The benefits of good public transport are so mind blowing that it's difficult to explain unless you have lived on a city that has it.

Lower spec speakers have become good enough, and DSP has improved to the point that tiny speakers can now output mediocre/acceptable sound. The effect of this is that the midrange market is kind of gone, replaced with neat but still worse products such as soundbars (for AV use) or even portable speakers instead of hi-fi systems.

On the high end, I think amplified multi-way speakers with active crossovers are much more common now thanks to advances in Class-D amplifiers.

If you want to avoid the extra space, it's as easy as using a 16:10 resolution size. The menubar will drop down to the 16:10 space.

All in all, it's several things that need to be reinforced. The distribution network needs to be smarter. The energy generation facilities need to be tested through their entire voltage range, so they can be counted upon. And there has to be more voltage inertia available in the network.

The proof is that multiple competitor products have been launched since, and all of them have had sync issues at some point, with different degrees of severity ranging from sync delays, through data conflicts, up to loss of data in all synced devices. To this day, I still trust Dropbox more than its competition. This includes custom rsync scripts.

Back on Linuxland, the userbase realized this about two decades ago, when Ubuntu launched. Having a nice default experience was considered better than having easy tweakability, because Ubuntu could also be configured to the fullest extent in the classic Linux way of reaching into the guts of the system and rearranging things to taste. Not that I would ever recommend tweaking Ubuntu too much, but it can be done.

What about the other end? Most people who like fiddling with Linux by reaching into its internals have settled on distributions such as Arch, where this way of managing the system is expected and thus the distribution works to ensure this experience is as easy and predictable as it can be, by providing a good happy path experience for common scenarios, and providing top-notch documentation for common and uncommon customization options, or minority hardware platforms and devices.

> Each time the Leta application is restarted (due to an upgrade, or new version) server side, a new secret hash is generated, meaning that all previous search queries are no longer visible to Leta.

If I read this correctly, the cached data is per-instance, there would be no way to share cached data among instances if each one has its own secret hash and they are cycled on each start.