Schwim Dandy

$1000 for what amounts to the processing power of a netbook with a 13 inch screen is robbery.

Turning off grouping makes for a great sense of depression.

I moved over to Librewolf last night (except on android) due to this issue. I’m not even anti-AI, I just don’t care for the current mentality to put it into everything and using it as the entirety of your marketing schtick. I don’t need an AI web browser. I need a web browser that can navigate something like chatgpt’s web interface if I want it to.

Librewolf has stated their intention to strip all ai elements from their fork of Firefox and that keeps me off of a chromium browser so I chalk this up as my personal best-case scenario.

More interest is a very far cry from “linux phones are booming”. Linux phones are not booming, they are niche projects for people that like to tinker and don’t need any of the most popular phone apps and features.

Until we can install linux on more than a couple phones, trust cellular connections across all the networks and have access to the majority of features and apps that a smart phone should possess, linux phones will never “boom”.

I say this as a Ubuntu touch user on the Fairphone 4. It is not an experience that anyone else I know would accept from their smartphone.

I hope they choose to focus efforts on linux instead of trying to keep Google from fully obliterating their ability to offer apps on the Android platform.

Even if they are thrown a bone during this fight, it’s going to keep happening until they lose. The reason linux is so bad to try to use as a smartphone right now is because entities like these are busy trying to piss up a rope with Google and Android. We could have actually had robust and feature rich linux phones if they had taken the hint when Google first started shitting on people trying to use their Android phone in the way they want to.

Linux phones are booming.

Booming, eh?

If you’re having problems finding the linux line on the graph, it’s one of those at the 0%.

“Next week on As The Nerd Turns, watch as former friend steals all the game controllers and unplugs the snack machine.”

Maybe you just have to swap and be okay with less people around, just so you can get out of Microsoft’s grip in open source.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. It is almost always the case that you will trade adoption/utilization/community for a less-used solution. Using loops, pixelfed, mastodon or piefed/lemmy, element, linux, FOSS web apps instead of their more popular system, they all come with an unspoken agreement that you embrace a niche-existence.

Only you can really decide what’s more important to you.

Why are people still giving this clown views?

Just wait until everyone reposting this hears about VPNs.

I didn’t understand that, thank you for the clarification.

lot of YouTubers recommend it as something that looks a bit like Windows (on the surface).

Oh yeah, I forgot that was it’s schtick. Well, best of luck to them, regardless of the cause.

From Kagi:

“Kagi Search includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as sources like Wikipedia, DeepL, and other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers. Teclis and TinyGem are a result of our crawl through millions of domains, focusing primarily on non-commercial, high-quality content.”

“Our unique results combined from all of these sources help you discover the best content you can possibly find online, sometimes from the quieter places on the web.”

I don’t know if I would simplify it to “Google on the backend” as it’s compiling from multiple sources, including their own.

Any idea on what caused the spike? I used Zorin years and years ago and while nifty, didn’t have anything that met a particular need that wasn’t already satisfied by other distros. I checked their site and it looks like nothing drastic has changed.

Perhaps some popular influencer or advertisement type thing?

I use Kagi and really like it. It costs, but very little so it’s worth it to me.

It looks like it’s been overrun with AI “articles”. There’s tons of telltale stuff like this:

What Are The Most Popular Names This Year?
Great question! In America, here are the top 10 boys and girls names of 2025:

I know that they took some heat for adopting AI to generate their images but it looks like it’s gone much farther than that.

I am pretty sure the content is irrelevant to the owners as from it’s first sale in 2006, it existed primarily to be an adsense ad farm.

https://buzzlogic.com/business/the-story-of-wikihow-and-how/?admin

They might have “fled” because they were worried for their safety. The OP sounds legitimately unhinged.

Great sales pitch but you’re lacking a bit:

“If you enter through the side door, you won’t be able to cook anything because it defederated from the kitchen and if you use the most popular door, you can’t sleep because the bedrooms have blocked you.”

Another interesting phone not available in the US.

Google has waited patiently for the moment at which they could start strangling their users without fear of ostracizing them and it’s apparently arrived. Blocking ad blockers in YT, breaking sideloading apps in android, charging for storage after the forever-free model getting people to store everything with them, etc. I believe the average user feels moving would break too many elements of their daily life and will put up with anything Google does at this point.

I’m definitely not what any true privacy-seeking person would call a diehard but I have pushed back where I can, choosing to try to find a way to keep from being impacted by these changes. Firefox, Freetube, CoMaps, personal mail, etc but it takes a decision to give up a ton of convenience that I feel a lot of people aren’t willing to make.

I’m waiting to see what the sideloading change brings before I decide where to go with my phone.