I have an Pixel 8 Pro after my most recent Oneplus finally died. Having used the pixel with Graphene for a year or so now, I have to agree with you: there’s not much they could add to phones to tempt me to upgrade. I set my family’s last 3 or 4 phones next to each other and they’re practically all the exact same form factor and it’s only a minor difference in notch shape and backplate color accents that set them apart. I don’t play games other than the occasional Tux Kart race in a waiting room, so all the phones have more than enough RAM and CPU. The only reason for most people to upgrade in the current market is a hardware failure or an end-of-support event that you can’t sidestep with third party ROMS.

Yep, got rid of my last phone when the mics stopped working right, even after flashing a variety of ROMS.

When I last bought an XPS 13, there was an option for Ubuntu. I agree that many people will choose a Macbook, but the XPS line has been decent. Perhaps someday they will discover the third OS option.

To top that off, you can dip your toes in by running a live image off a USB thumb drive to check if your hardware is recognized and supported out of the box. I have used Linux for 10-15 years, but never for gaming. This year I made the final jump, the one thing I had kept windows for. I don’t play competitive games with anticheat, and everything is running great. I anticipated more bullshit, because 15 years ago, Linux was not so polished. At this point I’m fine with running Linux on elderly folks PCs. It’s finally “good enough” to do just about everything and legitimately excels at most things.

I guess that’s one way to outdo Internet Explorer.

My city still owns the utilities and the council doubles as the utility board. They’ve been trying to privatize it, but it’s very contentious. Rightly so.

My wife does this in our home. Calls and full videos are usually okay, but nobody who is not watching them wants to hear you flip through shorts. I go play Cities Skylines in my office and it keeps everyone’s peace.

Yup, my wife watches a lot of shorts. I don’t get it. I think it’s bad for you, but it’s her choice as an adult. With that said, the looping is enraging.

Yup, I’m fine with it being done by a public org in the pursuit of science and furtherment of humanity.

They’ll staff the space factories with felony convicts, kidnapped non-citizens, and orphans who don’t have a place to stay. In addition to your proposed union I would like to see a “made with space-prison labor” disclaimer on these productsm

I can’t bring myself to throw anything out anymore. Someday, when all my working PCs have worn out, a $200 bottom of the barrel 32bit netbook could be the last thing standing between me and having to rent compute from some shitty tech company who doesn’t respect my first amendment rights, hides any advanced configuration from the end user, and has an AI constantly rewriting my files to remove any objectionable language, like YouTube or Facebook, but in my home. I’ll hack my toaster to run Linux before I let that happen.

Currently running a ~10 y/o Dell-XPS laptop that still runs absolutely great.

For me, I was a long term gnome 2 user and have used gnome 3 and various derivatives. Gnome 2 was still very customizable, but Gnome 3 was very prescriptivist. I feel like KDE gives me the ability to dial in my desktop quite a bit more and I really like dolphin and the KDE apps. With that said, I don’t hate Gnome. I’m glad it exists if only to encourage other DEs to keep getting better. I don’t see myself daily driving it, but I would gladly recommend it to a Linux beginner.

I have issues with that too. Some of it might have to do with VPNs, but even with everything off, my devices sometimes still can’t see each other. I’m guessing I made a mistake configuring the network or something. Instead, I usually copy files from my phone via SMB, then access the same share from an NFS mount on my PC

If they truly believe in their AI offerings, they should release them as an extension so users can choose to install them. You only bundle shit people don’t want. If it’s good, you distribute it stand-alone.

Yeah, when I support a social program, it’s with the knowledge and acceptance that some abuse will occur. It’s just that I think, despite the abuse, the upside is still a superior outcome to not doing it at all. Maybe one day we’ll rebuild the cultural fabric to the point where people don’t feel so desperate they immediately exploit any crack in the system regardless of the risks or long-term outcomes. With changes in culture and wealth distribution worldwide, I believe global prosperity is absolutely possible.

I can’t imagine welfare of any kind is more abused than the process by which the US government farms things out to private companies. If the poor are suckling at the teet of the welfare cow, then private industry is the wolf ripping it’s head off. Just look at the clusters of contractors that show up like flies on shit any time the money faucet is opened.

Yeah, I want my neighbors to have heat in the winter, food when they lose their job, and universal childcare. If I have to pay a few extra bucks a year for that it’s better than pouring it into the rest of the money-holes in Washington DC.

OP mentions being from another country. I don’t have a ton of experience with countries commonly regarded as corrupt, though I did go to Nigeria once; money flows >>differently<< there. But there’s also a stronger social fabric. I don’t know if I could vote for any tax when there is suck a blatant track record of shady dealings (though it’s arguable we’ve all been doing that). It was fascinating and I hope to go back some day.

Lol, I would wake up some time in February with an apetite sufficient to cause a global famine.

Inb4 someone writes a program and calls it AdblockAI. It gets trained on the shape of corporate logos and on the fly in-paints those regions of the screen to remove the logos.

On that same note, how about AR glasses that put black bars over ads and logos you encounter in real life so companies don’t get to subliminally advertise at you.

Rereading that, it’s not super clear who “they” is referring to. Here is what I was trying to say: In the past, some of our media has been revised to make it politically correct, books, film, and other media. I don’t agree with this, but I do think some of those people have good intentions. Putting ads on cultural artifacts (like our media) retroactively is whole new level of evil: supervillain evil. It’s like “Stonehenge, brought to you by CocaCola and Nestle” or “Skip the line at the Great Pyramid with Amazon Prime”. One is motivated by a misguided desire to protect everyone’s feefees. The other one is just pure greed.

They edited all the movie dialog to be woke/ now they’re gonna edit all the graphics to grab more money. :-D

Wife was happy. Though I have now been asked to retrieve all the ornaments from the attic so her and her sister can decorate it. I only did the lights. Teamwork!