I don’t understand how people do things like shopping on their phone. I mean if you’re only buying one or two items, sure, but if you’re doing grocery pickup at Walmart or something how do you even function on a screen that small? You can’t do any kind of comparison without flipping back and forth between multiple tabs.

Mobile is fine for reading articles, instant messaging, etc., but there are a lot of things that are absolutely better on a laptop.

I’ve thought about it; but with a wife and two kids it would be difficult if not impossible to pick up and move somewhere else and start all over.

1975 was 49 years ago, that’s basically half a century, 😋

Because they’re not the “default”. Most folks stick with whatever comes on their device by default; Edge on Windows, Safari on MacOS/iOS, Chrome on Android, etc. Anything beyond just picking it up and turning it on requires forethought and effort, which most users don’t care about.

Fedora got hit too.

I remember that! I had Unreal Tournament 2004 and it technically had a native Linux version but it wasn’t on the CD. You had to extract most of the files from the CD and go download the Linux executable file from the unreal website to drop into the installation folder.

Proton is just Wine from Valve. They add their own fixes and patches and whatnot and have an “experimental” branch you can try with games that don’t work right away, but it’s just Wine. Everything Valve does to Proton eventually makes it way back upstream to Wine proper. One reason Valve may not make it available for MacOS themselves is because they’re basing their SteamOS on Linux, and while MacOS and Linux are both Unix “like”, MacOS was/is more based on BSD, so the system calls may not always line up or work exactly the same when translating them. I do think however that Proton, or a modified version of it at least, is what Apple’s game development kit thingy leverages.

After Steam officially released its native Linux client I played Half Life 1, 2 and “Brutal Legend” because they all had native Linux ports before proton was a thing. Before that I remember playing games like Sauerbraten (quake like fps), Battle for Wesnoth (my wife and I still play this together), Frozen Bubble, LBreakout2 and several other Linux native games.

I’m using CalyxOS and it’s pre-installed as a system app, so this seems like something that’s being built in at the AOSP level of development.

Planned obsolescence

The general consensus I’ve always heard is that if you have a deficiency, taking a vitamin supplement can absolutely help. If you’re eating a balanced diet and blood work looks good at the doctor, then vitamins won’t do much because you’ll just pee out all the excess.

Edited my original comment for accuracy.

Thanks for clarifying. I hadn’t actually used that particular feature so I must have misunderstood the way it was worded in the app.

For most of my shopping, which takes place at our local Walmart (I live in the US), I actually really like using the self-checkout. Now when we make a big grocery run, having a person there makes things easier because they can scan and bag, I can unload things onto the belt and my wife can pull bags off the little turnstile thing and put them back in our cart, but most of the time I’m just running in to grab a handful of items so when I leave I can just walk up to the kiosk, scan my stuff, scan the QR code with the Walmart app on my phone and walk out the door. It’ll auto pay with the privacy card I attached to my Walmart account and give me a digital receipt to show if somebody wants to see it at the door. They even have a thing now where you can pay a monthly subscription for “Walmart+” where you can scan and pay for your items as you shop.

Governments should not depend on social media for vital communications, period.

Google may not be showing an “AI” tagged answer, but they’re using AI to automatically generate web pages with information collated from outside sources to keep you on Google instead of citing and directing you to the actual sources of the information they’re using.

Here’s an example. I’m on a laptop with a 1080p screen. I went to Google (which I basically never use, so it shouldn’t be biased for or against me) and did a search for “best game of 2023”. I got no actual results in the entire first screen. Instead, their AI or other machine learning algorithms collated information from other people and built a little chart for me right there on the search page and stuck some YouTube (also Google) links below that, so if you want to read an article you have to scroll down past all the Google generated fluff.

I performed the exact same search with DuckDuckGo, and here’s what I got.

And that’s not to mention all the “news” sites that have straight up fired their human writers and replaced them with AI whose sole job is to just generate word salads on the fly to keep people engaged and scrolling past ads, accuracy be damned.

I’m on my laptop so I thought I would elaborate on my first comment to give you things to watch out for if/when you update. I’ve been hosting mine with the zip file manually installed with my own Apache/PHP/MySQL/MariaDB setup for ages now without issue. It’s been rock solid except for, like I said, the occasional changes required to take advantage of new features such as adding new indices to the database or installing an additional php addon. Here’s the things that I noticed with updating to 28.

• The 3 dot/ellipses menu was missing in the web interface and was replaced with dedicated buttons for “Download”, “Add to Favorites” and “Delete”. Shift clicking was also broken. This meant that when I, for example, take a lot of photos for a holiday, I can’t use the web interface to select a large range of multiple files and then move them all from “InstantUpload” into a more permanent album. I either had to use the mobile app, or do them one at a time. The ellipses menu, along with the options to bulk “move/copy” have been added back since then with the *.1 update, but shift clicking in the web interface to select a range of files is still broken.
• The “Retention” app, which is listed as a “Featured” app doesn’t function any more. I used it to automatically delete backups of my Signal messenger, files in the “InstantUpload” folder that were over a year old, etc. You can enable it, but it doesn’t actually work and just throws errors in the log file, which is now reported in the “Overview” portion of the “Administration” page with a note of “X number of errors since somedate”, and prevents you getting the green checkmark. It’s probably safe to assume that other apps will also have issues because I had half a dozen get automatically disabled with the update.
• Occasionally when I use the web interface to move or copy a file, I’ll get an error message that the operation failed. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it’s not and the operation actually succeeded. If it ends up being true and the move did actually fail, doing it again results in a successful move.

It seems like they’ve made some substantial under-the-hood changes to the user interface that shouldn’t have been shipped to the “stable” channel. It’s not completely broken, it “is” usable, especially after they restored my bulk move/copy button, but I still can’t use the Retention app, at least last time I looked, so I’ve literally got daily cron scripts to check those folders for old files and delete them, then trigger an occ files:scan of the affected directories to keep the Nextcloud database in sync with the changes. This however, bypasses the built-in trash bin so I can’t recover the files in the event of an issue. I actually considered rolling back to 27 for a bit, but decided against it, so if I were you, I would stick with 27 for a while and keep an ear to the ground regarding any issues people are having that are or aren’t getting fixed in 28.

While the individuals have a responsibility to double check things, I think Google is a big part of this. They’re rolling “AI” into their search engine, so people are being fed made up, inaccurate bullshit by a search engine that they’ve trusted for decades.

I’ve hosted mine for years on my own bare metal Debian/Apache install and 28 is the first update that has been a major pain. I’ve had the occasional need to install a new package to enable a new feature, or needed to add new/missing indices to the database, but the web interface literally tells you how to do those things, so they’re not hard.

28 though broke several of the “featured” apps that I use regularly, like “Retention”. It also introduced some questionable UI changes that they had to fix with the recent .1 update. I’ll get occasional errors when trying to move or delete files in the web interface and everything. 28 really feels like beta software, even though we’re a point release in and I got it from the “stable” update channel.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years now and it works surprisingly well for me. 9 times out of 10 I find exactly what I’m looking for in the first couple of results. Brave Search is another independent alternative you might look into.

AI generated garbage seems to be cluttering up places like Google.