A quick look through its documentation shows that it instructs the user how to go through a subset of the instructions the original user provided (or an alternative set of instructions if using Android 11+ as there it can use a different mechanism) plus a few more, in order to run a Shizuku service as user “adb”.

From then on, that Shizuku service can then be used by other apps to do everything the “adb” user can, including installing and updating applications.

So I guess it could be used by something like F-Droid to go around Google’s new mechanism to close down app installs.

For Android < 11 it’s is no more non-expert friendly than the instructions already provided by the original user, though it’s better in Android 11+ as there it’s all interacting with menus on the Android side (see here under Start Shizuku)

Most of that stuff is automatable - except the bit about activating Developer mode and USB Debugging on the device (steps 3 to 6) which only needs to be done once per device - so I expect we will soon see several nice GUI tools that automate the rest and eventually we might even just see stuff that talks directly to the phone over USB via libusb and using the same protocol as ADB, so installing the Android Platform Tools won’t at all be needed.

But yeah, at this point it requires people to at the very least be familiar with using the command line.

Well, I did do app development for Android for a couple of years, so I’ll be using ADB it install APKs in any device affected if needed.

I’ll also never do development work for Android ever again, beyond making utilities for myself if need something like that.

Beyond that, I’ll never buy an Android device that cannot be unlocked. Last one I got was a Xiaomi phone, which at the time could be unlocked (which I did and installed an alternative ROM on it before I started using it), but they stopped that so Xiaomi isn’t going to be getting any more money from me.

Mid to long-term, I expect Linux devices are the solution. I’m especially interested in getting a Linux tablet (7" or 8") to replace the tablet I currently use mostly for book reading and internet browsing when I’m out and about (hence the size needs to be small enough to fit a back or jacket pocket).

When I started looking into it, my expectation was that Linux tablets would make even more sense as devices than phones since they’re closer to notebooks in terms of how they’re used, but I haven’t really found all that many out there - there are more Linux phones than tablets - and all of them were 10" or more (so, too large for my use case).

(PS: suggestions welcome, even just stuff I can root and install something like Ubuntu Touch on it)

Am I so unusal in wanting an portable computing device with a big enough screen to read stuff, for the purpose of consuming media rather than working on (so no keyboard need), which is not so big that I need to haul it in a backpack, not a full-blown smartphone with all the bells as whistles (I already have a smarphone on my pocket with mobile data, camera and GPS, so why would I need that shit AGAIN on a tablet???) and not a locked-down system like iOS or Android?

In my own personal experience: live in The Netherlands and go work in a small company were pretty much everybody is Dutch and the management wants to help you learn Dutch (so they keep doing all meetings in Dutch even though everybody there could speak English).

After a couple of years living there working in English-speaking multinational environments and thus without learning much Dutch, that specific situation forced my Dutch speaking skills to improve massively in a mere 3 months.

Otherwise it’s pretty hard to learn Dutch, IMHO, unless you’re starting from German (even better, Swiss-German) which is maybe the closest language to it (and Dutch grammar is actually simpler).

Unfortunately people here are mostly incapable of having nuance.

Oh, the irony!

How else would I get my hourly dose of homophobic insults on voice from teenagers with barely broken voices?!

Not to mention being frequently informed that my 70 year old mom is a prostitute.

If I try and simulate the multiplayer experience on a single player game by insulting myself, it’s just not the same.

Dust is going to be a problem (well, maybe not that much electrically, but it maks it a pita to keep clean) after some months, especially for the Raspberry Pi.

Consider getting (or, even better, 3D printing) an enclosure for it at least (maybe the HDDs will be fine as they are since the fan keeps the air moving and dust probably can’t actually settle down on it).

External 2.5" HDDs connected via USB for longer term bulk storage and using it as a NAS, a smaller internal NVME SSD for the OS and a larger one (but SATA, so slower) for the directory were torrents go to.

The different drive performances fit my usage pattern just fine whilst optimizing price per GB.

External 3.5" would be cheaper for bulk storage but the 2.5" are a leftover from when I was more constrained in terms of physical space.

Well, the N100 does have a lot more breathing space in terms of computing power, so it’s maybe a better bet for something you want to use for a decade or more, and that remote control I linked to above does work fine, except for the power button (which will power your Linux off but won’t power it back on).

I actually tried an Android TV Box (which is really just and SBC in the same range of processing power as the Pi) for this before going for the Mini PC and it was simply not as smooth operating.

That Mini-PC has enough computing power room (plus the right processing extensions) that I can be torrenting over OpenVPN on a 1Gb/s connection whilst watching a video from a local file and it’s not at all noticeable on the video playback.

Kodi install instructions are here

I don’t use docker, I use lubuntu with normal packages. So for example Kodi is just installed from the Team Kodi PPA repository (which, granted, is outdated, but it works fine and I don’t need the latest and greatest) and just set it up to be auto-started when X starts so that on the TV it’s as if Kodi is the interface of that machine.

Qbittorrent is just the server only package (qbittorrent-nox) which I control remotelly via its web interface and the rest is normal stuff like Samba.

After the inital set up, the actual linux management can be done remotelly via ssh.

That said, LibreELEC is a Linux distro which comes with Kodi built-in (it’s basically Kodi and just enough Linux to run it), so assuming it’s possible to install more stuff in it might be better - only found out about it when I had my setup running so never got around to try it. LibreELEC can even work in weaker hardware such as a Raspberry Pi or some of its clones.

Also you can get Kodi as a Flatpak which works out of the box in various Linux distros so if you need the latest and greatest Kodi plus a full-blown Linux distro for other stuff you might do the choice of distro based on supporting flatpack and being reasonably lightweight (I actually originally went for Lubuntu exactly because it uses a lightweight Window Manager and I expected that N100 mini-pc to need it, though in practice the hardward can probably run a lot more heavy stuff than that, though lighter stuff means the CPU load seldom goes up significativelly hence the fan seldom turns on and so the thing is quiet most of the time and you only hear the fan spinning up and then down again once in a while even in the Summer).

As for docker, there are a lot of instructions out there on how to install Kodi with Dockers, but I never tried it.

Also you might want to get a remote like this, which is a wireless remote with a USB adapter, not because of the air-mouse thing (frankly, I never use it) but simply because the buttons are mapped to exactly the shortcuts that Kodi uses, so using it with Kodi in Linux is just like using a dedicated remote for a TV Media Box - in fact all those thinks are keyboard shortcuts (that remote just sends keypresses to the PC when you press a button) and they keyboard shortcuts for media players seem to be a standard.

It really depends on what you’re doing with it and on what old PCs you have available.

I have an N100 Mini-PC at home in my living room connected to my TV which is both a home server and a TV-Box using Kodi (I even have a remote for it).

Having modern image and video decoding in hardware is pretty useful when I’m using it as a TV Box (there is zero stutter with it), whilst the rest of the time the thing mostly sits doing some low CPU-intensive server tasks (mainly torrenting and SMB server stuff).

Also, it’s a small box that fits fine on my TV stand without standing out and runs silent pretty almost all of the time.

Further, I don’t have any low power consuming old PCs around - the best are some chunky old notebooks, the rest are old gaming PCs which eat more power idle than the mini PC does at full load - and even the notebooks aren’t that low power as all that.

Mind you, for many years I used an old Asus EEE PC (a very small notebook running Linux) as home file server (with external HDs) and had a separated dedicated hardware TV Media Server box playing files from it, but eventually that PC stopped working and I found out I could just use my Router as a file server.

Last but not least, judging for how long I kept using my TV Media Server boxes (which over almost 2 decades I had 2 different ones and which as dedicated hardware could not easilly be upgraded when new video compression standards came out) 10+ years is definitelly my time-frame for using that Mini-PC.

All this to say that you should consider using old hardware, especially if you have some around and it’s task appropriate (like I did before using an old Asus EEE PC as a home file server), but also take in account what you’re going to do it and consider if new hardware won’t be better over the timespan you will likely be using it and if the being able to get a more task appropriate form factor (like how having a little box-size Mini PC lets me have it in my living room on a TV stand next to my TV and my fiber router) is worth it.

In summary, before you get hardware you should ponder a bit about what you intend to do with it before you decide what to get, don’t be afraid of using stuff you already have and also don’t be afraid to get new stuff if it’s actually justified by hardnosed reasons rather than merely some variant of the “new stuff smell” psychological effect when buying new.

The only thing I get from meeting again people I haven’t seen for decades is to, using the abilities I’ve been acquiring with time and life experience to read other people beyond the superficial, find out that most many haven’t really mature much from the people I knew and at times how much I misjudged them back in the old days when I was very naive and ran around pretty lost.

The “I’m better than that” feeling would be highly satisfying if I was a different kind of person, but it’s actually just sad that some people turn out to either having always been less than I made them up to be in my mind or failed to actually turn into well balanced mature adults.

The other possibility is that it’s all in my mind and I’m just deceiving myself, as having become more more self-deluded when it comes to others with time looks exactly the same from the inside as having become a little wiser in interpreting others.

In summary: Projection.

The chosen form of most accusations can be explained by the one doing the accusing having reached their own conclusions about the likely actions and motivations of others by thinking “What would I do in their place?”.

I vaguely remember that they were already preloading the Office DLLs way back in Windows 95 or XP days.

Would you trust HP to make any kind of consumer hardware which is supposed to run networked and has their own OS variant?

One would expect it would at the very least come pre-enshittified, possibly with some sort of subscription service to enable certain hardware features.

This ain’t the pre-Carly Fiorina HP.

That’s why they are superior!

Company Town Halls are “we listen to you” theatre.

Modern large companies behave towards their employees the same way they behave towards their customers: they use marketing to influence them into doing what’s best for the C-suite, the Board and (usually) shareholders.

In Tech specifically this kind of crap has been common since the 90s even in Startups (as part of the “pay them with hope, sense of belonging and pride rather than money” technique), though the big Tech companies are the most extreme in this kind of stuff.

Well, they’re not domesticated enough to let me pet them unless I catch a chick which fell off a nest.

Sparrows.

Forced diversity characters are generally just cringe.

Characters who are normal people who just happen to be female, of a minority ethnicity, non-heterosexual and so on are generally as good as all other characters because that’s just about people living live in an imaginary situation, so just like in the real world not everybody there is a white heterosexual male and people who aren’t white heterosexual males are, just like the white heterosexual males ones, not some stereotyped cartoon cutout of a person.

(That said, in Action movies, especially XX century, often all characters are stereotyped cartoon cutouts of a person)

This also dovetails with how Modern Acting techniques work: good actors will naturally play more believable characters in more believable situations because the actor also has their own version of “suspension of disbelief” going on.

If you want a neutral metaphor, it’s like the difference between seeing a scene in a Film or TV Series which is pretty obviously product placement for a cola brand were one or more of the characters are using said product in a way that makes sure its brand is seen and mentioned vs a perfectly normal scene were somebody just happens to be drinking something that looks like a cola - the entire vibe is totally different between having something which is not a natural story element shoved there to fulfill objectives other than telling a good story and just telling a good story that naturally reflects the real world in its many facets hence all that’s there just feels natural.