Like it or not, Twitter is still the de-facto place for breaking news stories. You just have to sift through the dross.

As much as Mastodon is a far nicer and healthier social platform, it has a long way to go before it gets anywhere close in this particular regard.

Decksandrumsandrockandroll! Good call.

That, Dig Your Own Hole and The Fat of the Land were in my heavy listening rotation back in '97-98.

Nice. This soundtrack was my introduction to techno and electronica, back in the day.

Yeah, without evidence that Activision/CoD were intentionally in cahoots with arms manufacturers, this is pretty flimsy.

I do think the case against Daniel Defense is stronger, though. I can see a legitimate argument being made that guns should not be advertised directly at teenagers and young men, and that firearms shouldn’t be advertised on social media in general.

Saw the new movie today. It’s not as full of CGI as the trailer makes it look, but, granted, it’s more noticeable than it was in Fury Road. There are still some great practical stunts in it, though, it was still an enjoyable experience. 75% as good as FR, for me at least.

Yup. How long have we been waiting for graphene batteries to revolutionize technology? About a decade now?

That’s how it goes all too often with these settlements, sadly. Remember when Fox News got to settle with Dominion over the fact that they knowingly pushed election fraud claims that they privately knew to be false? They just paid their fine and went right back to business as usual.

Free - Lawnchair | Kvaesisto
Paid - Niagara Launcher

Ah gotcha. I suppose you could just disable the default dock search widget and manually add the Firefox one. Only downside is that it would have to be above the dock area.

But … Firefox is a browser, not a search engine?

Or do you mean you can’t do a Google search via Firefox rather than using the Google search app?

nextdns.io

Right. Like, why would anyone pay a subscription for that?

Edit: I think I get it now:

Those who buy the MC02 get a year for free, after which they’ll pay around $20/€15/£13 each month (discounted if paid annually) to access a handful of services, including email, a VPN (dubbed “Digital Nomad”), online synchronization for calendar and contacts, secure storage on Punkt’s own Swiss servers and the express promise that there will be no ads or third-party crawlers.

So you can access cloud services without being tied to Google, I suppose. Still, the value proposition is questionable.

I don’t get the use case. What does it offer over getting an old phone and sticking LineageOS on it?

LDAC suffers from high latency and very steep degradation once the strength of the Bluetooth connection drops even slightly. In some case it can drop to around 330kbps, which makes it no better than SBC unless you can guarantee a rock solid connection at all times.

I have a flagship Galaxy device and there was nowhere near that many. As I mentioned before, the budget Samsung devices are much worse than the flagships when it comes to bloatware.

In any case, the subject at hand is not bloatware (which is undeniably bad - no argument from me) but ads. Not the same thing.

A pre-installed app is not an ad, though.

Plus pretty much of of them can easily be disabled.

Where’d you hear about flagship Samsung phones having ads?

As far as I know, the only Samsung models that feature ads tend to be the lower end series that get sold in markets like India.

Gaming these days is generally excellent thanks to Proton. Certain titles do still have issues, but it’s on a case by case basis.

Audio latency is a good point - I don’t know how that fares under a VM these days. Pipewire has brought many improvements over Pulse, so it’s possible that the situation has also gotten better.

If you’re hanging onto Windows for just one app, you could try running it in a virtual machine. I do that for a few work-related apps that have no Linux/web versions and it works great.

You could also dual boot, if VM performance doesn’t quite cut it.

I picked up Civ 6 for $5, which ain’t bad.

I don’t know about open source, but the only Android app that comes anywhere close to the functionality of GIMP/Krita/Photoshop is Infinite Painter, AFAIK.

No, it’s not the same as any other phone. Pixels get reviewed well because the reviewers get units that have been double checked and ensured that they are defect-free, and they are not used for very long before the verdicts get published.

If you go to places like r/GooglePixel or any of the Lemmy alternatives, they’re full of users complaining about the finicky connectivity, bad displays, or unreliable fingerprint readers, in numbers that are far higher per-user than other brands.

Google phones sell significantly fewer units than, say, Samsung, but they have noticeably more users complaining about technical issues.

Google phones are top class.

If you get lucky in their QC lottery, perhaps.

https://www.xda-developers.com/google-pixel-fold-quality-control/

If they had Samsung’s hardware reliability and breadth of customization, they’d be perfect.