $20 Rii and a $10 other brand one to try out. Both are fine. I like the buttons on the Rii better but it has no backlight which sucks because I'm usually watching TV in bed at 9pm. The $10 one's keyboard also responds faster so I can actually speed type.
Honestly they would have made it a lot farther if they had just shown a fully functional device that could make calls and receive them from deep sleep. All drivers and basic functionality "just working."
They are fighting an uphill battle against the frustration that was the PinePhone. Nobody wants to buy a flagship-priced brick thats a neat trick for a hobby project.