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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I can only tell you about Europe, because nobody here seems to use imessage. SMS are basically dead since the first generation of smartphones came out. They are used for OTP codes from banks sometimes but that’s it. The only reason why people use SMS in the US seems to be Apple. They didn’t make SMS worse than they were (which would be hard to achieve), but they basically force people to keep using them. Well, or abandon their apple friends. For the API, I think Apple could afford that, honestly. They don’t have to handle the data between Android phones if they support some form of federation. Only between Apple and Apple, and Apple and Android. Your operator also handles SMS when they go to or come from other operators. I think Apple just likes the peer pressure they seem to create with that app in the US. From a business perspective that might be smart, sure. Still, very malicious behavior. I’m glad there’s more and more regulation coming up (at least in the EU). If imessage wasn’t a niche here, they’d have to comply.


  • The Tesla comparison would work better this way: while you’re driving to another Tesla owner’s place, you’re having a smooth ride, no bumps, car works as expected. Then you put your other friends address into into the navigation and the radio switches to noisy FM and one of the headlights starts to flicker. It’s lock-out because no non-iphone user can join that club. It’s not lock-in, because every iphone user could easily switch to one of the “cross-platform” messangers. Not that I like Google. They’re both sh*t. But just opening up your infrastructure for others doesn’t mean you have to develop and maintain apps for other OSes.










  • I’m okay with steam because:

    • basically everyone can sell their games on Steam (*conditions apply)
    • it has a (working) offline mode
    • they’re putting a lot of effort into gaming on Linux
    • family sharing
    • it let’s me integrate external games

    The Blizzard launcher is just for the few games Blizzard is selling. It asked me to go online way too often. Maybe every single time, I don’t remember exactly. It’s a bit like that Rockstar launcher. I don’t see any value in it besides auto updates.





  • I haven’t tried not touching it for years to be honest. Longest period without a reboot was something between half a year and a year and it worked without a problem. Check the Arch website, breaking changes or manual interventions are very rare nowadays. There’s just one thing you have to do if you start an update after a long time: make sure to update the keyring first or pacman will exit with an error. That’s also mentioned in the wiki.

    I installed Arch on my server because:

    • I know it very well.
    • The base system is tiny. Fewer packages = fewer problems. Everything else is in Podman containers anyway.
    • It’s very flexible. I have a customized encrypted rootfs which needs to be unlocked through SSH, not a very common thing I guess.