Searching for "waydroid_x86_64 LineageOS 20.0" leads to a sourceforge page [0] of waydroid with LineageOS builds that have 70-80k downloads per month.
It seems to be popular to be installed on CachyOS, which in turn is the 2nd most popular distro to use Steam (after SteamOS itself), so my guess is that it's a popular setup for gaming...
Everybody, get up, we're leaving. Jailbreak your kindles and move to epub. It's not that difficult.
Buy books at Kobo or bookshop.org
There are so many functional kindles out there, this could be the event that changes the power dynamic and puts the author-reader relationship back in the center instead of the publisher/distributor.
It's what's slowly happening in the Movie industry now: The studios learn that they can't create sustainable value by just spending money and adding stars to a production. But directors create value. So they are suddenly put front and center and actively promoted.
From my experience, it comes from costs generated by:
1. Additional R&D-work and QA for the modification
2. New supply-chain deals for lower-volume components
Current sales-volume of Europe is only a quarter of the global volume, so price-negotiation is based on a much lower total volume-forecast.
Even if not, Battery prices today are ~15% higher than in 2024 (I expect Nintendo signed the supply-deal in late 2024), it'll be hard for Nintendo to cancel their existing supply-contract before fulfilling it (!), move to a different component AND get the same/lower price.
--> Better to sell other regions as-is, fulfill the contract and hope for a better climate in a year.
3. Tooling/Assembly (Ramp-Up costs, different processes, QA,...)
4. Re-certification of HW for relevant bodies in that region (Europe is quite lean on this, CE-certification is simple compared to US FTC/FCC)
I can almost hear the conversation with Nintendo of America CEO about covering 1/3 of the cost to get the same SKU and him simply responding "No, we just raised the prices because of component-cost increase, we wait for the HW-refresh in 2H/2027"
I wouldn't be surprised if they plan to unify the SKU again with a premium "Switch 2 OLED", offsetting the additional costs, preserving the margin and having an additional selling-point...
In my experience this doesn't work because people in large groups usually demand maintenance for free and donate explicitly for features they personally want.
You usually end up with insufficient donations to move anything, but now gained a bunch of users who think they own the devs and complain about every change which isn't that one thing they donated for...
Much easier fix:
They already open-sourced everything, the official branch is sufficiently stable and feature-rich. People are free to fork and create something new, decoupled from the Flipper team and maybe even financed by donations if they want to.
That's probably because Iceland is not an official Sales-territory of Nintendo, it's handled by Bergsala AB, a swedish distributor which serves the market there.
According to their latest fiscal report [0], Europe sales-volume of Switch2 is ~24% of the total global sales volume.
The change surely eats into their margin per device, so they prefer to keep the higher margin for the rest of the world and recalculate their margin for europe.
However interesting: "The Americas" sells 34% of all Switch2 in the world [0].
I wouldn't expect the US to mandate the same changes, but if e.g. Canada or Brazil also demand replaceable batteries, it could push the needle to making it a default HW-feature of Switch2...
Interesting, in the fineprint they actually confirm that they set the "Switch 1" End-Of-Life by Feb.2027 and stop selling it.
This means they will lose the revenue of that product-line (currently ~15% of their total hardware unit sales according to their fiscal report [0]), which may help accelerate the need for a "lite" version of the Switch2 to recover this market-segment...
...or not, because console sales is generally dropping and there's actually no competition to Nintendo in the handheld console segment...
Bleak times ahead for the gaming industry, and for the gamers...
1. They open sourced the entire Software under GPL from the start, and always pushed all their changes to that public github.
2. They supported the first-party firmware for years, including huge rewrites of the interfaces used by applications, etc.
3. They actively involved the community on many topics around the product and were always responsive.
They did their job very well, financed ONLY by one-time sales of hardware. NO subscription or additional licensing fees were ever charged.
There is still alot of potential in the hardware itself (e.g. Bluetooth/BLE, NFC Tag writing,...), and the Community is working on alot of different topics.
--
Tl;DR: The Flipper team is free to go and invest resources elsewhere now. Thanks for your support, keep up the great work!
> I think it's an accurate description of a common way of thinking, though I wouldn't call it conservative in the global sense.
It's not a common way of thinking, not in my observation.
Conservative / neo-liberal narratives push strongly against any form of "bigger picture view", more explicitly against solidarity, fueling this mindset of "I only support what profits me personally", i.e. "everyone's taxes should be used for roads (because I have a car), public transport is a waste of money (everyone should buy a car)".
-> It's a vertical word-view, where others are seen either above you (appease them) or below you (disregard them, they should appease you)
--
Liberal citizens still (try to) build on a sense of solidarity, of common investments for the "greater good" of a just (future) society, i.e. "I do have a car, but a stronger public transport system is a benefit to me and my peers"
-> It's a horizontal world-view, where others are seen equal to you and people are much more willing to stand up for each other and unite their voice for a cause.
--
I'm aware that this is not that visible in US, because there are only two major parties here, which both try to please the maximum of the middle spectrum. So both follow a rather conservative narrative and tend to pay lip-service only.
In countries with more than two major political parties it's more visible because the "center-left" democratic party is also threatened by competition from the "left", not just from the "center-right"/"right" party, so they need to acknowledge that citizens raise DEMANDS to them and are willing to walk away if they are not met.
I wouldn't have expected the era that brought Walkman phones, Cybershot phones, the T610/T650, the P910 and many others (Xperia!) to be called "crap", compared to....dunno, the Sony CMD-Z5...?
Apparently I need to clarify, as it's not obvious from my previous comments: _I_ don't consider Tesla premium at all, it is NOT a premium hardware company.
It's bad quality hardware hiding behind an cleaner engine and some software features.
It is EXACTLY the product of a hardware company which keeps treating hardware-production like it's software, as described above.
> Why shouldn’t software be treated with the same rigor at Volkswagen scale?
No one said that it shouldn't.
What I wrote is, that the approach of minimizing any SURFACE of risk in software creates the (subjectively good and solid) software of previous car-generations (in Volkswagen terms: MIB2 ~ a bit downhill already in MIB3): A solid, predictable and closed product fulfilling its core use-case.
But it DOESN'T create a user experience with those "fun" niche features, competitive remote-access Smartphone features, exposed API's, sudden new features during lifecycle, funny "ludicrous modes" etc.
And today's customers are demanding those features, it's now a hygiene factor for a premium experience on Smartphones as well as on cars.
A Tesla is not considered a "Premium" car because of its premium hardware or manufacturing quality. They disrupted the car-industry by being the first to apply a software-dev mindset to it, and the consumer perceives this as premium.
No idea what's your source on this, but I see you're spanning quite some "rope" from
a.) a global company in the car-industry being cautious of exposing ANY risk-surface in a product because every issue making it to the field doesn't just bear the risk of very expensive recalls/fines but may also put people's ACTUAL lives in danger, to
b.) the country Germany and its whole society
> If anyone with money finds a technicality to sue you on, they will.
In the car-industry you don't need anyone with money to sue you. If you ship a car which is found to endanger participants of traffic, your company may not recover from the aftermath for years...
> Management treats software exactly like hardware production lines
That's exactly my observation as well. Classic hardware-producing companies have an immense respect on the step of entering mass-production, as whatever issue that slipped through will be multiplied and physically spread across the world.
So they come from the mindset that the dominant mindset is to minimize the SURFACE-area of potential risk. This makes it really hard for them to compete in software-space, because in software the dominant mindset is to just estimate risk.
Neither is wrong, but applied vice-versa is.
- If you treat software like hardware, you end up cutting out everything that could make your product fit more than your decided main use-case.
- If you treat hardware like software, you're placing a bet on behalf of your customer that the product "will be fine", and a (very expensive) bet that this product won't create an aftermath which may destroy your entire company.
Companies which can't manage the distinction here end up putting hardware in the hands of customers they should have built differently and then spend all their resources on software updates just to somehow keep the core function working.
Nice, but a little bit too thin on details to read this as more than "we ordered a Commodore-branded Sailfish-OS phone from an ODM".
If it would be more "considerate" from hardware (or even software) perspective it could be compelling, but from the infos on that page it sounds more like a "memberberry" product
(like e.g. a phone from Kodak, Sega, Atari,... built on the business decision of [product-cost] + [branding] = [potential price-premium of xxx USD])
Searching for "waydroid_x86_64 LineageOS 20.0" leads to a sourceforge page [0] of waydroid with LineageOS builds that have 70-80k downloads per month.
It seems to be popular to be installed on CachyOS, which in turn is the 2nd most popular distro to use Steam (after SteamOS itself), so my guess is that it's a popular setup for gaming...
[0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/waydroid/files/images/syste...