tedgravy

Personally, Kagi is worth it for me because I’ve grown to rely on its features (lenses, domain ranking, Wolfram Alpha integration, fast response times), and I’ve not been able to get the same quality of results from free alternatives (SearXNG included).

That said, if you’re not a heavy search user, or you’re happy with the results from free search providers, then it probably won’t be much use to you over something like DuckDuckGo.

Regarding the AI integrations, I’ve not found them intrusive personally. Admittedly, I like their (optional) translation tool and (also optional) quick answers even though they’re both LLM-based.

Hell yeah. Few things are more satisfying than sliding a MiniDisc into a drive and feeling it click into place.

As a packager, I totally relate to this: we generally don’t have the resources to follow the upstream development of the projects we rely on, let alone audit all the changes they make between releases. Open source software still has security advantages — we can communicate directly with the maintainers, backport security fixes and immediately release them to users, fix bugs that affect the distribution, etc. — but I agree that it’s not a silver bullet.