Legitimately playing 4K blu-ray video on a PC without cracking the DRM requires an insane combination of requirements:
Meanwhile MakeMKV can rip them on basically any Windows/Linux/Mac system with a compatible BDXL drive.
Likewise, I'm far less hesitant to accept buying digital console games than video because I generally can expect that once I download a game on my one device that I'll pull out the same device whenever I want to play it and it'll keep working when offline and even after the servers are gone, until the hardware fails. Modern games' physical releases rely so heavily on updates and DLC that the cart/disc you get isn't complete anyway; buying physical effectively becomes a digital game with an extra point of failure (and partial resellability). PC gaming complicates things but at least some games are available completely DRM-free there.
With video content sold online, streaming directly from some server is always the focus. As soon as the server disconnects you become unable to watch by default. Even if some service lets you pre-download within its app and watch offline (which probably won't work indefinitely without checkins anyway), that'll defeat the portability expectations for watching your videos on any device interchangeably.
Blu-ray video isn't ideal considering you cannot watch it on a phone, tablet, or linux system without cracking its DRM, but that's still way better for lasting access than anything else major movie/TV studios are willing to let consumers access without piracy.
I bought a Milk-V Mars (4GB version) last year. Pi-like form factor and price seemed like an easy pick for dipping my toes into RISC-V development, and I paid US$49 plus shipping at the time. There's an 8GB version too but that was out of stock when I ordered.
If I wanted to spend more I'd personally prefer to put that budget toward a higher core system (for faster compile times) before any laptop parts, as either HDMI+USB or VNC would be plenty sufficient even if I did need to work on GUI things.
Other RISC-V laptops already are cheaper and with higher performance than this would be with Framework's shell+screen+battery, so I'm not sure what need this fills. If you intend to use the board in an alternate case without laptop parts you might as well buy an SBC instead.
This board has the StarFive JH7110 SoC. That processor has previously been in very low power single board computers like StarFive VisionFive 2 (2022) and Milk-V Mars (2023), a Raspberry Pi clone that can be bought for as low as $40. Its storage limitations (SD/eMMC rather than NVMe) show how much this isn't meant for laptop use.
Very underpowered for a laptop too, even when considering this is intended for developers and doesn't need to be remotely performance competitive. Consider that this has just 4 RV64GC cores, the cheapest Intel board options Framework offers are 12 cores (4P+8E), and any modern RISC-V core is far simpler with less area than even an Intel E core. These cores also lack the RISC-V vector instructions extension.
I'm not completely sure but I think they removed it at some point after the public backlash (which was 3 years ago now). For the Windows version at least, there apparently used to be an option during the installation wizard for setting whether telemetry is enabled or not. Most Linux distros never had the telemetry at all. I don't know about Mac.
It is open source, but had some controversy. Most prominently the addition of telemetry a few years ago, which was never included in the builds managed by Debian or most other distro maintainers. They also added a Contributor License Agreement which lets the Audacity project change its own license (even to a non-foss one, though they promise they won't) without needing to have the change approved by any individual developers.
and it's free
This is very uncommon in the US. Most major banks (I'm not aware of any exceptions) charge a fee for each outgoing wire transfer, usually $25-$30. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, and PNC for just a few examples I'm aware of, plus every credit union that has local branches in my area. Some of those banks even add a second fee at the recipient's side for incoming wire transfer.
They often encourage customers to rely on third party services like Zelle instead for small transfers to friends and family. Many banks' sites/apps can also handle transfers between two accounts that both belong to the same bank for free too.
Even their earliest "uncarrier" features weren't without issue. Making certain services (spotify, apple music, youtube, netflix, etc.) not count against subscribers' data caps, while continuing to enforce data caps for other uses, goes against the spirit of net neutrality. This also includes throttling video streams by default to force lower quality (with opt-out on their site).
Promos like a free pizza on Tuesdays seems like a neat optional perk on the surface but their existence fundamentally mean subscription expenses on cellular network service are partially going towards things that have not even the slightest tangential connection to the service.
A standard called SystemReady exists. For the systems that actually follow its standards, you can have a single ARM OS installation image that you copy to a USB drive and can then boot through UEFI and run with no problems on an Ampere server, an NXP device, an Nvidia Jetson system, and more.
Unfortunately it's a pretty new standard, only since 2020, and Qualcomm in particular is a major holdout who hasn't been using it.
Just like x86, you still need the OS to have drivers for the particular device you're installing on, but this standard at least lets you have a unified image, and many ARM vendors have been getting better about upstreaming open-source drivers in the Linux kernel.
To the contrary, I would expect the sample to skew more towards people who have a heavily customized X session and strong opinions about window managers while drastically underrepresenting average GNOME users who stick with the default Wayland session. Someone who likes their custom setup can still be waiting for a Wayland equivalent while casual Ubuntu users have been defaulted to Wayland on new non-nvidia installs since early 2021.
@zarenki
@lemmy.ml