A different Wallet/Pay implementation is a possible outcome, but I’m thinking of a bigger picture where Android phones are more like PCs: no non-unlockable bootloaders, no remote attestation anywhere, barriers to root detection at the OS level, third-party ROMs encouraged.

The early days of Android were like that. I wonder if things had developed along that path, would we have a paradise for power users? A security nightmare for mainstream users? Both? Neither?

I wonder what an alternate history where Google chose not to become evil would look like.

What if they had looked at Microsoft’s Palladium proposal and thought, as pretty much everyone outside institutional IT departments did that locked devices with remote attestation was a nightmare scenario best forgotten, refused to build it, and made an effort to prevent anyone else from doing so on top of Android? Safetynet didn’t appear until 5-6 years after Android launched to the public. What if it never did? Android already had enough momentum by that point I don’t think the financial sector could refuse to be on it no matter what risk management said.

I hadn’t heard of Pixels doing that, but I’m guessing the attempt does not hard-brick the device.

Pixels have a pretty strong warning on boot for unlocked bootloaders and an easily-typed URL with a detailed explanation.

That seems like enough to me from the manufacturer side. Of course I can imagine someone ignoring the warning; people sometimes climb into tiger enclosures with predictable results, but it shouldn’t be on device manufacturers (or zoo management) to prevent all possible negative outcomes.

A design that results in a hard brick on “tampering” is unusually destructive.

Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft, and LG tried similar ideas and none got much traction.

I’m not sure it’s actually a good idea even now that phones have enough CPU and RAM for an adequate desktop experience. It’s certainly not a good idea running Android as we know it, where apps are data silos and have UIs that don’t cleanly transition from the palmtop experience to the desktop experience.

You can do that today with a Linux tablet and Waydroid. It’s more like running the Android apps in a VM than something really well integrated with the Linux environment, but perfect is the enemy of good.

I got my first tablet this year after a long time as a skeptic. It runs Arch, BTW.

Most of the time it has a keyboard attached and I use it like a laptop, but it’s nice to be able to watch movies on flights during taxi, takeoff, and landing because tablets and phones are allowed, not laptops.

Gnome is really nice on a touchscreen aside from the terrible onscreen keyboard. KDE is a little rougher, but its onscreen keyboard is decent.

I remember making a note to look into it several times, and thinking I should buy one (exactly one) when it was about $600. If I had, I imagine I would have sold at 10x rather than holding until 100x or its peak at 200x.

I actually did think it or a successor would become important as a consumer payment method. I was wrong there.

I remember playing with a Motorola Atrix in a store. It seemed like a really cool idea.

I thought people would learn how to use computers.

It seemed as if most of the millennial generation in wealthy countries did learn to some degree and I expected it to be even more true for younger generations. Those more sophisticated users would enable more sophisticated and flexible applications. Technology would empower individuals while weakening corporations and governments.

Instead, the most reliable recipe for popularizing tech is to dumb it down. Millennials represent a peak of digital literacy (in wealthy countries) and those younger tend to have weaker technical skills.

“If you put money in a vending machine and got two items instead of one, would you put additional money in for the second item?”

No, I fucking wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t like to work for anyone who wouldn’t hire me because of that fact.

If 99% of applications that run on *nix desktops didn’t want to accept middle-click to paste text where that’s an operation that makes sense, I would agree with you. I do not believe that to be the case.

KDE and Gnome already have toggles for it, though Gnome’s is in gnome-tweaks because Gnome hates exposed settings.

I’d support unifying behavior between toolkits and apps to provide users with a single point to set their preference, but I use this feature a hundred times a day. I’d also like it to remain the default; *nix desktops should have their own flavor instead of just copying Mac OS or Windows, and middle-click paste has been a part of that flavor for 40 years.

Middle click to paste the X PRIMARY selection predates Blender.

Yes, I do know how old Blender is.

I am not a doctor and I am definitely not your doctor, but this sounds like an eating disorder to me. Are you in a position to talk to a doctor about it?

I hold the (possibly mistaken) belief that someone who can program everything from a web browser to a screensaver can, if they so choose, be a good sysadmin.

I also believe programmers usually don’t choose to be good sysadmins, viewing such work as an annoyance to spend as little effort on as they can get away with, which is what it looks like jwz has done here. Someone with his experience should be self-aware enough to understand who is to blame when that’s what they’re doing.

I wonder how many people have company email addresses there.

It’s a bar/nightclub. Most employees at bars don’t use email as part of their work. It would be unusual (though maybe on-brand for jwz) for bartenders to have company email addresses, for example.

Given his background, I’m certain he can do a good job of being his own IT admin if he wants to. He seems to want some of the benefits of that while having Google do the parts he doesn’t like.

Google, on the other hand seems to want to drop features that I think it intended to encourage people to migrate from ISP email accounts to Gmail 20 years ago and now sees as cruft and/or security concerns.

He does have his own mail server according to the post. He doesn’t want to store the mail long-term, filter spam, host a web mail client, or support employees setting up native mail clients.