Makes me feel slightly better to know I’m not the only one living in a country (United States) where foreign bought phones are a hit or miss on the networks. wish they could create a better system though.

Well, I’m just not going to agree with the LLM then

Part of what I’ve hoped about Gemini is that Google would actually take advantage of its Cloud infrastructure and build Gemini in a way that makes it truly cross-platform compared to the Google Assistant with a consistent set of features across the web, the speaker, and anywhere else they choose to cram Gemini into.

Instead they choose to channel everything through WhatsApps Android app.

Microsoft products are always so hit or miss. I find Outlook to be a lot better than Gmail, but at the same time it lacks in so many places.

I don’t want more app stores I just want something like a cross platform version of obtainium

I’m not sure exactly. But I personally don’t like GNU because I think they have been embedded in a form of wishful thinking for far too long. Expecting that developers and manufacturers willingly relinquish their rights to their copyright for the benefit of others, regardless if they want to or not. And expecting that end users only seek out those kinds of systems as well. In total, providing everyone with free reign with minimal regard to consequences. And pushing away those that simply want to try and make the things only a little better.

For an organization primarily devoted to ensuring that software remains open, accessible, and modifiable, they sure do seem to like to bend over backwards. Looking directly at GrapheneOS, my personal thought would be the fact the goals of GNU tend to conflict with the goals of security (the FSF has actively spoken against the concept of Tivoization, or systems that use free software but are locked down by hardware restrictions)

They’re also horribly out of touch with the general public. And in some cases, simply too radical to be taken seriously. To name a few examples:

• They have very little understanding of the actual public or anyone else outside of the tech field. Their Gift Guide is an absolute joke, suggesting adapters and old ThinkPads as gifts. With their most appetizing gift (a Vikings D8 Desktop computer) is literally mentioned as being out of stock. Suggesting you instead give, once again, a ThinkPad with Free software. Their only reasons for not using an actively manufactured and relatively modern (as in 3 generations ago) computer that are because of “restrictions to users freedoms” and “spyware” without very much definition aside from a few links (they’ve got much more to say about the computer than they what they believe in).

• Their “preferred terminology”, lists a bunch of jargon they don’t like and their alternatives, making a lot of automatic presumptions of guilt. My personal favorite is “Internet of Stings”. As if projects like Home Assistant aren’t trying to improve the scene (though they’re presumably ignored because they’re also willing to connect with proprietary services)

TL;DR the GNU foundation is made up of a bunch of nerds who care more about messing with their computers than actually trying to do important things with them.

The ministries want you to think not, but they probably can.

Mainly Firefox. It has quite a good extensions engine, but the overall UX just still isn’t there compared to other browsers. I really don’t care about all the ethical or moral reasons people try to come up with for using it, I just want a browser that has a lot of good functionality in comparison with Edge or Vivaldi.

And while I am aware of some of the forks like Floorp and Librewolf, I find the latter to be too hardened, and the former to be behind compared to upstream.

I use Bing. Partly because it’s the only real option if you want to search from the windows start menu. But also because I do like how it presents info a bit better, and also like its knowledge graph a little better than the one Google has.

That being said, the engine does have a lot of issues with relevancy. And its image search is almost unusable. So I often find myself needing to go to. Other than that, I’m fine with changing it to my default across everything I own. I just wish MS would fix its most blatant issues instead of bullying old people into using it.

Bing images is simply terrible

It’s like Google and starts off by showing you the most relevant answer you wanted through an info card. But then it goes on longer and longer under things that are less and less relevant.

Like, one of their examples is “What is a spaghetti western?”, And it starts with the answer you were probably looking for

A subgenre of western films produced by Italian filmmakers

But then it just starts going on and on with increasingly less relevant things like “History and origins”, “Best and most influential movies”, and then “Music and Soundtracks” before then getting the actual search results.

It’s literally designed to keep you from leaving the site. And all the sources seem to require quite a few clicks on mobile.

My emails seemed to go through pretty well. It’s been blocked by Discord and steam. But other than that, emails seem to go through pretty well.

Consumer disapproval of AI use in customer service is unlikely to keep firms from deploying the technology as the cost savings are just too great

So much for the market determining what goes

Many people now use ChatGPT like they might use Google: to ask important questions, sort through issues, and so on. Often, sensitive personal data could be shared in those conversations.

Okay but what about app compatibility?

Our router doesn’t support it (it’s the V2 model)

Unfortunately, it’s not so easy or useful if you don’t have a powerful machine to host it with

I frankly wouldn’t care at all had MS not truncate your home folder to 5 characters when using a Ms account and also didn’t make using remote desktop impossible when enabling a passwordless account.

I feel like another part of it too is just that Linux users also just have higher expectations in areas around privacy, security, and flexibility, and lower expectations of elements like UX and Minimum Viable Product, the latter especially being that they don’t even view the software as a “product”.

A lot of AI features are powered by data collection in some way. And given that most Linux users don’t even like small amounts of telemetry being sent without their explicit permission, I couldn’t imagine how libre AI models could be built, especially on a shoestring budget, to produce something that would be capable of producing acceptable results. All without avoiding the heat that current AI companies are facing with plagiarism accusations and copyright infringement.

I’m not really saying it can’t happen, But it would require a larger organization like Mozilla, who’s actively working on building open source AI that could then be later incorporated by someone else (similar to the soon to be dead Mozilla location services being integrated through daemons used by desktop environments). Or, by a much more random guess, by a corporation with a profit incentive to incorporate Linux like Valve and the Steam Deck with its inclusion of the plasma Desktop via an Arch fork. And in the long run, the FOSS community building a larger developer base that actually could, And one day upstream it all once it’s in a good enough format.

I imagine it might happen one day. But at present, I don’t really think that most computers are at a point where they can utilize it without the use of proprietary cloud technologies that aren’t considered to be ethical nor financially sustainable. And even if people’s computers could fully handle things themselves, there would still need to be a group of developers with enough knowledge to actually implement it.

Consumer AI has always been pretty limited in most Linux desktops. Heck, I’m still waiting for a Desktop Environment to one day have a nice implementation of Speech-to-text like Windows and macOS.