…And the cost of that convenience is now $2000 and a bunch of spyware.

Are you sure? Because based on the internet armchair developers I see around, open source developers are an inexhaustible source of unending miracles that work for free and are fueled by incoherent, conflicting, entitled demands from 14 year olds.

Now… I don’t like to brag…

Nice troll bait.

No, I know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Google’s old results were based on click-through determining which results were best. Now that the quality of the average user is lower, so is the quality of the average click-through result.

That’s as much response as you’re going to get though. You responded in bad faith, so now you’re going to talk to yourself if you choose to respond.

There is more to it than that… 20 years ago most of the people on the internet were likely similar to you, so most of their desired results were similar to yours.

Now people on the internet since the early 2000 are a minority compared to the “democratized” flood of users who joined in the mobile crapplication phase and started skewing search results towards simpler, less useful results.

SEO and ads didn’t help, but the whole ecosystem broke the model.

You’ll notice the vast majority of the complaints and problems people had about systemd went away when it launched into distros and invisibly did everything init did, often times in a better way. They made big improvements WITHOUT crapping all over everyone’s legitimate complaints and expected features, and things went fine, to the point where I’d say even most naysayers begrudgingly admit they were overreacting.

Compare that to Wayland, which not only didn’t do that, it makes it worse by actively gaslighting power users, mocking them for powerful features in their workflow and demanding they make changes. It’s been active and spreading for years, and the complaints people had on DAY ONE are still there.

It didn’t work for Mark Shuttleworth when he pushed Unity, and it shouldn’t work now. This is not the proprietary Microsoft world where developers can decide they have a new, better way of doing things and take a wrecking ball to the workflows of millions of active users and then scream “my way or the highway”. I do not need others to tell me what is good for me. That attitude belongs in the closed software world.

I don’t particularly care that 80% of users are on Wayland. It’s not relevant - if I cared about what the majority of users were doing, I’d be on Windows. None of that fixes my inability to use Wayland for my daily tasks. I will continue to use X if I have to build it myself and exclusively run outdated desktop environments. I refuse to give up my functionality to add a layer of security that breaks my critical use cases with no option to opt out.

Any ways to actively help China win the AI race?

Hypothetically, of course.

Preach all you want. In a practical sense, X works for me and Wayland does not. No amount of yelling about security exploits that have not once been exploited in the wild even by the most resource rich state actors will change the fact that I can not maintain my daily productivity with Wayland, and I’m not going to accept being LESS productive to satisfy anyone’s personal development crusade. That’s the antithesis of how software, especially FOSS software, is supposed to work. Either Wayland will give me every single feature I need, or I will sit here with my old but functioning X installations until the day I die.

The standard workaround seems to be “scream at the developer to rewrite their features around Wayland’s limitations and stop bothering the Wayland developers asking for feature parity”. You know… The same way Android handles updates.

User deleted by commenter

They’re also MUCH more susceptible to misinformation and propaganda than the “in-between” generations. They aren’t as affected by traditional media, sure, but their new media sources are heavily propagandized, with visibility manipulated by the worst people in the world. They might HEAR about the dangers of misinformation or propaganda in the periphery, but with their primary interface being a handful of apps on a mobile device, there’s not much they can do about it without extensive education they aren’t getting.

$45 million??? That’s a rounding error on a single day of Google’s income. I’m not even a little shocked that they have no scruples or integrity whatsoever, but I AM shocked how apparently CHEAP our democracy is.

Hell, it’ll probably cost more than that to IMPLEMENT this in any meaningful sense!

The solution is what it has always been.

Since DAY ONE phone hardware should have been as standardized and open as normal PC hardware - able to run any operating system that you want.

But every time it got brought up for DECADES, techbro corporate apologists were ready to line up and talk about all the reasons that wouldn’t work and how companies would NEVER do that, as if that was some kind of sensible counterpoint.

Now the noose is closing and all it’s going to take is the combined forces of the richest companies in the world to crush what little competition remains. Undercut or sue Fairphone into oblivion, for example. The lawsuits don’t even have to have merit - they can eat the costs for a few quarters to ensure no viable alternative to the walled garden ever gets a foothold.

The thing to be done now is minimize your mobile usage altogether and try to make it to the tech dystopian endgame with a few local files of your own left.

I’ll drink to that, my friend.

Exactly what they’re doing right now. What cable companies did. What every dominant business does when something better starts to eat their lunch.

Become increasingly abusive and scummy towards the customers who are left, because they’re either too deeply ingrained, spineless or lazy to change and they’ve already self-selected.

“If you don’t have another cloud destination, don’t worry… we’ll automatically save it to your OneDrive account we FORCED you to get when you activated your operating system. Why no! You CAN’T turn it off! Also, we won’t let you edit your files without internet connectivity. You can never be too safe!”

Literally the ONLY thing stopping this from happening is they don’t think they can get away with it yet. I’m NOT going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Toyoake in Aichi

I feel like all of this is a red herring.

How do Windows users fix a problem? They Google the problem and get the solution.

The EXACT same thing works in Linux. Has for a long, long time.

The only time it DOESN’T is when you either don’t know what you’re trying to do, in which case no power on EARTH is going to be able to help you, or you’re trying to do something so obscure and obtuse that a Windows user wouldn’t be doing it either.