What was so much better in the old days (besides memory consumption)?

We will eventually be forced down this path though, be patient! Upfront key exchange in-person will be the only way left to prove comms are real. GPG is just one path but someone will come along and make it easy on organizational level.

Either way, we are getting to a point where offline-2FA will be mandatory for all auth systems and when interacting with another party, it will need something like the above to be sure you are dealing with the correct company.

Intel has closed things down: some wifi and webcam firmwares are poop and a massive pain to get working on newer chips (if at all). Their wifi firmwares also don't respect certain kernel overrides (which is why I replaced my Intel Wifi 7 chip with a mediatek Wifi 6 one). Blame is 100% on intel and not linux. Broadcom is also pretty bad at being a team player in this regard.

I basically recommend everyone to stick with AMD chipset & GPU's where possible, because they have mainline kernel support nailed down 95% of the time.

Again, ARM works fine, their extra firmwares for extra devices on SoC's are to blame if you struggle.

So if anything, we need to push more game studios to use open source dependencies which will make porting easier.

The long term fear/plan for google is that they know they days of SAAS and Apps are obsolete. People will just write their own platforms, apps, websites all from scratch using AI, which means the app stores becomes obsolete, which means no more ad revenue from shitty ads and no more control and unfettered tracking of your behaviour. AI will make these guys obsolete, they know it, this is them fighting back.