I don’t know man, those are some strange behaviors. Can’t say I’ve experienced any of them. There does seem to be a common theme of slow and delayed responses, that is almost certainly a hardware issue from my experience, but that doesn’t line up with the specs you mention.

Regarding the privilege issues, running a general user without superuser privileges is a standard practice for Linux. You can change your user to a superuser though, there are plenty of walkthroughs available to accomplish that. That will keep you from having to run sudo, doas or enter your password as often. Some things will always require a passcode though, as that’s just what the best practices of the tech landscape indicate.

Supported and justified by the stockholders isn’t surprising. It’s the fact that this column writer is so unabashed in their reasoning that surprised me. It’s not often that you see regular, bottom level consumers enthusiastically using the same reasoning as a stock holder. Usually they come at it from more of a “they produce great products, they care about providing a great service” standpoint. However, someone who writes articles for a platform called “Apple Insider” is likely to have some level of stock in the company.

I’ve never stumbled across Apple Insider before, it’s quite the apologist for the company. Here’s some tone deaf quotes from the article that made me laugh:

“It’s true that the buck stops at the CEO, but without Tim Cook, Apple would not have so many bucks.”

I guess if you make a lot of money you get a pass for allowing misleading and anti-consumer marketing campaigns?

“If billions and trillions are hard numbers to imagine, here’s another one. Apple could, if its valuation could be converted to cash without loss, give every person living in the continental USA a free iPhone 16e — and then 13 spare ones. Each.”

I love how they chose to illustrate Apple’s obscene level of wealth with how much it could benefit people if they ever distributed that wealth through altruistic giving 😂

Heres a summary of the predictions made, from never all the way up to within the year. It seems to me the closer you get to the dollar bill the sooner the projections become.

“Some experts predict it will never happen…”

“Some experts argue that human intelligence is more multifaceted than what the current definition of AGI describes.” (That AGI is not possible.)

“Most agree that AGI will arrive before the end of the 21st century.”

“Some researchers who’ve studied the emergence of machine intelligence think that the singularity could occur within decades.”

Current surveys of AI researchers are predicting AGI around 2040"

“Entrepreneurs are even more bullish, predicting it around ~2030”

“The CEO of Anthropic, who thinks we’re right on the threshold—give it about 12 more months or so.”

I feel your pain 😅🫠

Yeah, just to add another confirmation to the other comments, if you have a separate home partition you can reuse it with a new / partition and expect it to work fine. The only stuff that gets saved in your home folder is comfiguration files for your apps, along with whatever actual files you have stored. You can even swap distros (Ubuntu/Arch) and keep your home folder, though sometimes the config files and settings don’t translate perfectly.

Seriously. It seems like the subconscious anxieties and fears of the writer’s mind come through in statements like this and a few others. Whatever positives (real and imagined) there are about the situation, there is an underlying loss of personal autonomy that causes a sense of unease. The thing that’s continuing to intrigue me now is: did the writer intend for that to come through, showing the losses a society of that nature would sustain as a commentary on those that promote it, or are they unaware that their words reveal that distress and anxiety? Idk, weird article.

“Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.”

The consensus seems to be that this is a propaganda piece (or at least heavily opinionated by the writer) but I just don’t understand how they could write this with a positive frame of mind. The article is a strange mixture of perspectives that don’t seem consistent. Bizarre.

You’re doing the lord’s work 🫡

I’d suggest looking in to it farther. The commenter above basically covered it, but no, beeper is not all closed source. Their hosted server has never been open source, but all the self-hosted bridges have been, and continue to be. You can run your own, open source, self-hosted beeper server, just like you’ve always been able to. There’s nothing embrace, extend extinguish about that.

Where did you read that? The github pages are all still open and receiving updates, you can still self-host the bridges and its under the apache-2.0 license, just like it’s always been.

Sadly it doesn’t 🥲. Copying app data is the hardest part of the process without a system level backup like seedvault, neobackup or traditional google backup services.

Only if you’re currently running stock android.

NeoBackup is the only one I’ve run across that seems to really fill the role of backup and restore thoroughly. The trouble is, in order to work it needs root, so I’ve never actually been able to try it. Almost reason enough to root in my book 😅, I love a good back up system.

Seedvault is another fairly well developed option, but it needs to be hardcoded in to the OS by the ROM developer.

You’ll probably benefit from a series of different backup apps in combination. Here’s a few that I’ve used and benefited from:

SMS import/export - backs up all SMS, MMS, call logs and contacts. Does not backup RCS.

Applist backup - back up your installed app list. This includes data on where you installed the app from and where you can get it again along with other useful info. The apps still have to manually installed.

Aside from those two, most FOSS apps include a backup and restore function, such as: signal, neo launcher, fossify calendar, newpipe, metro (music player), aegis (2 factor), obtainium, etc…

I hope this helps. I tend to tinker and install various ROMs, so am well aquainted with the pain of setting up a fresh OS without a system wide backup program. Its not as bad as it seems though, and as long as you get your messages, contacts and call logs moved over it goes pretty smooth.

I do see a mention in that post about instead supporting the jellyfin client developers. They give this page as a reference for who to support based on which client you use.

From a pragmatic standpoint, yeah it would accomplish that goal. However, that discounts the intended purpose of the stars, which is to represent an individuals attribution of personal value and trust. They lose significance and become misleading if you can buy them, which holds true even for good software. When we see a github star is should represent someone who has used the software, finds value in it or who respects and trusts the project.

This interview with the developer of MicroG might be interesting if you’d like to learn more about it’s benefits (or downsides) over sandboxed Google Play services. It debunks a lot of misconceptions or rumours about MicroG.

MicroG collects very little information about the user. It does less data collection than sandboxed Google Play despite it being a system app. MicroG is a more transparent, community driven piece of software that distances people from Google to a greater degree in my estimation, though I don’t have developer level understanding of the software. Just basing my thoughts on interviews and published information like the video above.

Personally I prefer the privacy/open source oriented approach of MicroG, but I also run GrapheneOS so haven’t been able to use it for a few years.

I think saying it’s just as bad is an overstatement. MicroG sends fake data or no data in the majority of data calls from Google servers and only interacts with Google when it needs to in order to make a given app function. Sending drastically less data to Google is a win and fits many people’s threat model just fine.

I’ve never used Shazam but did use the music recognition app on pixels when I was the stock ROM. Audile seems that it gets about 80% of what the Google app would get. I’d imagine that would change depending on the kind of music you’re often trying to identify though, Audile is probably working with a smaller database of some genres.

I can’t totally remember when I found these, but they’re relatively fresh on my phone. Couldn’t live without them now.

• Audile - song recognition
• Findmydevice - lost phone recovery
• Metro - visually pleasing music player
• Paperless Mobile - manage and interact with paperless-ngx servers
• Photok - secure photo storage for sensitive media

If you use KDE, look for the “TV Glitch [burn-my-windows]” opening and closing animation. It’s a default setting in the KDE Settings > Workspace behavior > Desktop effects > Window open/close animation section. It’s really good in my opinion, especially if you tinker with the open/close timing to make it a little more crisp.