Yeah, even the TLDR makes it sound more like Qualcomm is yielding to the pressure from OEMs who want to be able to offer longer updates

xrandr is Xorg only, it doesn’t work with Wayland. You should be able to make SDDM use your Plasma display configuration - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SDDM#Match_Plasma_display_configuration

No clue if that’s going to fix your issues, but at least it’s supposed to work with Wayland.

So I did look more into it, and apparently the open firmware is technically compatible with PCIe cards using this chip, but doesn’t provide any advantages over just wiping the firmware and letting the chip default to its built-in fallback firmware, and so the maintainer doesn’t see any value in explicitly supporting it.

Now the question is whether you consider the proprietary fallback firmware to be acceptable to run - this might sound weird, but for example FSF has explicitly made exceptions for devices with built-in firmware to be able to qualify for the Respects Your Freedom certification, so if your view aligns with theirs, you might consider this to be completely OK. If not, the free firmware appears to have a similar feature set, you’ll just have to jump through more hoops.

Also do note that both the fallback firmware and the free firmware are missing many features of the proprietary firmware, so make sure to check it’s not missing anything you need (wake on LAN, Jumbo frames and PXE boot seem like the most notable missing features to me).

More info on support for various PCIe cards

It’s less about the computer and more about the card itself - Talos II and Blackbird both use the BCM5719 chip for their integrated NICs. Basically, you’re flashing part of the motherboard with this firmware. A PCIe card built around the same chip might connect the interfaces in a different way, and firmware doesn’t generally have a way of poking around to find out how everything’s set up from the hardware side of things - it needs to just know this, and that’s why there are separate firmware builds for different hardware.

If you flash one of these files to that card, it might just so happen to work perfectly, but it most likely won’t. You would need to figure out how it’s wired up and modify the firmware with that knowledge. And then you could use the modified open firmware with that specific card model on any computer that supports the proprietary firmware, because IIUC this is meant to be functionally identical.

So in short, no, you cannot currently use this open firmware on any computer other than Talos II and Blackbird, but for slightly different reason than you might think.

Also, the Arch repos are pretty much just an “AUR with binaries” - they contain the same PKGBUILD files used by AUR packages, because that’s how Arch packages are built. So you can just download an Arch package PKGBUILD, modify it however you wish, and then build and install it.

If it is an Arch-based distro (sorry, I don’t recognize the package manager), then this might just be the recent Wine update that made it 700 MB smaller (which would mean the rest of your system grew 300 MB)

I made a post here about it: this one

Btw, is there a way to link to a post in a way that resolves on everyone’s separate instance instead of hard coding it to my instance?

I don’t really see the big problem here? Like sure, it’s silly that it’s cheaper to make wireless headphones than wired ones (I assume - the manufacturers are clearly not too bothered by trademarks and stuff if they put the Lightning logo on it so they wouldn’t avoid wired solution just due to licensing fees), but what business does Apple have in cracking down on this? Other than the obvious issues with trademarks, but those would be present even if it were true wired earphones. It’s just a knockoff manufacturer.

Cheapest possible wired earphones won’t sound much better than the cheapest possible wireless ones, so sound quality probably isn’t a factor. And on the plus side, you don’t have multiple batteries to worry about, or you could do something funny, like plugging the earphones into a powerbank in your pocket and have a freak “hybrid” earphones with multi-day battery (they’re not wireless, but also not tethered to your phone). On the other side, you do waste some power on the wireless link, which is not good for the environment in the long run (the batteries involved will see marginally more wear)

Honestly the biggest issue in my mind is forcing people to turn on Bluetooth, but I don’t think this will change anyone’s habits - people who don’t know what Bluetooth is will definitely just leave it on anyway (it’s the default state), and people technical enough to want to turn it off will recognize that there’s something fishy about these earphones.

I’ve explained my reasoning for all the points I disagree with. Which one do you have a problem with? CS:GO? The last version of CS:GO is still available on Steam and fully playable, the only missing part is matchmaking servers - you can play with bots or on third party servers without any problems. That seems far from gone.

CS:GO got a controversial update and got renamed. Old versions are still available under CS2, you just can’t use Valve’s servers anymore. Playing old versions on private servers is possible. But OK, I give you half a point for this one - you can’t play matchmaking with old smoke physics anymore (but then again, it’s not like it’s the first CS:GO update to change the gameplay in a fundamental way).

Moving on, Artifact. It’s in my library, ready to be played - Valve definitely didn’t “make me lose Artifact” like you claimed. The community is dead, but there are still 40 people playing right now according to SteamDB and servers are up. One point down for easily verifiable lie.

And finally, Team Fortress 1. I assume you don’t mean the Valve’s game called Team Fortress Classic, because that one is still available for purchase on the Steam Store and oscillates between 40 and 100 active players at any time. So that leaves us with Team Fortress, a mod for Quake. But that one is available from ModDB without any problems, so… What’s the issue supposed to be, exactly? No points, because I have no idea if there’s more to your claim.

Hint: blatantly lying about some points heavily undermines the other points you make. So at least try to be subtle.

It should not be controlled by a company that is known to make you lose your games.

Are you referring to the fact that Valve promotes digital game distribution (which is a very fair view), or are you talking about some incident where Valve removed games from people’s libraries? Because if it’s the second one, then I would really like to hear about it.

I feel like the ingest system will be sophisticated enough to throw away pieces of text that begin with a message like “ChatGPT says”. Probably even stuff that follows the “paragraph with assumptions and clarifications followed by a list followed by a brief conclusion” structure - everything old has been ingested already, and most of the new stuff containing this is probably AI generated.

I had a similar opinion when I was buying that phone - pretty much every phone had a fingerprint scanner and people generally didn’t complain about them, so decent scanners should have been mass produced and cheap - but HMD/Nokia managed to make me reconsider that opinion.

For context, Nokia 5.3 is a 3 or 4 years old model, so it definitely doesn’t disprove your statement, but I remain sceptical.

If a thief knows your PIN (by watching an earlier unlock), Android is now requiring “biometrics for accessing and changing critical Google account and device settings, like changing your PIN, disabling theft protection or accessing Passkeys, from an untrusted location.”

Sounds great for Pixel 6 series with their reportedly highly reliable fingerprint sensors /s

Honestly, I’m not sure what to think about this - extra protection against unauthorized access is good, but requiring biometric verification with no apparent alternative irks me the wrong way.

Maybe that’s just because of my experiences with Nokia 5.3 and its awful rear fingerprint sensor with like 10% success rate. But then again, there will eventually be phones with crappy sensors running Android 15.

The downside is that you’re then zooming in on the compression artifacts and all the “enhancements” we’ve all learned to “love” over the past decade (thanks, Google!), while the in-app zoom probably works with raw image data before zooming in.

Oh sorry, I understood your comment as saying that you couldn’t get weather info with GadgetBridge because of its somewhat unique architecture. If you’re using a different companion app then apps for GadgetBridge probably won’t work.

Also I’m not familiar with Pebble, I’m just assuming it works similarly to other GadgetBridge-supported watches / bands like the Mi Band I use.

GadgetBridge is not really against supporting online-only functions, it just can’t be part of the main app. Weather Providers is what you’re looking for.

Not a fair comparison IMHO - Ethernet is designed to be a connection between two or more otherwise independent peers (on L2), while USB’s goal was to allow connecting simple peripheral devices to computers. There was never meant to be a situation where it’s unclear which side is the Host.

Also note that the bridging “cable” is literally just two USB devices, one for each computer (although they are both on the same chip, so there’s that), with some internal link to pass the data.

Yeah, it’s not practical right now, but in 10 years? Who knows, we might finally have some built-in AI accelerator capable of running big neural networks on consumer CPUs by then (we do have AI accelerators in a large chunk of current CPUs, but they’re not up to the task yet). The system memory should also go up now that memory-hungry AI is inching closer to mainstream use.

Sure, Internet bandwidth will also increase, meaning this compression will be less important, but on the other hand, it’s not like we’ve stopped improving video codecs after h.264 because it was good enough - there are better codecs now even though we have the resources to handle bigger h.264 videos.

The technology doesn’t have to be useful right now - for example, neural networks capable of learning have been studied since the 1940s, even though there would be no way to run them for many decades, and it would take even longer to run them in a useful capacity. But now that we have the technology to do so, they enjoy rapid progress building on top of that original foundation.

Honestly, I’m kinda surprised that the live translation in Google Camera wasn’t dependent on other Google apps before - I thought all Google apps were developed with the assumption that the apps mandated for Android certification would be available, and that losing functionality if the user starts disabling stuff is fine.

As to why it isn’t very common: Android conditions users to think of the apps as fully self-contained units. There’s no way to have Google Play suggest installing app B as an optional dependency when you install app A, and asking the user to install it during the first launch would go against common user experience wisdoms. The current best practice is to get the user up to speed as fast as possible, with every extra tap they have to make increasing the possibility of them leaving for another app.

But there are definitely apps that do use this. For example OpenTracks, a GPS tracking application, has no integrated map to show captured routes and instead expects the user to find another app that supports its API. Or GadgetBridge, an alternative companion app for many smart watches / fitness bands - it is common for these devices to have some weather forecast widget, but one of GadgetBridge’s design goals is to not to have internet access (to help with trust). So it has an API for weather provider apps to make this work.

Edit: First paragraph is toast, I misread the OP

It’s somewhat hidden if you don’t know where to look. You have to switch to Night sight mode, turn on astrophotography in the settings, and then set the phone down on a stable surface. After a few seconds without any movement, the capture button will change from moon to three stars and pressing it will start the 4 minute capture.