Probably a lot. I was very annoyed myself, though it made android pretty similar to the situation on iOS where you can’t replace the default messaging app anyway.

It’s an area where I think we need a bunch of stuff:

1. Antitrust regulation to force companies to use open standards and allow customization
2. Folks like the Signal Foundation should get over themselves and run their project like a real open source project, where others can fork/modify/run both the server side and client side.

There’s so much anti-competitive bullshit regarding #1 from all sides, from carriers to Apple to Google to device manufacturers.

I think fewer people are actually using SMS than you’d think though - it’s been quietly replaced with RCS.

They had a good blog post about why - their take was that SMS is dying and the replacement was a moving target that was hard to support for reasons I’m forgetting. I agree it hurt them tremendously though.

PopOS Nvidia version for Nvidia machines - much better experience.

And it has a cool penguin bumper sticker

Yeah but if the truck is free and better than your current car…

I’m glad you are still with us, please stay.

I see – arch just seemed like a huge management pain to get all of my different software stacks working and playing nicely together when I last played with it. It’s also pretty easy to switch desktop environments regardless of your distro, but I don’t mind gnome (plus gnome-tweaks).

Did you try the Nvidia version of PopOS? IME the “out of box” experience is loads better than Windows, and the install/configuration takes like 1/4 of the time.

I’ve had three different G603’s replaced for free because the scroll wheel starts behaving erratically after a while. No hassle though, and the latest one has lasted long enough that they seem to have (hopefully) fixed the issue. I’ve also had good luck with their mechanical keyboards.

I don’t have anything nice to say about the state of their webcams though, especially in price/performance.

The Revolutions podcast had a good series on the Russian revolution if that’s a format you’re into. It includes the birth of Tankies as a name and phenomenon.