User agents were commonly used for the wrong reasons - fingerprinting, sites that block particular browsers rather than using proper feature detection, etc. so I’m glad to see them slowly going away.

Interesting… I didn’t realise Skylake isn’t supported. I agree with your comment. I thought people were talking about much older equipment.

TPM 2 has been around since 2015ish and I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows starts relying on it more heavily. A lot of businesses have already required employees to use computers with TPM 2.0 for a long time, and enterprise use is a big focus for Microsoft.

not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.

Does that mean you don’t count Alpine towards Linux market share? It mostly doesn’t use any GNU stuff.

You can also compile the kernel with LLVM instead of gcc, use musl instead of glibc, and use BSD coreutils instead of GNU coreutils.

User agent strings are frozen these days, at least in Chrome. They still have the browser major version and OS name at least, but Windows will always report Windows 10, Android will always report Android 10, MacOS will always report 10.15.7, and Linux is just “Linux x86_64”: https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/

User agent strings are essentially deprecated and nobody should be using them any more. They’ve been replaced by User-Agent Client Hints, where the site can request the data it needs, and some high-entropy things (ie fields that vary a lot between users) can prompt the user for permission to share them first.

The thing is that most Windows users don’t care and will continue to use it. People like you and I know about the benefits of Linux, but sometimes we overestimate how much regular users care about the OS they’re using.

Forced restart for software updates

If anything, they’re moving in the opposite direction. Windows Server 2025 is going to support hotpatching, which means that system updates can be applied without needing to reboot. Not sure if the technology will come to consumer Windows though.

Require new CPUs and motherboards / hardware, ignoring the market for old computers.

How long do you expect legacy hardware to be supported for?

every day we get closer and closer to ctOS in Watch Dogs becoming a reality

I legitimately can’t tell if this is satire or not. I think you’re confusing the USA with a European country that actually has data privacy and consumer protection laws.

Ask the 100,000 people that downloaded Boost, not me.

Ugh. I hate this so much.

That’s why I said “sold by Amazon”. The drop shippers are all third-parties. Instead of the item saying “Sold by Amazon”, it’ll say something like “Sold by [some third party] and fulfilled by Amazon”.

Stuff sold by Amazon themselves is generally okay, since they’re directly responsible for it (no third party they can blame for any issues).

I try to avoid Amazon where possible though. B&H is pretty good for electronics, and I know I’m not going to get cheap Chinese knockoffs when I search their online store.

Amazon is usually OK if you buy things that are sold by Amazon or sold by the manufacturer (if it’s a well-known brand). The third-party sellers on Amazon based in China are almost always reselling stuff from Aliexpress/Alibaba with a significant markup.

You can pay just a few dollars to remove the ads from Boost.

California (and a few other states) are trying. The CCPA and CPRA are a good step in the right direction. If you’re a California resident, you can request all the data a business has collected about you, tell them to stop sharing it with business partners, or tell them to completely delete it, similar to the GDPR in Europe.

That CAPTCHA isn’t specific to Temu.

My interpretation of that tagline is that since the prices on Temu are cheap, it means you can shop as if you had a lot of money, without actually spending that much.

I agree with you, and don’t really have any answers :)

US will try its best to block technology, including open source projects.

You can’t block open source projects from anyone. That’s the entire point of open source. For a license to be considered open-source, it must not have any limitations as to who can use it.

Yeah, it really depends on how much you trust the vendor.

Google? Say what you want about the company, but they’ll never intentionally serve malware.

Random company with no track record where we don’t even know who is maintaining the code? Much less trustworthy. The polyfill . io repo is currently owned by a Github user called “polyfillpolyfill” with no identifying information.

Third-party CDNs make less sense these days though. A lot of hosting services have a CDN of some sort. Most sites have some sort of build process, and you usually bundle all your JS and CSS (both your code and third-party code, often as separate bundles) as part of that.

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with mails that dont correspond to the original authors,

Oh! I didn’t realise this. Do you have an example?