[MarkusWandel]

Well, I approach it from two angles at once. One, a pocket computer running Linux which, using Termux, could be a full Linux machine - in which I can run Perl scripts on my SMS messages, grep my emails, rename and organize my photo library and so on. Which was presumably mostly possible on old, less secure versions of Android. With Android 10 and its exec restriction, sure you can still install precompiled packages as apk's but what about simply compiling a small C program and running it? So the old school tinkerer is sad that I'm locked out of a perfectly good Linux machine that I own.

However the other angle is, this phone is an appliance and I want it to just work. I'm personally competent enough to have that cake (programmability) and eat it too (reliable usability) - after all I've been running Red Hat/Fedora as my primary desktop OS at home for two decades and it works just fine, thank you. But I also remember what a horrible mess the average schmoe's home computer was back in the good old days... remember an outdated version of Internet Explorer with half the screen obscured by a stack of junky toolbars, and the whole thing running at 800x600 on a monitor capable of higher resolutions "because otherwise the letters are too small". Good riddance.

Anyway for the moment, second-hand desktop and laptop machines that can run a full, unencumbered compute environment are still plentiful. Maybe by the time they aren't, I'll be a truly old fart who doesn't care any more.

[rektide]

I agree that there are multiple angles. I think of them as different contexts. What I see is that, at the moment, we're designing, permitting, allowing, creating, constructing, & securing only for one angle, only for the pure-consumerism mode, the mode where we assume the user is in "don't care/don't know" mode.

This mode, however, is such a denigration to humanity. All the spirit of augmenting the human intellect, computing being servant to the human psyche, harnessed by human creativity... it's a way-more-than-tacit admission of defeat, a brazen retreat. It just seems... unaccounted for. We don't talk about this loss, this turning around. We trumpet security & chalk up wins for helping each other, but there's no mainstream dialogue that supports the deeply enriched angle, the immersive, expert computer user, the post-training-wheels life. Everything is centered around the dumb consumer, all of computing focused around a consumerized applicationized "just work" mentality.

I think we've been drinking poison.

[pabs3]

Maybe Android just needs to add support for virtual machines? Then you could have the best of both worlds.