I don’t know about the latter half of your statement, but my main reason for its use is pretty simply just that there’s more music available, and it doesn’t take all the time it normally would to get invited to a good music tracker. If anything, specialized Torrent trackers that could offer the same volume of music are a much bigger pain go deal with.

Yeah, I don’t think this one is a priority for the IDF boss.

Soulseek is a P2P file sharing system centered around music in particular. It’s pretty direct. Unlike a torrent where you’ll have multiple seeds for a single source, you’re connecting directly to other individuals for the content. It generally operates under the expectation that you’re also sharing something, and some users may opt not to allow downloads to people who do not also allow downloads from themselves. The downside to this system is you may need to wait for that person to come online before you can start a download, while with a torrent, other seeders can fill that gap.

It’s survived as a pretty big platform for music hoarders to source hard to find material, but it’s so dead simple to use and it has a quick and reliable search. Nothing secretive about it, it’s basically just another P2P network that has more in common with Napster than the Pirate Bay

Can I introduce you to soulseek? I promise it’s going to serve way better than torrents for that kind of stuff.

What are you, an apostle? Lol. This issue affects Windows, but it’s not a Windows issue. It’s wholly on CrowdStrike for a malformed driver update. This could happen to Linux just as easily given how CS operates. I like Linux too, but this isn’t the battle.

With that in mind, a battery health tool is probably the fastest way to tell how old a phone is going to feel. Otherwise nothing else is going to suffer wear and tear. If the phone is in good shape, and the specs are agreeable, then it doesn’t matter how old it is.

Hey there, I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “first activated”. In general, you activate a SIM card, not a phone. This would be associated with your current phone plan, not the device itself. Your carrier would be able to provide that info. If you’re referring to when your phone was first purchased/turned on, then most folks tend to add their Google account during setup, which might be why there’s a suggestion to check your Google account to see when the device was added.

The IMEI is potentially useful as it’s a device identifier, but generally doesn’t matter to anyone except your carrier.

Absolutely. Android devices are dirt cheap, and ubiquitous in most of the world. It’s an obvious choice for many based on that alone. There’s also lots of families that aren’t in Apple’s ecosystem.

Android Studio is the primary toolkit for developing native android apps. If you have no background in programming, there are some more visual tools like Budibase (open source) or Softr (closed source), but you are likely to run into difficulty getting them to apply logic the way you’d like.

If you’re a tinkerer, then honestly I’d look into learning more about Android Studio and Kotlin, the language most used these days for app development on Android.

Not arbitrarily. I’ve just had difficulty launching deb and AppImage packages from within Wayland after downloading them. I have to explicitly navigate to Dolphin and launch them. I know what I downloaded, I want to be able to run it from Firefox’s download menu.

Same, I couldn’t find an open issue for this anywhere. Now if they wanna fix the ability to launch executables from Firefox under wayland I’d appreciate that.

Iirc support for Classic Teams was dropped in March (or earlier). New Teams is generally less buggy in my experience anyways, and I haven’t yet found functionality its lacking. Not sure why you’re still presented with the option to drop back, as I don’t believe I’ve seen that toggle in a while

Streaming infrastructure is expensive, and all these smaller networks that decided to spin up their own didn’t seem to realise that. Prices go up, ad tiers get added because none of them are actually making any money. It’s just quarter after quarter of loss even with substantial revenue due to the fact that producing content, hosting and then scaling globally to make it available to a wide variety of geographic locations just isn’t cost effective. Even Amazon, the lord of cloud compute itself, hasn’t been able to maintain this.

So in this case, competition limits the only way they make money: people subscribing. Greedy bastards.

So far, I’ve not actually had this problem. It was a huge issue in Windows 10, but every setting (aside from audio devices being a little weird due to their own drivers) works pretty much as needed now.

It’s frustrating. There’s a lot of Windows 11 that I do actually like: Massively improved HDR support, far better DPI scaling features, tabbed file browsing, a unified control panel again (yes I know if you look hard enough you can find legacy panels), configurable snapping regions for Windows, gaming focused features with screen recording, intelligent capture, etc. On the power user side: the terminal, winget, built in ssh support and broader compatibility with Linux development toolchains, and if you’re the kind of person with a family or friends you do tech support for regularly the Quick Assist’s current iteration is a godsend.

But then the tradeoff is ads, increased telemetry, AI integrations, inability to move the taskbar, a piss-poor local file search, increasingly restrictive desktop customizations via third party tools, shorter support periods for Windows feature updates, and generally a lack of overall feature control due to low level integration with core Windows services.

I don’t think Windows 11 is a bad operating system in the sense that I believe it to be a marked improvement on a feature by feature comparison to Windows 10. But it feels like two development arms at Microsoft are consistently at war with eachother. Some want to implement really cool features and tools for end users, and the others are hellbent on locking the system down and forcing this Apple philosophy of “use it like we want you to”.

The launcher is a fair point. Though for me at least, not having the spotlight-esque search hasn’t been a problem. Appearance is an odd one, since the best part of Both Gnome and KDE is the wonderful flexibility in visual customizability. At the end of the day, I suppose I’d happily use either. Right now, I think Plasma’s big features for me has to be window snapping and, once 6.0 releases, hopefully HDR support.

Maybe I’m missing some of the nuances between KDE and Gnome, but I’ve enjoyed the out of box experience with KDE far more than Gnome. That said, perhaps I’ve simply timed my switchover to Plasma such that I missed its teething pains. I say this as someone who used pretty much exclusively Gnome over the years.

What would you say sets Gnome apart?