Yeah OK, that’s fair. It’s really a shame how dependent notifications are on Google. ALl the other things - Mail, Photos, Drive,… - are a lot easier to replace.

Android without a Google account is great though

As a fellow Futo user: it’s not great out of the box. My biggest recommendations are:

• under Languages and models, download all the voice models (if you use those), transformers, and wordlists you can for your languages
• if you use multiple languages, set the check on “multilingual typing” for ALL of those languages
• this is probably the biggest one: in text prediction -> Advanced Parameters, DRASTICALLY change the values. The original ones are 3.4 and 4.0 for LLM strength and autocorrect threshold, mine are currently set at 28.5 and 0.8, respectively. This takes the autocorrect from “occasionally working” to “as good as SwiftKey” for me.
• Keyboard and Typing -> Long Press -> Show hints. Could not find that for ages so thought I’d add it here.

Also, two super useful shortcuts: you can press the space-bar and move your finger around to move the pointer; and the same for backspace to fine-control what to delete.

Hope this helps, but if not… What additional gripes do you have with it?

Will do! Thank you!

That sounds great. I think I’ve given it more than a month overall, but probably never longer than a week at a time. Guess I’ll have to have my SO hide my normal keyboard lol

I built and configured an Arkenswoop some time in 2023. It’s really nice. However… I have gotten quite fast on a conventional keyboard just by using it over the years, and re-learning that is just so tedious. Every time I try, something with a deadline comes up, and I switch back “temporarily”.

Anyone have experience overcoming this?

Fair… Sorry, I always forget how prominent Apple devices are in the US.

Thunderbird for mobile is great! And in contrast to the gmail app, search actually works, lol

They blamed it on the communist party, yes. There were 8 parties represented in the Reichstag at the time though.

I have one big frustration with that: Your voice input has to be understood PERFECTLY by TTS.

If you have a “To Do” list, and speak “Add cooking to my To Do list”, it will do it! But if the TTS system understood:

• Todo
• To-do
• to do
• ToDo
• To-Do
• …

The system will say it couldn’t find that list. Same for the names of your lights, asking for the time,… and you have very little control over this.

HA Voice Assistant either needs to find a PERFECT match, or you need to be running a full-blown LLM as the backend, which honestly works even worse in many ways.

They recently added the option to use LLM as fallback only, but for most people’s hardware, that means that a big chunk of requests take a suuuuuuuper long time to get a response.

I do not understand why there’s no option to just use the most similar command upon an imperfect matching, through something like the Levenshtein Distance.

I’m sorry, but have you never had actual Cheddar?

I am using both and this somehow made it to my phone, wtaf

FWIW, Lidarr works the worst out of the arr stack for me too. I don’t know if there’s just not enough well indexed material in my sources or what, but yeah, not great.

If your entire experience with the arr stack has been Lidarr so far, give it another shot! Sonarr and Radarr work absolutely perfectly. It’s just such a nice feeling to open Jellyfin (or I guess Plex) on the TV and go “oh nice new episode is out!”

Matrix does have stickers

As others have said, you can completely disable the stock launcher through ADB commands. At that point, if you hit home, you’ll be asked which app to perform that action with. Select your launcher, click “Always”, and done.

Fuck Amazon, fuck Alexa.

But that wall clock is glorious. It’s a decently look clock, but seeing how much time you have left on multiple timers with a single glance is so incredibly useful. Especially when you’re cooking.

I’m currently in the process of migrating away from the shit Alexa ecosystem, but no matter what I end up with, I’ll have to find an alternative for this clock

Did someone say Gemini?

For me personally, there is only two applications of LLMs in programming:

• doing tasks I kinda know how to do, but don’t want to properly learn (recent example: generate pgf plots from csv data in matplotlib. 90% boilerplate, I last had to do it 3 years ago and vaguely remember some pitfalls so can steer the LLM in that direction. Will probably never again have to do this, so not worth the extra couple hours to properly learn
• things I would ordinarily write a script for, but aren’t worth automating because they won’t come up in the future again (example: convert this Lua table to a Nix set)

Essentially, one-off things that you know how to check for correctness.

Maybe. But there are third options as well - maybe if Adobe acts like you describe, and there is sufficient Linux adoption, that opens the door for an actual crossplatform competitor.

Or maybe they change their mind when not doing so costs them money.

The point is to ditch the dependency on a corporate Overlord, not to find a different daddy