No, because many apps refuse to run on third-party distros due to misguided notions of them being insecure. It's easy to say "just don't use those apps" but in reality, people are rightly unwilling to put up with any friction and so will simply continue to use Google's version of the OS.

Many banking apps work as long as you relock the bootloader. E.g. on GrapheneOS:

https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...

Strange, because I always remember Flickr having horrible UX. You could never just open an image file directly; if you tried, Flickr would always redirect you to a page which obscured the image behind an invisible layer which obscured pointer events such as right-click.

I learned quickly to avoid Flickr links.

Maybe it was like that for a while? But flickr allowed image downloads, there was a dropdown in the UI with the available sizes for years. And it had an API (+stable URLs) to download images.

It's possible they did not allow the way you tried to access images directly, to enable control of the downloads for the photographer. But I think you misjudged the behaviour back then, they were pretty open.

I believe that is to prevent hotlinking, which isn't the purpose of the service.

Twitter is a garbage fire, after all.

You must be joking. The Supernova UI redesign is an unmitigated disaster. They unnecessarily butchered the look and feel of Thunderbird to the point where people are switching to forks.

Absolutely. New Thunderbird sucks, I was afraid this would happen when they resumed development. what’s the best alternative?

Give me the 1990s GUI back.

Clawsand SeaMonkey both have a more reasonable design. (SeaMonkey did a piss poor job picking screenshots for their webpage...)

https://www.claws-mail.org/screenshots.php

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/doc/screenshots

Claws, that’s the one I remember.

The previous UI made no sense. Having the email viewer on the bottom and the list on the top instead of side by side makes absolutely no sense when most emails are designed for viewing in portrait.

"The only subprocessors used to verify your identity are"... some of the biggest data mining companies on the planet. Excellent.

You just described literally all modern web development.

Almost all, yes.

I said 90% in my comment but that's from my professional experience which is probably biased towards complex projects where maintainability is more important.

Yeah that's great and all but my 2nd gen iPad Air from 2017 doesn't get updates past iPadOS 15 (current version: 26).

As a result most useful apps flatly refuse to run on it, and my iPad is now a paperweight which yearns for the landfill.

Meanwhile the laptop I bought in 2011 is still going strong, now on Windows 10 (or whatever Linux distro I'd care to throw on it).

Right, the key point being it is almost impossible to reuse iPhone or iPad hardware once the updates stop coming, even though the hardware is absolutely amazing. A 2017 iPad Air is still awesome hardware if you could jam an optimized version of Android/Linux onto it.

If you don't need it to be an Air, I bought an 8th gen iPad on eBay last year for about $80 and it will let you install iOS 26, although with the 32GB model you can't fit many apps on it.

How is that so? The App Store has allowed you to download the last compatible version since iOS 6?

But I hate when people malos this comparison to a laptop, in the first 20 years of the personal computer you weren’t using 10 year old computers because the pace of change was so fast.

Your iPad Air has 2GB of RAM and has an A9 processor that is 7x slower in single core performance than the latest iPad Air. The latest iPad Airs come with 8GB of RAM.

My iPad Air from 2020 barely runs iOS 26 with 3GB RAM.

For comparison, I had a Dell Laptop in 2008 that had 8GB RAM and was my Plex server until 2018. Even today in 2026 low end laptops come with 8GB of RAM.

Most useful apps refuse to run? I have an iPad Pro from 2016 and it runs everything I throw at it. Perhaps the air’s weaker hardware was always destined to struggle as time moves on. That being said I also have an iPad from 2011 which I can still use as a Spotify machine.

But true, they don’t have the flexibility of a laptop. They are however the longest lasting tablets I’m aware of.

note: they jumped from 18 to 26 to align to the year.

I can't believe Apple hasn't pushed an update to their 9-year-old device in 11 years!

I'm in a similar boat and am wondering... Is there much that can be done with these iPads beside turn them into e-waste?

You can still browse the internet. Safari still works. I have ancient 1st gen iPad Air and I use it for that; you can still watch YouTube (from the web), it still works fine. Anything that has a web app mostly works.

If you manage to install decent apps in time, you can use these as e-readers or video players. But batteries will eventually fail and all what you'll have will be a fancy fragile chopping board.

I was gifted with iPad 1, Air 1 - first won't charge for 6 years now and data I didn't synchronize are gone, second one needs a serious "warm-up" before charging and while Apple released 12.5.8 in the end of January, it won't get any new apps.

iPad 3rd gen can be downgraded to iOS 8 (which runs slightly better than iOS 9), and dual-booting to iOS 6 is also doable (and actually can run more apps than later versions thanks to the 3rd party mods).

There's a community around /r/LegacyJailbreak dedicated to running old iOS devices.

Thanks, I will look into that.

You can jailbreak it and attempt to bypass app restrictions (e.g. with 3dappversionspoofer). Ymmv. https://ios.cfw.guide describes how to jailbreak.

Why can’t you still use it?

You just won’t be able to download new apps as they bump their minimum.

Wait for a trade in special and take advantage of it. Or use it for safari only.

Use it as a control center for your home automation.

maybe use as a e-reader or watch ripped media on it? if it's jailbreakable i am sure there's a lot of stuff to do too

I am so grateful to the author for writing this article. For years I've been fighting a series of small battles with my peers who seem hell-bent on "upgrading" our e-commerce websites by rewriting them in React or another modern framework.

I've held the line, firm in my belief that there is truly no compelling reason for a shopping website to be turned into an SPA.

It's been difficult at times. The hype of new and shiny tools is real. Like the article mentions, a lot of devs don't even know that there is another way to build things for the web. They don't understand that it's not normal to push megabytes of JavaScript to users' browsers, or that displaying some text on a page doesn't have to start with `<React><App/></React>`.

That's terrifying to me.

Articles like this give me hope that no, I'm not losing my mind. Once the current framework fads eventually die out - as they always do - the core web technologies will remain.

I think shopping gets this in spades too because not all shopping sites are meant to be particularly sticky.

It's one thing to browse the catalog at my leisure on gigabit networking, a 5k display and 16 CPU cores. It's another thing when I'm standing in Macy's or Home Depot and they don't quite have the thing I thought they have and I'm on my phone trying to figure out if I can drive half a mile to your store and get it. If you want to poach that sale your site better be fast, rather than sticky.

Let them have React and SSR everything? Didn't the NYT do this?

he links to infrequently.org a few times in the article. You should read every article there - its a revelation.

Then check out Datastar

Very interesting that DigitalOcean is by far the largest source.

Other (more responsible) VPS providers, e.g. Linode, actively block machines from which they detect a lot of abuse traffic. Wonder why DO doesn't do the same.

Hetzner would have blocked some of those pretty quickly. Especially the top 2-3 IPs that seem to have thousands of attempts.

It's like they tried their hardest to add as much vocal fry [1] as possible.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yL2GezneU