Probably a lot. I was very annoyed myself, though it made android pretty similar to the situation on iOS where you can’t replace the default messaging app anyway.

It’s an area where I think we need a bunch of stuff:

1. Antitrust regulation to force companies to use open standards and allow customization
2. Folks like the Signal Foundation should get over themselves and run their project like a real open source project, where others can fork/modify/run both the server side and client side.

There’s so much anti-competitive bullshit regarding #1 from all sides, from carriers to Apple to Google to device manufacturers.

I think fewer people are actually using SMS than you’d think though - it’s been quietly replaced with RCS.

They had a good blog post about why - their take was that SMS is dying and the replacement was a moving target that was hard to support for reasons I’m forgetting. I agree it hurt them tremendously though.

PopOS Nvidia version for Nvidia machines - much better experience.

And it has a cool penguin bumper sticker

Yeah but if the truck is free and better than your current car…

“Then he must be a noble beast indeed,” said Aragorn; “and it grieves me more than many tidings that might seem worse to learn that Sauron levies such tribute. It was not so when last I was in that land.”

“Nor is it now, I will swear,” said Boromir. “It is a lie that comes from the Enemy. I know the Horse Freaks of Rohan; true and valiant, our allies, dwelling still in the lands that we gave them long ago.”

Depends on how new your hardware is - distros with new kernels work much better on many brand new machines.

PopOs Nvidia version is amazing for common gaming laptops.

It’s like watching my parents try to meme and I’m here for it.

I see – arch just seemed like a huge management pain to get all of my different software stacks working and playing nicely together when I last played with it. It’s also pretty easy to switch desktop environments regardless of your distro, but I don’t mind gnome (plus gnome-tweaks).

Did you try the Nvidia version of PopOS? IME the “out of box” experience is loads better than Windows, and the install/configuration takes like 1/4 of the time.

I’ve had three different G603’s replaced for free because the scroll wheel starts behaving erratically after a while. No hassle though, and the latest one has lasted long enough that they seem to have (hopefully) fixed the issue. I’ve also had good luck with their mechanical keyboards.

I don’t have anything nice to say about the state of their webcams though, especially in price/performance.