Coriza

Definitely the latter. I unfortunately use a lot of Google services and they are pushing AI integration in everything and making it very hard to opt out or they keep pesting you to enable it.

I “love” when the wrong technology is applied.

On the the dawn of the smartphones Mozilla tried to enter the space with an FirefoxOS and the pitch was that every app was just a website just more tightly integrated with the phone. The problem is that all the web stack is wonderfully resource hog and at the time phones were super underpowered running websites were not optimized in a browser that were not as optimized as today. So it was a terrible choice for the time being.

Other good one was Android early days. They choose Java as the default app environment and development. It kinda makes sense to use it if you want the same program to run on different platforms, the problem, again, it runs worst and with the underpowered devices of the time everything was a slog. And they doubled down on the mistake by using a garbage collector that doubled the memory usage of every app. The cherry on top, at least in hindsight is that arm was and still is the de facto Android plataform, greatly disminishing the advantage of using Java/JVM. And today Google enabled apps with native code optimized for specific plataforms, but everyone only care about ARM so of you try to run Android like in an Intel laptop a lot of apps are not compatible.

End of rant.

This reminded me of a joke patch someone sent to Firefox to rename incognito mode to porn mode.

But there is a difference if it is part of the base experience or unavoidable, like you need a Google account to do anything on an OEM Android Install, like install any app and such. I guess same is true for steamOS, since focus on the OS is the steam app.

Yes, it is the patent shenanigans.

I think that is exactly what they mean, Google abuse/subverting the floss ecosystem creating a de facto closed system, and would have to open up to be a really open source OS if they want to get exempt. Same with apple and the BSD kernel and base (although it can be said that they are not subverting the spirit of the code they use since BSD licenses ate by design made to allow closing the source, etc).

In any case I am pretty confident that all big tech want to eagerly embrace age verification since it is another data point to sell and for their ad machinery.

The biggest hurdle for a Linux phone is proprietary drivers. On a PC you can swap parts, you can add a USB wifi or sound card on a laptop, but on a phone you are kinda stuck with all the stuff on the phone, so the problem with binary blobs is so much worse, and untill we don’t have at least the full drivers source or datasheet as an normal part of phone releases it will always be an impossible to win catch-up race.

At least phones are not getting that much better anymore so is starting to be feasible to floss hackers to fully port Linux to some phones in time for them to still be usable (battery problems a part).