> they have no history of working devices to prove themselves!
* Boot loops.
* Android updates that they push to their own phones that brick those phones or break the cameras. It is as if their engineers write code against the devices those engineers can't use to test on.
* Non-existent customer service in case the phone does go into a boot loop or update breaks the camera.
The bigger problem with Qualcomm is that they're primarily the reason why devices only got a two year span of updates and poor support. Each board built for each phone still had to get the software support starting with Qualcomm before it could be built with new source for updates. Outside that 2 year window, every device OEM had to support the hardware themselves. That's why new phones with older SOCs never got any updates at all. (Read up on Project Mainline as one attempt to mitigate this problem.)
I'm not surprised at all that OEMs are moving towards own/custom SOCs or other sources. Been seeing more Motorola phones with Mediatek socs, Samsung has Exynos, Google now with Tensor.
What are you talking about? Pixel 2 was releases Oct 2017, end of support was Dec 2020. So, about 3 years. Pixel 1 was the same, 3 years. For the later ones, still supported, let's see. Tensor based ones will get at least 5 years.
> The weirdest thing in the Google presentation is that several sections had presenters talking to a different camera than facing the screen. That just felt very strange.
B-Camera angles are common in interviews. It's to help create a less formal and less stuffy 'presentation' like feel. It's intended to be more of a "you're standing there, somewhat behind the scenes" feel.
It is also one way to obscure the fact that someone's using a teleprompter because it is more difficult to see that their eyes are moving back and forth.
From what I watched of the presentation, there was also a fair bit of moving around. In my studio, we primarily used it as a way to hide main camera adjustments in the edit, usually from the interviewee changing positions, slouching, etc. Generally, a high enough quality production will never rely on a single camera regardless.
I went back and checked Apple's keynote and noticed that all their presenters faced the camera. But the camera itself was panning slightly which helped, as you said, to feel less stuffy. Nice!
Mint and Pop are still Ubuntu based, not to ignore the Debian underpinnings of Ubuntu.
I've stuck with xUbuntu because it seems to be the most sane of the bunch when it comes to defaults and preinstalled software. Once installed, it does a good job of staying out of my way UI wise.
> One specific Linux issue I ran into repeatedly is that Chrome and Chromium by default refuse to trust Linux graphics drivers and instead do software rendering.
After I enabled these features, my desktop started encountering a problem where I would have to kill and restart the display manager once, and thereafter the display manager would occasionally hang and I'd have to restart it.
It was manageable with a few days research and technical skill, but it's not the kind of thing you would expect most people to put up with.
Another thing to note, Chrome's software renderer didn't seem to play well with my skylake? integrated graphics. Not only was it slow, but buggy with screen tearing and other visual artifacts. So I had to get acceleration working so my browser would both render properly and be reasonably responsive and performant.
I can vouch for Proton. In some games, I can even get more FPS running on Proton/Vulcan DX emulation than natively on windows. One such example is Path of Exile. I should totally NOT be playing this game..
Yeah, gaming on Linux has seriously come a long way thanks to the efforts of Valve and the wider community. My main issue with gaming on linux is cloud saves; while it generally will work with Steam, other platforms like GoG have no such capacity, and it's a real drag compared to Windows.
I recently set up Game Backup Monitor (http://mikemaximus.github.io/gbm-web/linux.html) for GOG games. The backup location is in OneDrive. I do have to import the backup manually, but the combination eases the pain.
Anecdotal but no less amusing: I upgraded my desktop and used the extra parts to rebuild my Windows 10 system, the nearly cutting edge hardware on the newly rebuilt main desktop all worked when I reinstalled xUbuntu 20.04 on the new SSD.
The hand me down parts, while not ancient, were still old enough that I had expected Windows 10 to be able to support it when I installed it on the SSD for that machine. Wifi and Webcam both did not work after Windows finished installing and detecting hardware/updating.
Windows 10 later decided to reboot my system, unprompted, when I still had a project file open in Premiere.
How far Linux has come is honestly refreshing. How long Windows has continued to have absolute dealbreaker issues is astounding.
The immense majority of Windows installs are on computers that come with it. Because of that, OEMs make sure all bits and pieces they sell at the same time work with it.
Also, that’s why even printers need to come with a CD of Windows drivers (probably for the imaginary CD drive that no longer comes with the computer)
