I didn’t even know about the others, thanks :-)

I still hoping JpegXL will get some traction. The fact that it was removed from Chrome looks bad but they’ll most likely add it again if it does. It’s by far the best of all of them.

Just use the piped.video frontend.

It doesn’t make sense for them to do because their customers don’t seem to care.

“Malicious” implies intent.

It’s just a guess but all of Googles failed messengers were probably available for iOS, too. Apple on the other hand is known to intentionally make things incompatible with other brands.

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.

Wikipedia sais WhatsApp was released 2009, two years before iMessage. So the idea wasn’t new and they most likely didn’t lock out Android users by accident.

Once you slightly climb the career ladder, vocabulary turns into marketing bs. Suddenly you most not say “problem” anymore. They’re “opportunities” or “challenges”. So at that level you don’t get “fired” because that would sound bad for the next company you’re going with. You’re looking for new challenges elsewhere. Leaving behind a dumpster fire like in this very case.

GPS location please.

Obviously I don’t want to know it but be sure there’s hundreds of Google employees that can freely access it.

He might have convinced himself already. That doesn’t change the facts though.

Crazy of you think about it. Kind of sad actually.

The problem with only panels and wind is the fluctuation. We need at least a small “baseline” power supply that works when there is no wind at night. Storing large amounts of energy is the missing piece here to get rid of conventional power plants altogether. We’ll get there eventually.

If a penalty is “worth it”, it’s a business decision, not a penalty. Add a zero or two if you want it to work as intended.

T480s user here. It’s perfectly fine, too. I think it went downhill from the 90-series onwards.

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.

There’s OsmAnd and Organic Maps (and probably more). Both are open-source apps, use Openstreemap data, and work offline. You can get OsmAnd+ for free on F-Droid. If you want support the devs you can buy it in the Play Store. There’s also a free but limited version there.

You still have to install that annoying Blizzard launcher, I guess?

I think there’s sauce on your screen.

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.

But isn’t the church the reason why he feels that way in the first place?