Brave Search is awful for non-English results. Startpage is decent but only because it’s basically Google results.

Spooky

It’s included with the 8 Pro.

They had that YouTube Premium Lite tier in a few regions, which was basically that. But Google just killed it.

I was wondering if this happend again so soon, since I already updated last week.

It’s a great tool but note that by default it upgrades EVERYTHING, up to and including production cloud environments if you are connected to any.

I didn’t say otherwise. I actually use both GNOME and KDE. GNOME on my personal machine and KDE on the work laptop.

I guess it’s preference. For some reason GNOME looks/feels better than KDE for me. I can’t even explain why.

Visual Studio Ultimate is so heavy though. I wouldn’t want to use it for anything other than the languages it was designed for.

The other thing is just how much I hate Windows Update. I can tolerate most parts of Windows, but WU is objectively terrible. It’s incredibly slow, requires multiple restarts (sometimes forced!) amd sometimes fails with random errors that are impossible to troubleshoot.

It goes without saying that most Linux package managers work incredibly well in comparison.

Linux?

It’s so nice to be excited about my OS again. I remember as a kid, I used to be really excited about Windows updates. People were cynical about Microsoft even back then, but I remained loyal to Windows for years.

Only last year did I finally move to Linux as my OS (although I still use Windows for gaming). Since then every following Linux news is always exciting. New versions of distros, desktop environments and software always bring interesting improvements.

Meanwhile on the Windows side, most noticeable updates just bring more ads, tracking, forced Edge recommendations and forced logins. Ironically the last Windows feature I remember being genuinely excited for was WSL 2.

Yep those are the two I use!

Photos is cool but weirdly much lower than every other gallery app.

There are so many different “privacy browsers” for Android, that it can be hard to keep track of them. FFUpdater is the one place I can find all of the good browsers, as well as information about each (including Warnings on why you may not want to use them).

Better than OsmAnd?

That name is guaranteed to get you kicked.

Kindle devices are nice but not at all FOSS, and not very open either. Although you can sideload books, EPUB files are still not directly supported, you have to convert them. Converting is easy with Calibre but it’s still a hassle that is not needed on any other ereader.

There’s a vibrant jailbreak community on MobileRead, however Amazon keeps blocking jailbreaks.

After my Kindle died I got a Kobo instead. Costs about the same as Kindle (maybe slightly more?). Still not fully open, but supports EPUB and its MobileRead community is just as vibrant (and Kobo doesn’t block you from doing this).

There are many ereaders than run Android.

Plenty of other good options. See podcastapps.com