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

sftpgo is a nice project to host files in a secure way without too much hassle.

While I don’t agree with your first point from my experience, the second one is very true. Especially for memory consumption, your typical Java app easily occupies five times as much as something more bare metal.

There aren’t many distro with a base system as tiny as Arch. It’s not a bad choice at all. It’s on my server since many years, working perfectly reliable. Everything except the base system is inside Podman containers. Why not?

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.

I think that’s for LGPL. For GLP any form of linking requires the code to be licensed under GPL, too. The dynamic linking except isn’t that bad of you think about it. It gives you the freedom to update or replace the library at any time. For security critical libs (TLS, GPG, …) that’s a big plus.

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.

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

I second this. People usually recommend Ubuntu for beginners which I can somewhat understand because it’s super easy to get started. But the downside is that you’ll most likely stay a beginner and don’t understand the absolute basics of a Linux based OS because, well, most of the time you don’t have to. Then you make a beginner’s mistake once and there you go.

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.

DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400” sources according to itself, including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot); but none from Google. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites such as Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the search results.

Source: Wikipedia

So it’s definitely not a “proxy to Bing” but it does use data from Bing.