Yep. I run Garuda and the main pull is that it’s a more user-friendly Arch with a lot of stuff I want to use preinstalled. I don’t really care about how XTREME it is or whether I might potentially get 1 FPS more.

Android already does that, no AI required. Some fairly simple math is enough.

The device first charges to 80% and holds there. It also calculates how long it will need to charge from there to full and when it will need to resume charging so that it will hit 100% just before the next alarm goes off. Then it does that.

Also, Ubuntu is moving towards using snaps for everything so they’re pretty much the successor to PPAs.

Mostly yes but there’s one other option that simplifies the whole thing: Chromebooks. They’re actually pretty decent for someone who doesn’t need much beyond a browser, a mail client, and a basic office suite.

Sure, they’re tied to Google with all that entails but they can be a real option for someone like a senior who relies on relatives for tech support.

Not even very surprising. The dark and/or broody scenes tend to be a lot less serious than they look. To give an example I saw: At last year’s Wave Gotik Treffen (a huge goth event) there were plenty of posters for broody bands – and in between them there was one for the German Hevisaurus spinoff advertising their new song about bubblegum.

And then someone went around and put googly eyes on all the posters. That’s also pretty on-brand for the scene.

True. It’s just the automated transfer that doesn’t work.

I didn’t bring up F-Droid’s very existence as an argument because iOS also allows a form of sideloading these days. Android still makes it a lot easier but Apple isn’t entirely out of the loop anymore. Baby steps, I guess.

I’m the spirit of fairness I will nitpick you.

Firstly, porting apps over between Android devices works seamlessly only if those apps come from the Play Store. Android has no provisions for auto-transferring e.g. F-Droid and its apps. So it’s no wonder you can’t transfer your iOS apps (which might not even have Android versions). But it is true that auto-transfers of Play Store apps between different Android spins is seamless.

Secondly, whether and how easily you can modify or replace your Android is dependent on the phone’s manufacturer. A Pixel is a very different beast from an Xperia in that regard. Still, Google do provide AOSP and are very mod-friendly on their own devices. Apple very much aren’t.

Garuda’s gaming spin should. At least mine runs on Plasma 6 + Wayland and I didn’t do anything special to get there.

Soon they will launch their new product, Copy of New Teams Classic (work or school) (2).

I think Latte-Dock has been unmaintained for some time now. It’s a dead project and maybe doesn’t even work properly with Plasma 6. So it’s a good time to drop it.

On the one hand I like the basic idea, on the other hand I think that some fundamental problems aren’t fully solved yet. There big use case are passkeys and direct password manager integration – neither mesh well with the idea of software that isn’t allowed to talk to most of the system.

I’m certain that this will be resolved at some point but for now I don’t think Flatpak and its brethren are quite there yet.

True, although that made people think that Windows 2000 was the intended successor to Windows 98 – me included. Not that I minded; in my opinion Windows 2000 was straight up better than Windows XP until XP SP2 came out. Anyway, Microsoft spends far too much time getting cute with version numbers.

They could’ve sold Windows 2000 as Windows NT 5 and Windows Me as Windows 2000; that would’ve kept the “NT X” versioning scheme for the professional line and the year-based scheme for the consumer line.

But the versioning scheme for the NT line is all kinds of weird in general. Windows 7 is NT 6.1. Windows 8 is NT 6.2. So we’ve established that the product name is independent of the version now. That means that Windows 10 is NT… 10.0. Windows 11 is also NT 10.0.

Okay.

There’s also oh-my-fish.

Can’t confirm. My default browser and web view are Firefox on both Sony and Samsung devices.

People are using their smartphones instead of their PCs. That hurts sales. So PCs need to behave more like smartphones, e.g. by being able to notify you of new messages at all times. Then people will surely ditch their smartphones again and buy laptops.

Intel, Microsoft et al never considered that that’s fundamentally not how PCs should work.

Well, and them replacing the rotting husk of MacOS 9 with a bastardized version of NeXTSTEP. That kinda helped, too.

Meanwhile I think mine is a pretty good phone except for the side-facing fingerprint sensor, which is straight up incorrect and shouldn’t be done.

Then again I consider an audio jack to be an important feature and smartphone cameras as something you can safely skip in the feature matrix. My needs are somewhat unusual.

The fingerprint sensor is still bad, though. It’s extremely easy to accidentally touch it three times while fishing the phone out of your pocket. It should require a second of contact before trying to unlock the phone; that would make it vastly more usable.

The Pandora was pretty cool even if it took so long to get manufactured that the SoC was outdated by the time I got mine. I do have vivid memories of playing Kolf on it during a long and boring speech.

Same here. There’s really no reason why I should have to throw away the whole machine if the keyboard goes marginal after a few years or I decide I want a faster CPU.