Its not specifically hard but its also not just as easy to use. I say this as someone whos been gaming on linux for over a decade now. You still run into issues here and there with proton(often a devs fault for bad code) and there is genuinely a lot more going on and tweakable on the steamdeck.

Steamdeck is a great device but Nintendo is good at making simple systems

Yeah I dont think I’ll ever understand these weird 5g skepticism threads. I do get better battery life on lte than 5g and building penetration means a lot more switching between bands(an issue specifically with my pixel’s radio) but similar issues existed with with lte and 3g when they launched. I guess the difference is LTE already has speeds and latency enough for people to get by.

And yeah on lte you’re already getting 10-60mbps down so for most use cases you probably dont notice a huge difference in speed while browsing social media, and watching youtube. But having a network with higher speeds and more bandwidth is better for handling congestion. If you live in an area where the 5g is unreliable or your phone has poor support for it then you can just switch to lte while things keep cooking.

Yeah google didnt help of course, but the internet as a whole pivoted from RSS. It still very much exists today and you have user friendly easy ones like feedly still out there in spite of the pivot, but the inability of RSS to go mainstream is more the result of how social media and apps dominate the modern web

Personally as an RSS user I dont even want or need it to send me the article. I almost always just click the link and go to the website directly. I think RSS could still exit as just a link aggregate with a preview. The thing that lead to the decline of RSS is that it was competing with social media and news aggregates like google news.

Setting up your RSS reader takes work. Even the super user friendly ones like feedly still require you to search for different sources that you want to add. In the old school and more pure RSS programs you have to manually find the rss link on a website and add it to your feed.

In a more open optimistic future of the internet this would be the way we get content. Exploring the web and adding it to our list if we want updates o demand. In the actual modern internet addictive monopolistic social media has to cater to algorithms instead or social media engagement(that often doesnt actually read the source).

Google not encouraging and getting rid of its rss content certainly didnt help matters but I think RSS is just a living fossil of a potential evolutionary branch that the internet count grown into but didnt.

Dont forget adding to your shopping list and opening the list

Part of this is also our fault for how we allowed our browsing habits to change and adjust and make the issue worse. Like how many of us will just search random things even if we want to search in or go to a specific website as a goto?

In the old days we might search once or find the website through word of mouth or links on other affiliated websites, and then bookmark good website and search there first before turning to google. Now? Lord knows I immediately google even if I know I can go to another website. Instead of browsing websites directly we sit on social media, be it reddit twitter facebook and are spoonfed our content without actually going to the original source or if we do just to the page and never to check. g like rolling stone reviewing air purifiers.

Some of this is the result of convenient access, some of this is thanks to addictive predatory design, and for those who held out as long as possible the companies in charge of content sites would pivot to cater towards social media and search algorithms and enshitify their homepage making it harder to bother.

Even before the big AI thing this was a common thing for trendy games. Frustrating is it would be websites that arent even gaming focused that would get “top 10 x” or “how to get x in popular game” or “console commands for game x!” . And of course since the top result isnt a game website it was just trying to grab clicks it was a not great or complete article.

My big issue with amazon these days is that it’s flooded with trash. Like sure if you want some disposable garbage that you dont think twice about or if a very specific item you know is good is for sale on their site you can use them and their return policy is good.

But otherwise the flood of no-name vendors has become like browsing a more expensive wish.com. So many randomly generated non reputable companies selling the same rebranded knockoffs of knockoffs at various price points. It used to be that at least you could go up in price bracket and get to the actual products but now even that is hard. You can check out products worth over a hundred dollars and it still have mixed reviews and no actual brand recognition . It’s gotten to the point that if its something that matters or is more that $50 I search on big box sites and either order directly for them or find the item and get it off amazon.

If the palm pre had better build quality and wasnt tied down to sprint in the US I sometimes wonder how things would have played out. It was a better OS than android(especially since it was competing with the g1).

Nvidia isnt so bad if you’re on a stable distro it supports and using x(though Ive heard wayland support is improving for it). On rolling or more cutting edge distros where the kernel is likely to change every few weeks and major DE versions might ship that proprietary driver will hurt.

That said while amd is generally better on linux for this reason it’s worth mentioning that it has two huge flaws:

1.Its not perfect like the fans mention. As someone who owned a 3500u and 6650u apu life under amd isnt always sunny. 3500u had a kernel regression for about half a year that prevented the cpu from idling and rembrant apus have an issue where the whole system locks up which seems to come and go(feels like it’s gone for now but Ive thought that before). Desktop gpus are better, but they still did suffer from driver bugs. I think my experience with my 5600xt was better than windows fans had for that generation, but it was not entirely stable and I did suffer from many kernel panics and system freezes. A few mesa and kernel releases fixed that, but it wasnt perfectly smooth. In addition to that no hdmi 2.1 support which is fine unless you game using your nice oled tv because no tvs come with display port. Proprietary drivers do allow for supporting some of the more obnoxious features that arent allowed.

2. It can vary gpu/cpu to gpu/cpu for how fresh your software will need to be, but generally newer hardware needs very new kernels just for basic support and it may need a few more releases to get stable or good. So if you want to just sit back with ubutnu LTS or debian you need to make sure the release cycle lines up with support for your hardware. The other end of the spectrum is that being on a bleeding or cutting edge distro can mean stability issues and regressions. So for example a month or three ago fedora pushed a kernel update that had a regression where my 6800xt gpu wouldnt clock up when utilized so gaming framerates tanked and retroarch shaders were choking up. I could just use the old kernel but I had to make sure that the kernel updates didnt bump it away. Also an entire point release and several releases after that before the bug was fixed.

So while there is a lot of pro amd comments in the linux world and its worth acknowledging that the open source drivers are generally good it’s not perfect and the grass isnt always greener.

Well thats just mean for no particular reason.

I recently created another google account for youtube just in case. Was a huge pain to transfer over all my subscriptions but worth it for not having to worry.

While I understand the concern over the single appstore monopoly that we have on any device, I think it’s worth remembering what ecosystem android and IOS came into.

The old multimedia phones that were sold in the mid 00s were effectively “smart”. Many of them ran java and you could install programs, and freely install ringtones, and browsers that actually worked like opera mini/mobile. The thing is you couldnt by default. At least not in the US. The devices were locked down and everything you did went through the carrier’s store. And US telecom services are some of the greediest and scummiest companies out there so you couldnt even use your own mp3 files as a ringtone.

Apple combated this with their closed off ecosystem, but android did face issues with fragmentation in the early days and needed a way to prevent the telecoms branded phones from stinking up the ecosystem. They did this by leveraging the play services and play store. From the playstore they can also since mainline release various peacemeal updates which helps resolve their other issue with fragmentation and thats android device being abandoned.

Sure enough you can still release your own version of android without it, amazon’s tablets and tv sticks do pretty well.

That said I do think it’s a good to help people move past the default and open up the platforms more, I just wish it would apply to all smart devices,

Yeah and honestly Im fine with courts opening up the platforms more to make at ths point, but the issue is that apple got the win. People cite incentives and back doors dealings on googles end, but apple doesnt need to they just control everything by default no questions asked.

Yeah it still doesnt feel consistent to me. Apple is a large enough marketshare holder for a handheld computer and doesnt even give you an option to sideload another market place. The explanation doesnt make any more sense just because google is more open.

Hybrids are still generally more fuel efficient than equivalent non hybrids especially in non highway conditions. And you have plugin hybrids which are effectively EVs with the peace of mind that on those handful of trips that do exceed your range you can get there just fine.

It’s rarer than is used to be but I know Ive had issues in the past with firefox on some insurance websites, some banking websites, I know Ive seen sites where they block you from even entering but if you change the user agent it works. It’s less common than it was 5 years ago though as there is a report website feature and they work hard to try and fix compatibility.

It wasnt firefox’s fault though more the web developer. I dont have specific examples because I didnt save them and it’s been a while. Its not as bad as during the ie6 days of the internet though. Now that was dark times.

Edit: Also sometimes it’s addons and people mistake that for the browser and dont tweak their addons before blaming firefox.

Early chrome introduced a lot of features that attracted the tech crowd in the late 00s and early 10s like html5 video (replacing the need for flash plugins) as well as multithreaded tasks for better use of those newfangled multicore cpus people were buying.

Around the same time firefox was experiencing a memory leak and took too long to open(I switched over to linux at the time and didnt have the issue but it was a big complaint online).

Early on firefox was also slower to add a lot of the newer html5 stuff that was popping up around the web while chrome was more or less built from the ground up with it in mind which also lost it some enthusiast mindshare.

Along the same time google started a heavy chrome push. Of course the default browser on android was based on chrome, and google search results pushed people to download chrome, and youtube’s html5 video ran better on chrome(firefox initially didnt have all the codecs they used due to licensing). Google used its web dominance to advertise, and push, and advertise, and push.

Eventually firefox got to a point where they mostly caught up but by this point chrome had gained a solid footing and lead and here is where dirtier. Firefox was constantly behind on webstandard and synthetic benchmarks but many of the things firefox was behind in on these benchmarks were things that google had just introduced. Also with the new google dominance came lazy developers who would instead of building a site for web standards and test on multiple devices, build their site to run on chrome and bugs on other webrenderers be damned. With other major competitors like opera and Edge switching to blink it meant that the devs were mostly covered.

So this gave the appearance that firefox was still technically behind even after having closed the gap. And by the time chrome started having its own PR issues and memory leak problems the fluid tech landscape has changed.

Firefox lost market share in an era when tech and software were still fluid. New social media could rise up any day myspace could get killed by newcomer facebook. There can be multiple video sites who will win? IOS, Blackberry, Palm, Winmo, Nokia, and Android were going head to head in the smartphone space. Internet explorer, firefox, netscape, opera, chrome and safari all had different engines.

Nothing came to knock facebook out and the social media that rose up after was just different, youtube is essentially a monopoly in that space, IOS and Android are all that’s left of the smartphone war, and firefox still exists but chromium’s engine Blink powers most alternative browsers and firefox’s usershare is tiny now. Safari only has a marketshare because it’s default on macs and the only game in town on IOS. Chrome will have to really really really mess up in order to actually shed significant mainstream user marketshare.

Remember when websites could open infinite windows, and prevent you from backout out or closing windows?

Even if things get really bad, they wont get that bad. Also dont forget flash meant the ads were media rich, security hole ridden, cpu spinning, awful monsters as well.

Sure, but they wont. The insidious thing about iMessenger is that it isnt iChat. It is the apple default text messaging app. Which is good because it means that all your messages are in one place, and you dont have to try to convince your older family member to install a 3rd party chat app. You just have a chat app. This tricks users not into thinking that texting is just better on apple.

But its bad because it only works between other apple products and users. This is objectively Apple’s shortcoming, however there are enough iPhones in the wild and enough people in the US who defaulted to just hitting the sms/mms icon instead of downloading a chat app that the odd man out might be the android user. And it’s not just about the green bubble being green. If you invite an a green bubble to a group text then all your rich chat messenger features go away and it turns into an MMS thread. Which is objectively bad.

But yes they could just download and use whatsapp,line, telegram, signal, facebook messenger(and in the early days things like aim/yim/msn) But they dont. The fact is their default messenger app works, and it works well with most people they talk to so the problem is the green text.

It’s especially silly when you consider the “there’s an app for that” generation of user and so many things are apps but they refuse to engage on other chat channels. People download different apps to get dates, the navigate, to browse websites that shouldnt even be apps, to order food, order groceries, order taxi’s, but a chat app just to talk with you? ehhhhhhhhh.