Even currently available smartphones have a tap to pay range of multiple centimeters. Stop buying thre cheapest crappiest phones available and you'll be fine. I would prefer to be able to limit the range to "full contact" or have an "initiate payment" button.

>Neither of them understand what they've given up (probably even a little bit) for the captive portals they've inured themselves to.

They aren't giving anything up - if they had actual computers they'd be on Windows 11 by now, which is becoming (or has become) the next captive portal.

While I don't 100% agree with "open Office suites work just fine" because LibreOffice (the one I use privately and for side gigs) has a bunch of issues, I would like to volunteer that MS365 currently has MORE issues. Excel especially, when combined with online editing, is a huge fiasco when you start creating larger spreadsheets with lots of filtering. Even on a brand new laptop you get the dreaded "14 cores... xx%" status bar notification for minutes on end when activating a filter rule. Loading the same spreadsheets online often results in a "We ran into an error - please open in desktop version of Excel" popup.

And since it's Microsoft, that ties nicely into OneDrive freezing Explorer for 10 seconds at a time every time you move or rename a file in one of your shared folders...

Closing the work laptop and opening something that runs Debian is a huge relief these days.

I think your Thinkpad is broken. My house is littered with the things and none of them charge off only a single port unless defective.

Notable exceptions are P and X1E series devices, but those don't charge off USB-C at all up until the latest X1E gen.

What crappy laptops are we talking about here? I've seen this on tablets and phones but never a laptop. Even my crappy Dell work laptop does just fine on a USB-C docking station.

Exactly. I'm describing things programmers THINK are elegant.

>Ok, so you don't recognize elegance either.

I would never presume to recognize it.

It's just that all the examples I've seen of supposed elegance in code have seemed more like inside jokes between people in the know. Or possibly a way to increase job security... as long as nobody can understand WTF you did without immense effort, you're more difficult to replace. Yay?

>Quoting a high end philosopher with an incomprehensible unrelated quote makes your argument unassailable by small minds.

I love it. Definitely need to include this in my repertoire at work.

As a hardware developer who only dabbles in programming, I've never really understood the reason for "elegant" code. I mostly find it hard to read and understand.

To me, good code is self-explanatory and, barring that, well documented. It should also produce an efficient program, but that's not *necessarily* directly linked to what I've seen programmers call "elegant", which is usually something much shorter and more cryptic than I would have written. With no comments, of course.

If you want to use modern security-theatre-required applications (such as banking or trading), you're pretty much fucked unless you go with a big mainstream phone OS. A lot of institutions/companies seem to be deprecating website functionality in favor of mobile apps for the "security" features, so just using a web browser is also no longer an alternative.

I literally run this setup, with a dedicated gaming/photo/music/video PC that runs Windows and everything else on Debian.

However, that doesn't solve the aggravation entirely - as I sit here on the couch typing on my Debian Thinkpad, I'm seeing in the corner of my eye that Windows has once again woken up to install updates - despite having disabled automatic updates AND disabled wake timers. I still get the "Hey, install Windows 11!" or "Hey, I've reinstalled Edge prominently for you and would like to help you import all your bookmarks!" after updates, and it won't just stay the fuck asleep or hibernated.

When I finally find a good FOSS alternative to Photoshop Camera RAW I'll probably revisit getting rid of Windows entirely, but until then I'll have to keep it around, so I might as well keep running my games, DAW and video editing on it.

They're quite nice when you're trying to be, you know, energy efficient... I quite like 'em for battery life.

The NPU seems much more useless to me, other than slightly improving greenscreen functionality I have no idea what to use it for.

Have you been there? I'd say it's much worse than you make it sound.

A lot of the immediate pollution is from people literally burning trash and (literal) shit in the streets. Not just to get rid of it - during the colder months (Delhi gets surprisingly cold) it's also to keep warm. The trash itself strewn absolutely everywhere doesn't help either.

It was the same in most of the larger cities... this was right before Covid. Will take a lot more than electric cars to make me want to go back...

It doesn't sound like you've ever used Gnome. Workspaces, tiling extensions, and even the built in native splitscreen layout are all conducive to a decent multitasking experience. My 4k display is usually split into 8 different segments... on Gnome...

For most Lifetime license owners that'll probably just be the kick in the pants they need to migrate to an open source alternative...

Have they fixed all the issues yet? Power drain, limits on modularity (certain modules can go in certain slots without triggering aforementioned power drain), weird firmware issues, bad layout on the coin cell holder causing people to rip it off (solder pads and all) when trying to replace the RTC battery...?

I'm all for releasing new mainboards with all the new tech, but it would be great if their sustainable laptop concept could be, well, sustainable... WITHOUT having to replace the entire core of the machine in order to get fixes for the issues.