Who said anything about a low res backlit screen? And if you read monitors and screens all day, it may be an issue, but with dark mode reading it is fine. The devices I am talking about have about twice the PPI as a 22/24 inch 1080p monitor. There are cheap e-readers that have atrocious resolutions but the tablets I am talking about are fine, but not as good as EInk.

If you can get an Onyx Boox tablet used by a first adopter that it wasn’t right for, it has the best of all worlds. Open, Android, EInk, large screen, and can be used to bang out content and read email. Other than that I would just get a downmarket but new Android Tablet and use it as a dedicated eBook and audio book/podcast device. The screen isn’t ideal but you can get a stock android tablet for $150 bucks us and use Caliber on it along with all the typical android stuff. Hell you might even be able to get a Linux tablet that would fit your needs but cost a little more. But if you go tablet the devices tend to be a bit more open to sideloading.

On Vivaldi and yeah it was paywalled so I went straight to my collection of workarounds and no built in solutions. Overall faster that way.

For those who are paywalled https://web.archive.org/web/20240927171841/https://theintercept.com/2024/09/27/google-israel-defense-tech-conference/

I don’t know… maybe it is because I am consuming most of my YT content on desktop and that carries over to my android experience. As a matter of fact I don’t consume shorts on Android and that may be the difference. My feed on desktop is all computer stuff, CBC stuff, occasional Marvel stuff, and ASMR stuff, and half of that I don’t watch.

I really feel sorry for you if that is what your Android Experience is. I would suggest GrayJay or New Pipe to get out of the Algorithm then. I could remember back about 5 years ago when I started getting full episodes as an ad, of absolute religious trash, and I am talking when I reported them the channel was banned in a single report trash, at a time when I, due to illness, that I would listen to while soaking in the tub with a lift to get my sick ass in an out, and they would put 45 minute shows as ads. I would get so angry but its a long ad, so it wasn’t worth me getting out of the bath to skip it, and 15 minutes later of “Kill the HOMO-Sexuals” and “that current bad thing happened because we voted in those godless communists and socialists… why we should just hang them and save the country! A-MEN!!!” and I was using up power on my bath lift to get my sopping wet butt up and report their ass. After the 5th report I temporarily moved to New Pipe and stuck to desktop where I got full episodes as ads but not THOSE episodes.

YouTube can really fuck themselves over when they sell contra-ads on leftist, or any media, and now they are reaping the whirlwind with the ad platform and the search platform in the middle of Antitrust right now.

I don’t get allot of that, possibly because I have History turned off and refuse to turn it back on.

• I vastly avoid Right Wing content, and most of what I do encounter is like old school Republican, reeeally old school Republican. They are as pissed at the Right Wing’s take over by the Alt-Right(and worse)
• YouTube has games?!?
• The shorts content I get is mostly computer content and news, some branding because I have entered contests, and that is it. I have seen 1 short that was even approaching jailbaity and it was an add for a coming of age movie.
• It has been literally over a year since I used Google to find a video (well except for a tech support video I keep loosing the link to that I use to help people with installing Windows 11 Locally) and I have been using Startpage which anonymizes Google results.

If you disabling your Ad ID and turning off your history and you still get all that BS I would be looking for an Exit Strategy to.

You think that there aren’t people who might need a Smartphone for work or medical emergencies? That is a non-zero number, so no. However should we have everyone’s base needs met before others get past a certain point before luxury goods? Yes. Should we be able to do that now AND have luxury goods? Also Yes. Is it alright for people to have a Billion Dollars before that? Definitely No.

Food is food. Do what you want to do to your food because you are eating it. Other people aren’t eating it so they don’t get a say. If most people saw what the original pizzas were they wouldn’t recognize them and some wouldn’t like them, including modern Italians.

Tabasco, in my opinion, is just like eating a pizza with peppers or a bunch of pepper flakes on it, or as I sometimes do, ground cayenne pepper.

I find that people who come from the old days of linux will often respond “you have to use terminal”, or “learn the operating system”, or even balk at people saying you can just use the GUI Interface/Desktop Environments. And then when you get help from expirienced users you get allot of terminal commands, which makes people think “I can’t use Linux without learning the terminal first”. In actuality it is just easier to show a person a command and ask for the results than it is to walk a person through getting the same info otherwise.

“OK, which Desktop Environment are you using?”.

“Desktop what?”.

“Which version of OS did you download and install?”.

“Cinnamon.”.

“X or Wayland?”.

“What’s a Wayland?”.

“OK, X. Is your system up to date and which kernel are you running?”.

…and so on. It is faster to just help working in the terminal. The Desktop Environments are fairly far along and most that I have worked with you could get by completely in the Desktop and not touch the terminal.

I would suggest Linux Mint, but for now I would stick to the non latest version of 21.3 as they bit off ALLOT in 22 and while it works for allot of people there are driver bugs they inherited from Ubuntu and have not implemented the fix for yet and allot of other pains in the toukus so if you want a version with the minimum of troubleshooting and stable Desktop Environments I would stick to 21.3 (If I had any sense I would be switching back to it from 22 myself).

If you want another option it would be Ubuntu and its Different Desktop ‘Spins’ to see which you like the most. Some people prefer to start off on Fedora and I am told it has a good DE, or some people recommend PopOS which had its own spin on a DE but they have let development lag on it as they developed their Cosmic Desktop for the Wayland project (the project that is superseding the X.org project for making windows).

Which ever you choose, good luck. I am in the same boat and I am trying to learn what I can before it is too late.

While people who know me would think that it is Bioshock 2 for a ton of issues, but that is mostly because it is automatically compared to Bioshock, ARK: Survival Evolved for its issues but I have 9k hours in it and growing so I can’t say that, or the horribly disappointing Baldur’s Gate after I finally got to play it years after and it kept giving me migraines. No. The worst game I ever played was also one of the most beautiful and beautifully animated arcade games, Dragons Quest. You had to match your movements to certain flashes on the TV and between input lag, multiple inputs reading as rejections, and frequently flaky controls the game was impossible for all but the most rich to get past the first 2 or three prompts. I on occasion saw a player who had pumped a couple of hundred of dollars into the machine to figure out its quirks and know when it was broken and they actually got somewhere. I never did. The same happened for the less successful Space Quest which was the same machine with a new cabinet, broadly speaking.