The increasingly fuzzy text from being jpeged too many times is exquisite.
dylanmccall
joined 1 year ago
For me, a big one is integration with email / calendar / contacts services that aren't Google. I don't know where Google dropped the ball here - Android was originally amazing for this kind of thing - but at some point they started bolting a lot of features specifically on top of Google accounts, and out of the box Android doesn't even understand how to sync with CalDAV / CardDAV. So if I want my Nextcloud stuff to work at all I need to go and install a third party app. The third party app works great (I happily used DAVx5 for many years), but it's ridiculous when iOS has all that integration officially supported and available straight out of the box. And it even does clever things, like suggesting contact details it learns from my (Fastmail) email. Android has that stuff, but it is completely on the cloud, and it only works if you give everything to Google.
That's why runtimes are the way they are: for most simple desktop applications, they shouldn't really need much on top of what is already included in the GNOME, KDE, or Freedesktop runtime they depend on. (If you're curious, flatpak run org.gnome.Platform and poke around). Those runtimes get regular updates within each branch for important bug fixes. Alas, many applications add at least one or two external libraries they need to build / distribute themselves, and some applications add a lot of them. But it isn't like every application bundles its own libssl or something.
Yeah, permission popups are absolutely a thing. The system for that is called Portals: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/portal-api-reference.html. The idea is an application asks for the tightest sandbox it needs to run, and then uses the Portal API to request capabilities at runtime, such as access to specific files or permission to start automatically. The catch is you can't just make legacy applications magically use an API like that: it requires work on both ends. But it's certainly happening, bit by bit :)
Avalon Dairy in BC uses glass bottles, and grocery stores which sell them take them (in exchange for your $1 deposit) and send the bottles straight back to Avalon. They get cleaned and reused directly. If you're at the store, you can look closely at all the bottles and find the dates they were first used. Alas, I've kind of gone off getting them now that we're using 2L bottles of milk every week - the bigger bottles are extra bulky and my nearest grocery store doesn't sell Avalon.
I'm still a big fan, though. It's a good system, it genuinely causes the bottles to be reused (instead of just not made out of plastic, or "recycled"), and it's so simple. We could easily have this for everything if we regulated (or at least incentivized) specific containers for groceries, at least for things packaged domestically. No more needlessly complicated special jars for different brands of maple syrup. If every company used the same containers, when they reach the recycling depot (hopefully intact, although that's another problem) we could actually do something sensible with the things.