For some reason I find it really unlikely that Google would support a product for 10 years. They don’t exactly have a great track record…

Yeah monitors are my primary problem too. Can’t get them to work properly at all through the thunderbolt dock.

Hell, I’d settle for thunderbolt peripherals working reliably. Maybe it’s just a Linux problem (or maybe I don’t know what I’m doing), but I’ve never had a thunderbolt dock “just work” as advertised.

You’ll almost certainly be perfectly fine. AMD cards generally work a lot smoother, and the open source drivers means things can be well supported all the time and it’s great.

On Nvidia, in my experience, it’s occasionally a hassle if you’re using a bleeding edge kernel (which you won’t be if you’re on a “normal” distro), where something changes and breaks the proprietary Nvidia driver… And if Nvidia drops support for your graphics card in their driver you may have issues upgrading to a new kernel because the old driver won’t work on the new kernel. But honestly, I wouldn’t let any of this get in the way of running Linux. You have a new card, you’ll probably upgrade before it’s an issue, and the proprietary driver is something we all get mad about, but it mostly works well and there’s a good chance you won’t really notice any issues.

This is my experience as well. It’s a little disappointing. Still, if anybody has suggestions for xmpp communities I’d be happy to hear it!

I’m surprised how many fellow xmpp people I see on here, because I feel like matrix has a lot more of the public consciousness. It’s nice! I’m pretty happy with xmpp, though I wish I could find some larger communities.

Monal is okay. It chews up battery and recently did some heinous crimes with group chat notifications so I’ve switched to Siskin. Either way… Neither app is perfect. Xmpp is decent on iOS now, but still a little lacking.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes RAM getting “wiped” is a “feature”, e.g., you don’t want somebody to be able to pull information from RAM after you shut off your computer… but that’s not really what it’s designed for (and you can recover data from powered off RAM in some lucky cases). It’d be sweet if we could have fast non-volatile memory. Having a computer use 0 power when suspended and not having to worry about hibernating to disk would be sweet! I do kind of wonder about the security RAMifications of that, but I guess it’s not much worse than having a laptop suspended currently.

I’m on iOS and the biggest downside to iOS in my opinion is the $100/year developer fee, the Mac requirement for development, and the lack of side-loading. What this ultimately means is that it can be hard to find free / open source apps for iOS, especially ones like newpipe that might not be approved on the App Store. It’s honestly a pretty big bummer. Some other restrictions also mean that Safari is pretty much the only viable browser on iOS and ad-blocking / extensions are fairly limited. Another disappointment is that ad-supported apps seemed to be a lot more annoying than the Google equivalents, weirdly enough. I guess Google maybe has more / different guidelines about making ads supremely irritating, or maybe I just had better options for free apps on Android.

I’m curious what you mean by “in light of what Apple is doing”? As far as I know iOS isn’t really miles ahead of Android in any particular area – they’re more or less comparable in my experience, with iOS being a bit more limited in terms of customization and stuff (the fact that you still can’t place icons anywhere you want on the homescreen is baffling to me).

If I’m being entirely honest, I think I probably like the Android operating system more than I like iOS… Which is weirdly part of the reason I like iOS – I’m a little less tempted to look at my phone and a little less tempted to tinker with it. And there are are things that I like about my iPhone. The hardware is nice, the Apple Watch is really nice, FaceID is great, some things I thought would be silly like live photos are actually kind of nice, some of the iCloud features are great, and it’s nice that it pairs with other things in the Apple ecosystem well. Ultimately the main reason I’ve abandoned Android is that I just got sick of my Android phones dying all of the time and only getting software support for like 9 months. Apple’s support window is massive in comparison, which is also a big plus.

… It’s legitimately kind of funny that this is a valid mistake to make now, haha.

I’m still kind of upset that they’re AMD graphics cards now, instead of just being ATI cards. It’s kind of confusing, especially since the CPU and GPU naming schemes are quite similar.

This has not been my experience at all. I’ve had tap for over a decade in Canada, and large banks in the US here did not give me contactless cards a few year ago. In the past couple of years they seem to be rolling out more of them, but people always looked at me like I was a lunatic whenever I tried to tap my Canadian card to pay for something.

Banks in the US often do not provide contactless cards. Contactless payments are only starting to gain some traction since the pandemic… beforehand it was pretty rare, at least on the east coast (I get the sense that other regions of the country were better about this). It is actually madness, though.

Okay. I will feel less shame… I could have sworn I was on the right thread… I clicked on it, check the post, checked the image… but I guess it took me a while to write the comment and they pulled the old switcharoo on me. I thought I was going insane.

YEP I DID. This was meant to be on the post about degoogling… I feel like I keep having a problem with Lemmy where I end up on the wrong post when I click? It’s super weird… Am I the only one that ends up on the weird sports post all the time when I didn’t go there?

Edit: uh, wrong thread… I don’t know if I should delete this, but I’ll strike it out for now…

You know, thinking about it… The only Google service I really use personally is YouTube without logging in and with ad block. My work email is through gmail, and I have some gmail accounts that I haven’t killed, but I self host my email now… I don’t have an android phone, and I use DuckDuckGo… My browser is Firefox. I haven’t really gone out of my way to remove Google intentionally, it’s just sort of happened gradually and has been a death by a thousand cuts. I used to have a Pixel, but I got fed up with the lack of long term support on Android devices and they’d always die on me… I used to have Google Fi for my phone plan, but it was just more expensive and the support wasn’t great… honestly any Google product has terrible customer support because they kind of build things hoping you’ll never have to talk to a human.

I feel like step 1 is just buying a domain so you can have control over your e-mail address, and then you can switch providers whenever you want (or host it yourself).

If you already pay for extra iCloud storage you can use a custom domain for e-mail with iCloud… Many people are already paying for this, and if not it’s only $1/mo. Apple’s still a pretty big e-mail provider, so maybe that doesn’t address all of your concerns, but it’s a really cheap way to use a custom domain that more people should take advantage of imo.

I host my own e-mail and it’s pretty care free these days (I don’t send bulk e-mails, though, so I don’t contend with rate limits at all). Honestly, more people should do it instead of buying into all of the fearmongering about e-mail… It’s a little tricky to set up right, but the impossibleness of the situation is somewhat exaggerated. The best defense for self-hosted e-mail is if more people actually do it… Otherwise you’re just capitulating to the large (and slightly less large) mail providers.

Not everybody is running containers, or is constrained by the performance of those containers, I guess?

I think the primary aspect where Macs are more appealing than Windows machines for many programmers is just that it’s a unixy machine and many of the tools that you’d care about from Linux / *BSDs / whatever are easily available. I guess this is maybe different in an era with WSL, but that’s a relatively new development, and since I’ve only used Macs and other unixy machines before I have no idea if that’s a viable option personally and I’d be skeptical…

In terms of “why a Mac over Linux?” I think it’s partially a matter of Macs being well supported and that most people don’t seem inclined to fiddle with Linux on their primary work computer.

Beyond that, though, I think MacBooks are just nice laptops with fewer compromises than most other laptops in my experience. They have good build quality and pretty much every aspect of them is pretty solid… Good keyboards, good chassis, good battery life, good screens, good trackpads, good speakers, good performance. I think it’s actually pretty hard to get something that’s as solid all around, I feel like with pretty much everything else there’s something that stands out to complain about. Like I love my Thinkpad, but god I wish I had an Apple trackpad, or an Apple silicon chip and the performance / watt that comes with it.

Yeah, exactly! For steam itself on NixOS you don’t have to manually use steam-run, but steam-run is a handy little tool to wrap / run other commands with the FHS that NixOS sets up for steam. I’ve mostly used it to run a few Linux games that I have binaries for, but don’t have on steam… I’m pretty sure I used it for another Linux program too, but I can’t remember what right now.

I’ve been having a great time with games on NixOS. Steam just works when you enable it. I believe you can specify extra libraries for the filesystem hierarchy hackery, but I haven’t needed to yet. One thing you should know about (if you don’t already) is steam-run which is a simple command line tool that automatically wraps things in a normal FHS. Super convenient for the occasional binary :).

NixOS is the path to enlightenment. Very good stuff. Also look into steam-run if you’re not already aware!