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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 2nd, 2024

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  • I went from Sony, Samsung, and LG to now buying TCL. At under $1000 for a 65", they’re the best option.

    Anything under $1500 I’d bet on TCL. Keep in mind TCL manufacturers a great chunk of the worlds LCDs that aren’t just for TCL. Pretty sure they bought LGs LCD plants. Maybe Samsung too.

    Their TVs have a lot of dimming zones. Sony I don’t think makes LCDs or OLED panels themselves. At least one line of their TVs use TCL panels already. They buy from others

    Here’s a review for the model that came out last year. At this point where’s it’s regularly on “sale” for $1000. TVs are MSRP for like half a year and then the discounts always seem to me to be happening

    https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/tcl/qm8k

    1,680 dimming zones in the 65" model and from what I’ve read, the global models are usually one year behind China. So in 2025 China had TCL TVs with even more dimming zones. 8 years ago sub $1000 65" with array LED backlight zones were like 100-200 zones. OLED were incredibly better and would kill off LCDs when prices came down. The density of dimming zones I think progressed faster than people expected

    So TCL has solid image processing while Sony has great image processing but not so much better for me to think it’s worth it. Same with the $1000-2000 mini-led backlit LCDs vs OLED. Yes OLED looks better. Don’t feel like it’s large enough for me to go much higher than a $1000 TV. That’s a reality for home theater brands today. TVs, speakers, receivers/amplifiers, headphones, mics, etc - there’s good stuff at low prices.

    Everyone’s competing on value now. There used to always be rumors about a Apple TV (actual TV) and Apple EVs. Never hear about rumors for those anymore. Don’t think the quality difference possibility and profit margins exist to make those appealing anymore for Apple. Sony like Apple is increasingly a services/media company.

    Samsung - Tizen sucks. I don’t recall how LG and WebOS looks, but to me Tizen is leagues above Android and Roku in making your TV into a loud billboard. At least Android you can install a different launcher.


















  • I don’t think 10 lifetimes is enough for me to learn about all the software that people out there run on Linux servers. Then I die my last lifetime and people come up with new software. Myself as an individual could see all that and say that software like that should be available on a server OS especially to compete with Linux. A huge company with over a hundred thousand employees. They can probably crowdsource through their employees a way longer list than me but will leadership read the list? Will they greenlight funding development for all that software? Will they match up to as good and ideally better to be worth paying for than the free and open source stuff on Linux? Will they keep up development on all that software or fall behind the open source stuff?

    If they can’t do that, there’s no reason for any company to smartly spend money on a proprietary server OS license for what would be immediately a worse product or a product that is at best just as good or a product that would inevitably end up being worse than the Linux ecosystem. I consider it an impossibility for a new proprietary OS to cover the whole breadth of server software out there and even the whole breadth of server hardware support. I’m not sure what the status is of Windows Server ARM and Windows Server RISC-V. Don’t know how popular POWER is on server or if SPARC is still kicking. That’s top 5 largest company in the world Microsoft that’s been doing operating systems for like 40 years.

    Doing a Linux spin makes the most sense.

    Plus Linux development is supported by a huge amount of large companies. It’s not rag tag open source freelancers vs mega-corporation. It would be a collection of mega-corporations to small corporations plus independent individuals vs a mega-corporation







  • Before big commercial companies can succeed with the mainstream, flatpak permission handling that is as smooth as Android and iOS. Not everything is going to be in the distros base package manager and devs need a way to distribute software that can be expected to work on any of these devices. No confusions over why they’re system doesn’t know what to do with a deb or rpm file. Flatpak is the closest thing right now to something with universal adoption. After that it’s a slow and steady grind for market share. Like how Macs market share 20 years ago isn’t very different from where Linux is today

    I think a hardware company could succeed better by marketing the devices as creation devices. Focus on Blender, Krita, Ardour, Darktable, Kdenlive, etc. Pretty much the niche Macs were marketed as 25 years ago getting regular people interested with stuff like garageband and imovie


  • Last I had it on my desktop was like 2 months ago. Oddities with games here and there was a deal breaker for me. Don’t remember if I could alt tab over video game windows yet. Not being able to alt-tab other windows over a video game is a deal breaker for me. There were random nich applications I don’t recall that didn’t handle dialog windows/file pickers well. That may be better by now. The file explorer is really bare bones even compared to nautilus. Not expecting Dolphin but I want something better.

    High hopes though. I may give it another go as my primary with 26.04. The Cosmic applications are all pretty fast. I think I like how it looks more than KDE just KDE is way more fully featured


  • The outside display is just about 21:9 and internal about 4:3, sounds like it’s an ultimate retro gaming handheld. Lack of SD card support is a pain though

    For folds, I like the old flip phone style flips better. The only puzzling thing with those ones are why keep the front facing camera when the rear cameras have a display on that half on the phone. The outer display on this is 6.5". It’s not a compromise in size at all like the flips/razrs. Internal screen shouldn’t have a selfie camera either




  • Dumb of HP and Dell to not eat the cost. Just in the future never support VVC. HEVC is well enough a thing already. Push defaults to be AV1 and then in like 5-7 years, AV2. I use AV1 for everything I can. Computer supports it. My phone does not but edits I do on my PC will be encoded to AV1. Photos, support JPEG-XL but in the interim, AVIF. Screw apple for going with HEIC. I highly doubt that there will be a successor to UHD Blu-Rays to adopt VVC. No big reason to jump to 8k. Only good would be higher bitrates/better compression and audio.

    Films are mostly recorded digitally with 4k-6k cameras or a limited amount of 35mm still going on that scans well to around 4k. 8K digital cinema cameras are becoming more common but the 4k-6k ones are dominant and 70mm is expensive and uncommon. Plus significant digital effects are prevalent on even low action movies, non-sci-fi. Those are still going to have been mostly done and mastered for 4k. Another round of remastering required for 8k content where digital or 70mm film masters exists. Dinosaur broadcasters may choose VVC the shrinking world population watching dinosaur broadcasters. AV1 is increasingly the present and AV2 will be the future. VVC will be end of line because of short sighted greed


  • You may just want to head to YouTube and look for a really dry video instructions. When I first got started on Linux like 15 years ago, videos were a lot less intimidating to me

    I’d YouTube installing Ubuntu and use the YouTube filter option set to like 1 month. There’s constantly new videos for intro to Linux YouTube. I say Ubuntu because it’s a part of the most common family of popular Linux distributions


  • It’s why I favored Unity over Gnome back in the day. The titlebar/basic menu items and close/minimize/expand buttons integrated into the top bar was better. Ya it was probably a copy of MacOS/OSX. Damn good to me in my opinion though. Overall I like Gnome but I’m not sold on it long term. Someday I may try going full time on KDE again. Very likely popos 26.04 with Cosmic I’ll try that out on my primary computer when it releases