I was working on my Mom’s Samsung tonight and can confirm that default One UI is the worst cell phone interface experience I’ve ever had. Needing a skin or launcher is a deal breaker when devices with great OOTB experience exist.

I am nearing the end of my rope with Android, I might suggest hanging on with your iPhone for another cycle. My P9 Pro is feeling more and more like just an advertisement data collection machine, and core features like speech to text and notifications have never been worse.

I don’t own an iPhone, but got an iPad in 2024, and most of what I do on my iPad feels more refined. I was floored this morning when speaking out a comment on the iPad that the text to speech didn’t add a bunch of random periods/caps alongside half a dozen incorrect words. iOS also has basic things like consistent first party podcast, payment, and chat apps that they don’t continually switch out every few years like what Google just did (looking at you Google Podcasts, GPay in USA, and Hangouts). We’re also losing the ability to install apps from outside the walled garden that is then play store at some point soon. I’m not looking forward to learning what that means for my Retroid/Android gaming handhelds.

If you do jump to Android, consider the Pixel 9 Pro. I hate it the least of anything I’ve tried in then Android universe. Battery life is very respectable, I can actually get 2 full days from a charge. The cameras have somehow fallen in their standard shooting mode, but the pro/high res mode is crispy AF, just a bummer that the file sizes are bigger than they are on my Sony mirrorless. Samsung makes nice hardware but the skin they put on Android is truly terrible. If you use Microsoft work apps on your phone, you’ll appreciate being able to shut them off with one button, and your employer’s limited visibility into your phone will be further reduced to what’s installed in the work container.

Microtik is the router brand that I want to love, I even looked into deploying them when I worked at a service provider. Those little things had more features than anything else, but unfortunately they had such a poor track record with vulnerabilities that they really can’t be considered.

We’re a year or so into our AWS migration, but will have a presence on prem for years to come. Broadcom has seen our last dollar, so for what remains on prem, we will be moving to a different hypervisor. I was kinda hoping that Proxmox could be the one, but it may not shake out that way.

I don’t even want to hear an argument for moving back on prem with how badly Broadcom/VMware ripped our eyes out this year. 350% increase over 2 years ago, and I still have to buy the hardware, secure it in a room, power it, buy redundant Internet and networking equipment, get a backup facility, buy and test a generator/UPS, and condition the damn air. Oh then every few years we have to switch out all the hardware when it stops getting vendor support.

At least everyone was all in the same boat today, and we all know what was broken.

I really like my Synology DS220+, and DSM 7 has given me 0 issues. Recently I wanted to upgrade to something with 2.5Gbe networking, but most of the models I was considering had this new branded drive restriction. I had seen a few comments that indicated they were considering removing this, though it was unclear if that was an upcoming hardware releases or upcoming software releases.

I’ve heard that it is possible to migrate your existing non-Synology drives to a new NAS with drive restrictions as-is if they are already formatted from the old NAS. If you are looking to go from a two drives to four drives I’m not sure how that would work, and if a drive failed I think you would either need to replace it with Synology hardware or run the workaround script to remove the restriction.

I won’t personally run the workaround script myself, for a few reasons. I am extremely cautious with my data, and I also don’t want to reward them right now, but im not in a rush to upgrade. I’ll wait them out until they backtrack.

Firefox is doing amazing right now. My uBlock origin on desktop and mobile Android is still working months after it stopped working in Chrome.

Agreed across all points. Android’s main advantages after the changes go through with side loading will be:

1. choice of manufacturer and
2. the still-deeply-flawed-but-far-superior implementation of a work profile in Android.

I love being able to press one button and have all of my containerized work apps shut off. It is also quite nice that a remote wipe from M365 could be limited to the work app container rather than the entire phone.

It is a tough choice, both companies are gigantic and kind of scumbags. Funny story though, I was also in the market for a new computer recently as my 10 year old Windows 10 tower was really starting to show its age. My frustrations with Windows had also peaked.

I have been doing a more photo and video editing for fun, and I ended up taking a leap. I got an M4 Pro Mac mini. Mac OS is definitively better (IMO) for home use than Windows, and the M series processors are like wizardry. I liked it so much that shortly after I bought a used M2 Max MacBook Pro off of a coworker.

Coincidentally, a few months after I got my Macs LTT also switched over first to Snapdragon-based Windows laptops and later to Macs for a 30-day challenge and they ended up staying on the Macs.

I am an IT manager and I don’t think I would ever want to deploy Macs at scale in my workplace, though it is the only computer I look forward to using now.

One personal phone. They give me a stipend. I did the two-phone game years ago and I’ll never do it again. It’s fine.

I’m sure we all have a different perception, but my current view is that Google sells you a phone that they need to push ads and harvest vast amounts of data from you in order to make money on the phone, and Apple somehow needs to do this less.

Which company do you feel takes privacy more seriously? From what I understand, Google primarily makes their money from advertising.

I can’t do Graphene because of work. I am an IT manager, and one of our guys did graphene and had a host of issues with the work apps. I really can’t risk any issues.

Sorry I should have clarified. Google pay moved the payment features to Google wallet, but the biggest loss was the person-to-person payments are now gone. I never understood why they had multiple apps that did the same thing. I seem to also remember a time where there was a Google pay and gpay app that lived side by side, so there were a total of three apps when there should have been one.

Yes, sorry I should have clarified. The biggest loss was the person-to-person payments are now gone. I never understood why they had multiple apps that did the same thing. I seem to also remember a time where there was a Google pay and gpay app that lived side by side, so there were a total of three apps when there should have been one.

The Android ecosystem has been feeling more like an invasive chaotic advertisement machine the past few years. The play store is a cesspool, the weather app switch was poorly executed, Google Podcasts went to the graveyard, and Google pay getting shut down meant I had to switch back to vomits Venmo.

I still have Android gaming handhelds, but why wouldn’t I just get an iPhone the next time I go to replace my phone? I can’t believe I’m even saying that after being so die hard Android so for years.

Agreed. I’ve stated it before in other threads, and I’ll say it again here, but if they asked me in 5 years to pay another $89 or whatever in continuing support for a badge on my server I’d happily do it. Plex is really good. Great UI, great apps, great external enrichments like trailers/subtitles/ratings/actor info, and Plexamp is 9.5/10 for music.

Their biggest fault is how they communicated about the change for remote users. I did have a few family members get the email and ask if they were going to have to start paying monthly now, but they’ve never been on a free server. They should have stated more clearly than if you were on a Plex Pass server that no change is required.

For software I like made by people getting paid, I was happy to pay the one time fee. It’s really good, secure, and downloads are fast now.

I have the same setup with Picard --> mp3tag, it works very well for me. I prefer to overwrite the artist field with the album artist field for cleaner sync to my iPods with MediaMonkey (iPods handled multiple artists in the worst way imaginable).

Picard did take some light up front tweaking to get the directory naming to albumartist\yyyy - albumname\01 songtitle.flac but it was worth it

For audiobooks check out Audiobookshelf. On my NAS I run it in Container Manager (Docker) and get the image directly from the built-in repo. I check for image updates every few weeks, though only to keep compatibility with the apps, as I don’t notice new features. Very easy to set up, just make sure your folders are named correctly.

I’m coming up on 5 years as a Plex pass owner, so my users and I will not be impacted by this change. In five more years if they asked me nicely to pay another $89 to support the service I would. Send me some stickers and put a badge on my server. I get a lot of use out of the software/service, as do my family members.

I will say, I am quite annoyed at the wording and audience of this email. Jellyfin is just not an option for me until there is excellent feature parity with Plex. I know they are a lot of Jellyfin fans here, in my opinion, Plex is a significantly better experience for me.