These projects seem to be really struggling with the Freedom part of Free Software.

That's great, but it certainly doesn't address "why you hate your weather app." And "sometimes the forecast isn't perfect" is not a reason I've ever had. Poor behavior, ad bombardment, poor design, bad visibility, and more are all reasons I've had in the past, but never "the forecast isn't perfect."

I got fed up with several things in Apple Weather but they appeared to be lack of care and attention to design, rather than underlying data sources. One was the lock screen widget not showing current conditions and showing "severe weather" instead. The severe weather was air quality alerts. Less than useless. Another was NWS alerts coming up with generic data rather than the actual information, so I often got recommendations along the line of "execute a pre-planned activity". Useless again.

Perhaps that is because I work in renewable energy and am very familiar with the weather data models and sources and experienced with the variability, but surely we've all experienced weather's unpredictability before.

By the way, I like my current weather app, Breezy[1], which uses a number of sources including Open Meteo[2].

[1]: https://github.com/breezy-weather/breezy-weather

[2]: https://open-meteo.com/

On the subject of what they address, I have thoughts and many doubts.

> Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus

Just don't, bro. Don't do it. I don't want copilot icons in all the system apps. None.

> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions

This feels like it's too little, too late. They redesigned the UI in yet another toolkit and in the process broke something had worked for decades. Perhaps they could add a 147th different UI toolkit with a different look instead, just to change things up.

> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates

Would be welcome, but I have my doubts. MS has shown clearly they don't care.

> Faster and more dependable File Explorer

See comment on task bar above.

> More control over widgets and feed experiences

Get out of it. If I see one more stock ticker on a screen share from someone I know does NOT track the stock market I'll know you for the lying liars you are. Don't promise "more control" just stop being so invasive and annoying.

On the subjects they didn't address, I have feedback:

- Remove advertising from the start menu, the system, apps, everywhere. Just remove it forever.

- Remove invasive telemetry. Again, forever.

- Respect user choice. Stop trying to force things to open in Edge, ignoring my default browser. I am a Firefox/Zen user, keep a single (other) chromium-based browser around for sites that don't work right (another rant for another time), and try not to touch Edge if I can help it.

- Stop turning the bundled native apps into crappy web apps. "New Outlook" is a real tire fire.

- Make the default Edge page ANYTHING but the advertising and nasty "news" summary that shows up. Why not a simple search page, like when Google was new.

- Stop making start menu searches return web results instead of local apps

- Make start menu searching actually search in a useful way. Why does QGIS not show up when I type GIS? Because it doesn't start with Q? That's garbage. Make it work how users would expect it to work.

- Let people say no, fully and completely, to OneDrive. You can make adding it later easy at user discretion, but don't ask to set it up automatically. Don't use fear mongering like "your files are not backed up" to try to trick people into signing up for it.

- Local accounts should be easy, not a nasty workaround with a moving target for instructions.

I'm familiar with Arch at least so system management is fine. So far 3 months in it seems great.

"This service is provided "as is" without warranty. MalusCorp is not responsible for any legal consequences, moral implications, or late-night guilt spirals resulting from use of our services."

And the best part is that many of the ads that show up are literally scams. YouTube has no ad standards that I can tell.

The instructions for how to decide whether to enter these additional unicode codepoints are also highly suspect.

Performative, but not helpful.

GrapheneOS is neither rooted nor jailbroken in any technical sense, and Authenticator certainly works today, as do Work Profiles and Intune Company Portal (with a little wrangling). Would be nice to know if this is real or not since I am forced to rely on the app even though I don't want to.

My friend the GrapheneOS supported devices list is nothing but pixels, including the very latest models. It'll be good to have more supported devices.

https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

And of course the Apple watch only syncs with Apple devices. So also implied is iPhone or don't bother.

Don't bother with this blog post.

The few screenshots they show make this look similar to the existing online tool, which is fine for a lot of work, but like Word Online hits a wall with more complex documents.

There are ways, which involve using a software trap to capture it and then emit right control for a set period of time, but that's a workaround rather than a real fix.

https://github.com/m-bartlett/remap-copilot has a good writeup in the README