Why are we OK with thick folding phones, but not with thick no-folds?

i think by “we” you mean the manufacturers? AFAICT they just gave away the game: the push for thin phones was more from the supply side than the demand side. not saying people don’t generally prefer thin phones – just that the preference is probably weaker than has been made out to be.

that said, i think it’s more fair to compare things like cubic volume and weight than just the thinness. a 1/2" thick full-size phone would be uncomfortable in my pocket, whereas a 1/2" thick wallet-sized phone might actually be more comfortable than a traditional smartphone.

Orion won’t make its way into the hands of consumers

not for you though (unless you’re a Meta employee).

but yeah good hardware is good hardware and if i could just use it as a display for any other device i have i would totally use it around the home: following a recipe without having to shuffle my phone and the ingredients; running a lengthy command over ssh and doing chores while i wait, without having to check my phone every couple of minutes to see when it’s done…

those things all rely on the software though. will they open it up as a dumb wireless display/terminal, or not? if they don’t, it’s kinda dead to me no matter how great the hardware is…

as a NixOS-on-Pinephone user i 100% support funding upstreaming efforts 😉 that’s the type of thing which can have really broad reach. you’d never know it unless you were specifically looking for it, but we’ve also got people maintaining those OpenEmbedded musl+systemd patches for our distro (along with way too many other non-musl systemd patches: like you point out, it’s just not the type of thing that gets cleaned up without some focused effort like this).

not a good sign to find myself on a platform where fellow admins are criticizing the developers like this. in a healthy ecosystem we’d leverage more formal channels to help direct the development. if you haven’t already, it might be good to document the regressions and start/join the discussions on github or matrix (link for it can be found on the Lemmy github page). i’ve used these in the past for this project and the devs were reasonably quick to reply and apply fixes.