I used an Ubuntu Phone as my daily for about 6 months.
And how was it
Quite bad. This was over 10 years ago so the details are muddy... It was on BQ hardware and the first weeks it couldn't even work outside on GSM or 3G (or whatever was at the time). It was clearly developed and tested solely on Wifi. Using cellular connection make it fall apart and constantly hang.
Then it never was able to get WhatsApp working. Everyone uses WhatsApp, and had to get by using old SMS or whoever I got to trick to install the then unknown Telegram.
Eventually got tired and got back to an Android phone. An Alcatel if I recall correctly.
After some time, BQ offered a way to revert the hardware back to its Android version, did that and had a backup for many years.
It was a very messy and buggy launch, but being on the bleeding edge, it's expected. If they had offered a WhatsApp app I would have hung on way longer, it was the only deal breaker.
I knew a woman who used an iPhone 6 up until I think 2022.
Her secret was she never did updates. And lo and behold, the phone kept working fine and she never felt any need to get a new one. By the end, the battery lasted about 15-20 minutes.
This is pretty horrible to hear as someone working in security. Just because it works does not mean you should do it.
I imagine her data gets lost multiple times per year.
I don’t disagree - I should make clear; I’m not saying this as an example of a good thing you should do (hence why I posted it in this thread), more as a data point about how happy Apple is to break their stuff for old hardware holders and to give some perspective on how they use software updates to encourage hardware purchases.
My 6s still works. I did have the battery replaced 3 years ago because I expected to continue to use it a couple more years. I got a new phone last year but my old one is still happily running.
At university in the 90s some friends and I ran our own Linux server. It was a 486 or early Pentium and we hooked it up to the university network in a post grad student's office who was happy to just keep it running under his desk.
We even got the campus sysadmins to give us a proper edu domain name. It was a more open and different time and ethernet still meant coax cables with T connectors and terminators.
We were running pre v1 kernel on slackware and it was all installed from floppies. We used it as a web server, coded and played muds, read newsgroups and mail etc. I think tin and pine etc. we easily had 20 users using it from the computer labs.
Anyways the computer kept dying or freezing occasionally. Still early Linux. And the office where it was kept wasn't always open and we didn't have a key.
Being electronic engineering students we built a whole circuit with a PIC controller which plugged into the parallel port. We wrote a watchdog daemon which would keep pinging this dongle. And the firmware on the PIC would check for these pings.
If the server died the pings would stop and the dead man's switch dongle was wired directly into the hardware reset button of the PC.
Worked like a charm for 4 years. And apparently worked for another 5 or 6 after I left.
Those were truly wonderful times. I remember even around 2000 campus network security was minimal to non-existent and we were all just going wild and I learned so much.
It was so much fun. I still get some of the same thrills building a retro console using a rpi, or a home media server in the garage using a second hand dual Xeon motherboard.
But sadly as the CEO of a software firm I don't get to hack away much on anything anymore.
I do occasionally get to impress the young ones with my Linux command line wizardry and 1337 vim skills. I really need to get a beard.
Years ago I got a second hand Sega Saturn - it was fine for a while then stopped working because it couldn't read the disks.
But then I discovered (not sure how) that if I turned it upside down it would work fine. So I did that for a couple of years.
...how did you work that out?!
They probably got frustrated and kicked it across the room and it landed upside and started loading.
That's my head canon anyways.
I got an HP laptop in university and someone coughed a mouthful of tea onto my keyboard a few months later. At first I kept "a" on my clipboard so I could paste it as needed while typing, but soon other keys followed. So my computer is over 6 years old and I've been typing for almost 6 years using:
- The 4 on my num pad as the A key
- The 7 on my numpad as Q
- The 5 on my numpad as tab
- The 2 on my numpad as Z
- The help/F1 is ESC
- The numpad 1 to type 1 and exclamation points
Recently, I've also changed the minus on my numpad to be ` (backtick). I don't have a capslock. Thankfully, the damage didn't continue to spread because I would have eventually run out of keys.
Sometimes I fantasize about someone calling me out on a weird typo so I can tell them about it.
did you ignore
You're using the past tense here. That's gonna narrow my potential responses.
My family's first computer baxk in the 90s was a hand-me-down power Mac from a relative. Between whatever they had done with it before we got it, and what we managed to screw up as inexperienced computer users playing around with it, it had it's share of little quirks.
At some point we managed to turn on some screen reading function, and set the voice profile to something singsongy. It also had an error that popped up every time you started it up. The result of this is that almost 3 decades later I still have this ridiculous little tune seared into my brain after hearing my computer literally sing it who knows how many hundreds, maybe thousands of times
The globalfax software has successfully installed, however, since no fax device control panels were loaded, faxing has been disabled
Put up with it for several years, none of us knew or really cared enough to figure out how to get rid of that error or turn off the text-to-speech.
When I set dark mode in an app, the top of the window would remain light, in XFCE. But in early January 2024, I realized it was because XFCE had a theme setting in both Appearance and Window Manager, and they were conflicting with each other. I ignored it for quite a while but now I'm happy with my full dark mode computer
When i boot up my (linux) PC sometimes the second monitor is all messed up. Reloading i3 with super+shift+r fixes it so i can't be bothered to actually fix it.
Hah dude I've been using i3 for years, and same. Like maybe 30% of the time. And half the time the background image is wonky when I start it up. Super+shift+r fixes it every time though, so fuck it
The on/off/wake button on my phone broke off. I installed an app that would wake the phone automatically if the gyro sensors sensed it was taken out of the pocket, which worked around 60% of the time. I was a broke student at the time, so I dealt with that for a year or so before buying a new phone.
My last phone the USB c port died and I just used wireless charging for like 2 years lol.
Used an OG Google pixel until about a year ago. Had to replace the battery a couple times but otherwise still mostly ran like it was brand new.
Have a Samsung Galaxy. Screen cracked by itself several months after getting it, however I was busy, didn't have time to take it in and got used to it. Now the warranty is expired so I can't get the screen replaced anymore. I cope by believing they wouldn't have replaced it and would have told me it was somehow my fault despite using a fairly heavy case and not being a phone-dropper/slammer.
The bearings of the OG case-fans started to fail so I reconfigured them to kick in when the CPU got hot. One after another I ended with only 1 left working all the time...
Had them all replaced last month, 4 fans on max are quieter than the last at 50%...
Oof, there's many.
Let's start with my older phone (Moto G5s Plus). Right since I got it, the camera focus was broken. When trying to focus, it would just vibrate and make rattling noise. HOWEVER, I found a "solution". Hitting it just right from the back and shaking it side-to-side worked. I used it like that for 4 years.
My current phone (Poco X3 Pro)has many software bugs. Some I probably don't remember as getting around them is a muscle memory.
Let's start with audio. The left and right microphones are swapped. Thus I flip it around (left-handed) when recording videos. This actually affects a few different MIUI-powered phones as I found out.
Wallpaper bug:
This started appearing since I got my phone back with MIUI global instead of EEA after both MOBO replacements (yes, and both were in warranty). The lockscreen wallpaper gets stretched top to bottom after reboot, but isn't affected by resolution. Homescreen wallpaper gets stretched if resolution is different than native, otherwise it gets zoomed in.
"Fix:"
- For homescreen, create a black rectangle with resolution of 1080x2400 and insert the desired wallpaper into it, but slightly smaller, in center.
- Set it as wallpaper
- Reboot the phone
- When asked for PIN, lock the screen first, wake it up, and just then enter the PIN. This fixes the lockscreen wallpaper.
- Unlock the device and stay on homescreen
- Pull down the notification bar, decrease and then increase brightness
Done! The wallpaper now has correct aspect ratio, it's just a bit fuzzy due to upscaling.
Images created in Termux not visible to Google Photos:
Go into Google Files, rename the file to something else, then change it back. Done!
Files from Termux counting into "System storage":
Same fix as above.
Uploads to OneDrive from Android crashing:
The solution is to use Firefox in Termux. Yes, desktop Firefox.
Poco X3 Pro screen not rotating:
The "solution" is opening Accelerometer and Gyroscope in PhyBox
MTP reporting different timestamps:
I do backups with rsync. Unfortunately, I did so over MTP, not realizing the timestamps are adjusted in some odd way. Now, unless I wish to re-do the whole backup, I have to stick to MTP. Unfortunately, I had issues with gvfs on Manjaro, so I can't get CLI access to MTP.
Solution: Use Linux Mint for backups over MTP.
Memory card slot not working in Manjaro for 2 years:
Solution: None. Some update brought the drivers after 2 years.
School network being unrealiable:
Solution: Connecting to both Wi-Fi and mobile data at once and running my own HTTP proxy server in Termux.
Warning: The username and password isn't encrypted in case of HTTP proxy. The proxy will likely also allow access to localhost by default. I'd recommend to null-route those requests. There may be more security issues.
ProtonVPN client being mostly broken on Arch:
Solution: Connecting to ProtonVPN on my phone and running proxy server on it.
School proxy server limiting network speed based on MAC addresses:
This one was used long time in past and kept as a backup. Unfortunately, it was needed again. It limits the speed to around 0.2Mbps if the MAC is unknown, which among other devices includes newer school PCs.
Terrible solution: Cloning MAC of one of the least used ancient desktops and using that on my laptop. I also bought RTL8152B USB Ethernet adapter, and burned that MAC into its eFuse memory (permanent). Pretty convenient.
Ok, I guess that's enough.
My lovley Logitech gamer headset from like 2014 started to loose volume overtime on the right ear. So I just manually adjusted the volume of the right ear to about 60% while the other one had 39%. Over the years that gap grew bigger and bigger. I still use them but they sit at a configuration which now changes every week or so. The right ear sits now a 132% and the left on 39%.
for 5 years my PC would only turn on at a 45degree angle. It would work fine while upright or sideways after turning it on, but to initially start it up it needed to be tilted. I tried reseating everything many many times, I had even replaced a pretty large number of components over that time. Then I moved and when I plopped down the PC a screw popped out of the PSU. problem solved, and I'm very glad it didn't explode.
My parents' plasma TV (probably one of the last working ones in existence) has had HD overscan cutting off the edges of the picture for as long as I can remember. Once they started using a laptop as a media PC, they had to increase the height of the start menu to see it. Just this week I found the setting to fix it burried deep in the TV menus.
They've been effectively watching 720p scaled up to 1080p this entire time...
Spotify would just pause. No reason, no warning. It would just pause. So I’d pull my phone out, unpause it, then it would pause again.
I think it’s been fixed now? Maybe? Hard to tell, because it happened randomly.
This kept happening to me. Then, I realized my account was compromised. Someone in China was also using it to listen to music. It kept pausing every time they started playing a song.
Actively ignoring one now. I have a dying ssd that's been loosing sectors. Everything important is backed up and Its faster than the replacement hdd would be. Waiting for a good deal on a 2 tb nvme ssd
My laptop (Framework 12) sometimes does not start. It seems the hard drive is just not found, or the part used for decryption. I just restart at most 3 times then it works.
I have automated, tested, daily backups in case something goes boom.
My hard drive making dying noises.
I didn't lose anything though. (except money on a new one)
My old iPhone took a swim but it mostly came back. The face sensor and NFC stopped working immediately but after a few months the NFC started working again. Eventually however parts of the touchscreen started failing in vertical strips. At first it was still usable but at some point too much of the screen became unresponsive I had a get a Bluetooth remote to use the phone.
I was stubborn about getting a new phone as I knew the iPhone 15 would get USB C and wanted to wait hot that.
My truck has two warnings. I could get them fixed but they don't bother me, it's for features I don't use and I don't care enough.
I didn't ignore it, but I did have to put up with it for months:
Discord would just never recognize that my PC was being left idle, so I would never get notifications on my phone, which constantly left me gaslighting myself into thinking my friends were ignoring me, or just didn't have any reason to message me all day.
I contacted Discord support at least once over it, and they couldn't do anything to help me figure it out, since I had all my settings set properly to have it switch over to mobile notifications after 1 minute of inactivity.
After a shit ton of googling, I found out that certain devices, namely third-party xbox controllers, could cause a PC to never actually go idle, and then I found a tool to help me check if my PC is idle, started unplugging things one-by-one, and found out that my 8bitdo Arcade controller was the thing keeping my PC from going idle.
The issue popped up with an etsy-bought Guitar Hero controller further down the line as well, but thankfully by then I knew how to troubleshoot the issue. Bonus points, my new fighting game controllers don't have this problem.
When I turn on my PC, it goes into BIOS and I have to Save and restart for it to boot. It doesn’t detect the boot drive at first. Sometimes it does. Been like this for the past 5 months
My computer wasn't booting properly for a month or two, I think it was saying boot drive not found or something. It would work if I went into boot options and picked my main drive.
The cause? I used the Blu Ray drive for the first time in years, and for some dumb reason, that was listed higher in the boot options. My computer was trying to boot into a Blu Ray of Blade Runner
I had a car with a leaky radiator. I would fill it up with water in the morning and drive to work. If I didn't it would start overheating. I don't remember filling it again on the way back. Put up with that for weeks. I think I only got it fixed because the weather warmed up and it was no longer sufficient to cool it. Or maybe it was the same problem as the heating not working and after a few weeks of wearing multiple layers and getting absolutely frozen I finally got it fixed. They may have been two separate issues/occasions, this was around 2003.
Calculator battery housing had a missing screw. Would have to squeeze it there for it to work. Did that for about a year.
Eventually broke entirely. So I soldered in two CR2032 cell holders and glued them to the back. Am now the proud owner of a Casio fx-4000p with an external battery. I made it rechargeable for a while, but quiescent current draw was too high and it was impractical.
I made a living pretty much just doing math for a short while. It served me very well. I refuse to get a new calculator.
Another time my DVD drive had difficulty opening. I'd have to press the eject button a lot of times before it worked, just did that for like 3 months. Eventually it failed entirely, so I took it apart, removed the magnet that holds the drive shut, cooked it on the gas stove to weaken it, and put it back in. Worked for another 6 months. Was glad I paid attention that day in Physics class.
I had a cellphone around 2004 or so, where sometimes the display would suddenly become mirrored. After a while it would also turn upside down. On the really bad days it would be both. Everything else worked fine, so I kept using it, but writing and reading SMS was a pain.
A Fairphone 4. Got it at launch and it's a terribly buggy mess.
Describing all the issues would make a huge wall of text.
The sad part is that the hardware is ok. But they don't seem to have any software QA at all.
My goal was to carry it until 2027, when replacable batteries will become standard, but since I can't even use the phone for calling, I am trying to at least carry it until the Galaxy S55 launches.
My iPhone 4S went for a swim before phones were generally waterproof and the screen backlight went out and the camera light stayed permanently on. I used the blind assist mode with the phone for a few months and even took photos totally blind. Eventually the backlight came on again and I could use the phone totally normal. Finally killed it falling out of my pocket 150’ up while rock climbing. Great phone though.
My old note 9 stopped charging via the USB port. Ended up having to get a wireless charging dock. Worked so well that I still use it instead of wired charging.
I don't know if ignoring is the word for it, but I don't trust for shit the dashboard warnings in my car. I'm pretty sure they don't report issues. I haven't tried to have it checked, but the car is old and I try to pay attention in some other ways.
Especially in older cars, the warnings usually are fully legit - as in, there is no software stack in-between that could be buggy.
However, it's important to note that quite often the probe fails before the car. Meaning that if the oil probe is signaling oil level too low, it might actually be the probe or its wiring that is damaged. This shows up as the same error because hey, it is rather important for the average user to have that warning should the oil level actually be too low, so they make "I cannot know" look as scary as "It's broken" just to make sure you go to the repair shop with that.
Some 20 years ago, the right shift key on my keyboard was busted. I ignored it for so long that I got used to only using the left shift key. To this day, and many keyboards later, that's still how I type.
I actually never learned how to use the right shift. I'm doing fine without it.
Automod. Need I say more?
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