Okay, and? What nontechnical user cares enough to use it specifically when they could use Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Polaris Office, MobiOffice, WPS Office, Collabora, etc., instead?

But do nontechnical users care about the “missing” features? A lot of nontechnical users prefer simpler apps.

There is a version of Blender that was made for Android. It’s quite old, though. But if you’re competent enough with Blender that you’ve memorized all its keyboard shortcuts and workflows, you’re likely technical enough to get it working via Termux. But if not, Nomad Sculpt (on both iOS and Android), SpaceDraw (Android only), and several other apps can serve the same purposes.

Not sure why you listed video editing software and two different specific video editors, but Android and iOS both have Lumafusion. I’m sure there are other decent editors but I haven’t used them because Lumafusion is great. iPads do have DaVinci Resolve, though, for what that’s worth. If you care about using a FOSS video editor then you should care enough to install it via Termux. But let’s be real, most nontechnical users are probably happy using CapCut.

DJ software - Cross DJ is free. There are other alternatives. And there are web based DJ software apps like YouDJ.

OnlyOffice is available on Android already.

“any linux app” - I don’t think any nontechnical users want GParted on their Android phones, and it wouldn’t work anyway.

Android has its own games, same as iOS. Nontechnical users are way more likely to want Windows games than Linux games anyway.

Wine used to be developed natively for Android but they stopped a few years back. You can still download it at winehq though. I think Box64 with wine is a decent option?

Overall the thing I’m confused about is why you think Google or any major Android phone manufacturer have a motivation to make native Linux apps more accessible. Google certainly doesn’t want to make it easier for you to use the better versions of their competitors’ apps. Google is moving further away from Linux, not closer. Providing a usable, good enough desktop experience that’s still Android underneath makes far more sense for them.

Fortunately, like I said earlier, there are workarounds to get access to those Linux apps.

The thing that is more likely to change is for the creators of Android apps to build apps that function better when used in a phone-as-desktop format. And even if they don’t, there are enough competent web apps out there that just being able to use your browser full screen on a monitor solves 90% of people’s actual use cases - and probably over 95% when you include the other apps that have decent desktop experiences that can be run alongside them.

The Steam Deck approach is much closer to what you seem to want. The Steam Deck is an actually competent Linux machine that has a Valve-supported compatibility layer in Proton for running non-Linux games. It plugs into a USB-C hub connected to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard just fine, can install any Linux app, etc… It’s completely usable handheld as well. But it isn’t a phone, and even though it’s quite portable, it’s not “stick into your pocket” portable.

I don’t expect a major manufacturer to make a Linux phone any time soon, and I don’t think the Linux phones that are out already have - or will have in the next 5 years - a smooth enough experience to convince any nontechnical user to switch.

There are mobile versions for all of those?

What are the gaps in functionality for nontechnical people? And “apps that exist on Linux but not Android” doesn’t count, because such people are unlikely to have ever even used a Linux desktop in the first place. The improvement that matters won’t be Linux apps; it’ll be Android apps that are more usable in desktop mode.

That said, what are the issues with the apps that are currently available?

If a user installed Chrome, an office suite (whether that be Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, the Microsoft equivalent, or something else), an email client, and other commonly available apps, what tasks would they be unable to complete, if any?

Are these, or other commonly used apps, substantially less usable than on desktop? If so, how so?

Can’t you just use GNURoot Debian and XServer SDL to get a Linux desktop env on any Android phone?

There’s an xda-developers guide on this and the two apps are still in the Google Play Store, so I assume it’s still feasible.

I’m not sure how well it plays with DeX and other similar solutions, though.

That’s assuming the apps aren’t capable enough to handle being used on a desktop on their own, of course. What sorts of gaps did you see, and in which sorts of apps?

This is already a thing

Samsung DeX was the first big one but there are a bunch of competing ones that do similar things now.

What’s been stopping them?

A big part of the reason that Republicans are more able to pass legislation is that smaller states have a larger impact than they should, based on their populations.

Each state has a number of members in the House of Representatives in proportion to their population - 52 for California. Each state has two members in the Senate, so CA has the same amount of power in the Senate as Wyoming, which has a population of under 600k to CA’s 39 million.

Beyond the impact on Congress, the sum of those counts determines the number of electoral votes a state has in presidential elections. So California has 54 electoral college votes.

If California split up into 12 different states, each would end up with 6 electoral votes. The total count in the House would decrease from 52 to 48, and some other state would get the remaining 4 (though even that could be avoided by just having some sub-states be large enough to get 5 Representatives) but the total count of Senators would increase from 2 to 24 and the total electoral vote count would increase from 54 to 72.

Many of the smallest US states are firmly red, which means Republicans don’t need as much popular support to make policy changes. This would help reverse that. Heck, if California went all the way and split into 65 states, each with the population of Wyoming, they’d end up with 195 electoral college votes.

I feel like the US would take over California again if that was the case.

I’m not sure how you think the US would take over CA again, or what the impact would be, if it continued to be part of the US and just split into several different states. Could you elaborate?

I’d much rather California split into 12 different states, each with roughly the population of Nevada.

No offense taken, but thanks for the comment! If someone was offended and they saw your comment, I think it would probably help

I thought it was like the way one’s brain is wired that causes them to have slightly different perception than the rest.

I’m no expert, either, but this is a solid explanation IMO. It’s why autistic people are prone to sensory overload; their brains don’t filter out noise (like the hum of the refrigerator, the sounds of people chewing, or background conversations) the way that most allistic people’s brains do. It also definitely could have been the reason, or at least contributed to, why the woman from your post was confused - particularly if she was trying to figure out why allistic people did something.

Sorry, that’s incorrect.

Autism is commonly comorbid with mental health disorders (aka “mental illnesses”) like anxiety, depression, ADHD, etc., as well as with intellectual developmental disorders, but autism is still considered, at worst, a neurodevelopmental disorder, regardless of where an individual falls on the spectrum.

Both the DSM-V and ICD-11 are in agreement about this, for what that’s worth, but you could also just do a search for “Is autism a mental illness?” on Duckduckgo, Kagi, Searx, Bing, Google, or whatever, if you want to confirm.

The lady was autistic if I remember collectly. She had a boyfriend who also had a mental ilness.

Autism isn’t a mental illness.

What would moving your account here from Reddit entail? What would transfer with you? Your posts? Comments? Followed and moderated subreddits? Upvotes and downvotes?

I think the better question than “Does the experience system sound like it has potential,” then, is “Does the overall concept / system have potential?”

My gut is probably, but it depends a lot more on what you’re willing to put into it and what you want out of it. What’s your metric for success? If it’s something you want to run yourself and to share online to have a few groups use it, then that’s a lot more achievable than being able to get a publishing deal, for example. And in-between, publishing on drivethrurpg or something similar, at a nominal cost (like $2-$5), would take more effort than the former and less than the latter; and the higher the cost and the higher the number of players you’d want, the higher the effort you need to put in (and a lot of that isn’t just in system building, but in art, community building, marketing, etc.).

From what you’ve shared, it sounds like an interesting system. I could especially see it working in an academy setting where grinding skills to be able to pass practical exams is one of the players’ goals. I also could see it working well by a loosely GMed play by post system, with the players self-enforcing (or possibly leveraging some tools built into the site to track resource pools, experience, rolling, etc.), though I haven’t played in a forum game myself, so I might be way off-base.

Did your system have classes or was it completely free-form in terms of gaining access to those skill trees?

I run a Monster of the Week game and my players get experience throughout sessions, as well as at the end. The mechanics are basically:

• It takes 5 experience points to level up.
• If you fail a roll, you get an experience point.
• If you level up, you get the benefit immediately.
• At the end of the session, everyone gets 0-2 experience points.

I think other PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse - systems inspired by Apocalypse World) systems do something similar.

I grew increasingly frustrated with the system of only distributing advancement/experience points at the end of a session.

Isn’t the simple fix to this to just distribute experience points as soon as they’re earned?

At some point, I started to divise a play system that relied on a split experience atribution system, with players being able to automatically rack experience points from directly using their skills/habilties, while the DM would keep a tally of points from goals/missions achieved, distributable at session end.

Your system sounds like the way that skill-based video game RPGs (Elder Scrolls games and Arcanum come to mind) handle experience.

In a lot of games I’ve played, I’d rather get experience for in-game accomplishments immediately and to be able to train skills like this during downtime - generally between games.

To those with more experience in TTRPGs: would this be feaseable? Or enticing? Interesting?

I could see people being interested in it. You get instant gratification and a bit of extra crunchiness. A lot of players enjoy that.

With the right skill system I could see this being useful. My main concern is that if you put this on top of a system with relatively few skills, it could encourage people to game it by grinding. There are ways to mitigate that, though.

In a system with fewer skills, instead of just being experience points, the “currency” you earned this way could be used for temporary power ups related to the skill in question.

You could also limit it so you only rewarded players for story-related tasks.

I’d recommend Colemak Mod-DH, personally - it seems ergonomically superior and switching later is a bit of a pain.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is probably the tech you’d want. It basically involves a knowledge library being built from the documents you upload, which is then indexed when you ask questions.

NotebookLM by Google is an off the shelf tool that is specialized in this, but you can upload documents to ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, etc., and get the same benefit.

If you self hosted, Open WebUI with Ollama supports this, but far from the only one.

If you dislike decentralization, then that’s like being on an instance that’s banned every other instance.

Do you mean that you dislike defederation?

stuck with the GPL forever

If you accept a patch and don’t have the ability to relicense it, you can remove it and re-license the new codebase. You can even re-implement changes made by the patch in many cases, whether those changes are bug fixes or new features.

If you re-implement the change, you do need to ensure this is done in a way that doesn’t cause it to become a derivative work, but it’s much easier if you have copyright to 99% of a work already and only need to re-implement 1% or so. If you’ve received substantial community contributions and the community is opposed to relicensing, it will be much harder to do so.

A clean room implementation - where the person rewriting the code doesn’t look at the original code, and is only given a description of the functionality - which can include a detailed description of the algorithm - is the most defensible way to perform such a rewrite and relicense, but it’s not the only option.

You should generally consult an attorney when relicensing and shouldn’t just do it casually. But a single patch certainly doesn’t mean you’re locked in forever.