It often strikes me as so wild, the fact that I’m typing this in a curses UI in 2025. I see this less as a vindication of the durability of the textual software stack (although it is) and more as a failure of the stack as the whole. [I hate laptops][Ihl] but Linux on the laptop and desktop was in a great place. I had my own fork of dwm (hopefully I can still rescue that dwm code at some point in the distant future) and I was running Emacs with proportional fonts and everything was peachy and even keen.
But iOS and Android, in conjunction with serverside apps like Facebook and Google Docs, wreaked havoc on that paradise and I can’t believe that Android now almost 20 years in is still in a Google-strangled hellscape of planned obsolesence e-waste devices. I’m typing this in curses Emacs because Android is so awful that I find myself preferring to SSH into a normal computer. Same with iPad. I might’ve been slightly more productive on iPad than on Android but only because iPad’s RDP apps and mosh apps were better than what I’ve found on F-Droid so far, i.e. it was better at letting me connect to a real normal computer running normal Linux like GNU intended.
The efforts to make tablets and phones that run some sort of abominable “mobile” Linux have my full blessing. That’s gonna have to be the only way out of this unless there’s a serious successful fork of Android soon to wrest it out of Google’s tentacles.
On a positively-accentuated note, the textual stack is pretty dang awesome. I started writing this as a post on Fediverse but halfway through decided to make it a blogpost instead and I could easily do that because I type those two kinds of posts the same way in the same app.