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They already have alt-tech, which had kind of a headstart on the Fediverse.

The Fediverse is home to a lot of young, tech-minded people distrustful of major corporations. The younger generations are more likely to come out as transgender due to greater awareness and acceptance of gender identity and dysphoria, and a decentralised, open platform is naturally going to appeal to communists, syndicalists and other left-wingers who don’t want some billionaire buying the next website they get comfortable on. And funnily enough, there are a surprising number of trans people in the tech sector, to the point where trans-flag socks have become a meme among programmers.

This is the first I’ve heard of the JPEG XL format, but it sounds pretty good!

Hopefully it doesn’t get misused by websites to mangle lossless compressed images with so much compression they’re barely visible to save a few kilobytes, though.

Been using LineageOS with microG on my phone for the last couple of years out of a general distrust for Google, using open-source apps in place of the Google ones. My phone stopped getting OEM updates after Android 12, so being able to use Android 13 through LineageOS is a plus. Main downsides are that some apps don’t play nice with microG and that unlocking the bootloader makes banking apps stop working.

In the case of the Surface Go family, there isn’t really anything comparable from other companies. It’s unironically the best compact tablet I’m aware of that you can put Linux on, and it runs Pop!_OS without issue once you disable Secure Boot. The only better Linux tablet for me would be an iPad Mini, but you can’t put Linux on one of those and even if you could it’s ARM-based so most proprietary apps won’t work on it.

In general, your tablet options for something smaller and handier than full-size 2-in-1s are pretty limited if you don’t want to be running iPadOS, so excluding Microsoft’s devices from the running if you want to put Linux on your tablet is pointless. Yeah, buying a Surface Laptop to put Linux on there is a bit weird, but I can see the Surface Pro family yielding a good ARM Linux tablet some day.

USB-C hubs all seem to be dodgy crap made by anonymous Chinese companies and resold through various companies, including the likes of Apple. There’s an absolute dearth of hubs made by actual reputable firms.

Centralisation in this instance refers to control over the network and standard itself rather than control over what’s posted on it. There’s no single authority that can unilaterally change how every Fediverse instance and system works - for example, there isn’t anyone who can decree that from now on Lemmy will no longer allow connections from Canada, or that nobody is allowed to post pictures of capybaras any more.

It’s intended to prevent a /u/spez or Elon Musk situation where one asshole can bring down the entire ecosystem built around an API. Nothing stops anyone else from hosting their own instance if they dislike lemmy.world, whereas if you don’t like Twitter, you can’t just host your own copy of it.

The very fact that they work like mobile apps is a reason to dislike them, honestly. At least Flatpaks aren’t total fucking crap like Snaps.

And yet they keep buying and killing their competition to try and funnel you into their godawful hellsite.

I can only imagine how thin the margins will be on laptops that are physically incapable of running their own operating system and basically don’t qualify as general-purpose computers. The computer itself will be streamed to you over the internet and you’ll just have an IPL that handles your keyboard and mouse, the display, the network connection and the encrypted memory buffer you use to send files to your cloud PC or receive them onto a Microsoft-authorised USB device for external transfer.

Will also be so much fun in 5-10 years when only enterprise customers are allowed the luxury of being sold a local version of Windows, so your whole laptop freezes up every time your connection is interrupted and trying to turn it on without an internet connection just takes you to a 404 page baked into the bootstrap ROM.

Thank God there’s a less awful alternative frontend for Fandom. Absolute garbage website, unusable without an adblocker.

Hopefully no credible Fediverse platform actually federates with their trojan horse. If we let Zuck, or anyone like him, become a major player in the ActivityPub world, pretty soon we’re going to end up right back where we started.