This is the last straw for me as well. I only used Google for search and never had an account anyway, so it's not even a hassle. Their results are slightly better than DuckDuckGo, but I'll take the productivity hit.
This is openly hostile to the foundation of the web. They aren't even bothering to pretend anymore.
Javascript required for text rendering is incredibly poor design. For those of us with limited connections, I turn off Javascript because I don't want to download 10MB of Javascript ad tech and frameworks. This is expensive and takes forever to load on satellite and rural connections.
Good design takes these basic common issues into account.
We need our personal websites to start linking directly to each other again… friends, coworkers, mentors, related topics, etc…
This trend died out, it used to be on practically every website. Maybe people just figured Google would find and sort everything for them. But now the search engines are packed with SEO garbage and offer no discoverability or serendipity.
The device needs a factory reset. Deleting the Files app itself does nothing, even though this warns you that all associated data will be deleted. Which is unsurprising at this point. The latest OS updates feel like I'm a beta tester for Windows ME.
Beware: don't share dot files with the Files app. I tried to sync a git directory and now my Files app is filled with several hundred git object files (bf13ee59588b878f1d780c5cc8cd2e3410eaba, etc) that cannot be selected, moved, or deleted because they allegedly "do not exist" according to the error dialog.
I had the equivalent model of these about ten years ago, no complaints. IEMs will have better sound quality than regular headphones. There was more cord noise, from what I remember, probably because they make everything else quieter so it's more noticeable.
On a side note, I didn't like the AirPods at all, and returned them. The sound quality is worse than the default iPhone corded earbuds, and they were frustrating if you wanted to frequently switch pairings between a phone and computer (like getting an incoming call and the bluetooth pairing takes 10-15 seconds to change over).
I get it, for some people it doesn’t matter. There is zero difference between xfce (Gnome, Windows, etc) and MacOS.
But for some people, they have used MacOS since OS X 1.0 (or for me, System 7) and there is a particular "Mac" way of doing things. There are expectations and standards for how the system and user interface should work and respond.
Perhaps you could attribute this to baby duck syndrome. You could also attribute it to people having different mental models for the world, there are clean desks and messy desks, different cataloging systems. There is something for everybody. For people who like Macs, everything else seems like a clumsy intolerable mess.
There are themes and hacks to make systems "look" like MacOS, but they fall short of even remotely functioning like it.
It's frustrating because it's the "least worst" option.
I use MacOS because it has a thoughtful, consistent, coherent, beautiful user interface and desktop environment. The things I use all day are basically a web browser, mail client, code editor, and terminal. I can do actual work on any BSD really, there is no proprietary app that causes lock-in, I don't use iCloud or any of their services.
All I want is their desktop and core system apps. If Apple stripped down the OS back to Mac OS X Snow Leopard standards, and charged $129, I would pay for it.
If there were an equivalent desktop environment for BSD that replicated the MacOS desktop environment, I would pay money for this. Charge customers to hire full time designers, developers etc.
Maybe some hardware/carrier configurations have less problems?
All I can say is, in the past 15+ years of SMS messaging, in the US, on every carrier, with devices ranging from the early Nokias to the latest iPhones, I have had reliability problems that are frequent enough for me to avoid SMS when possible.
SMS has always been unreliable. It has no place in modern communications.
No delivery confirmation: messages silently drop and the recipient is unaware you attempted to message them. There is no notification to you that your message failed to deliver.
Profoundly long delivery delays: messages sometimes get stuck and get delivered hours or days later. "Hey dude meet me out front" delivered 16 hours later, etc.
Length restrictions: some phones still do not handle long messages correctly. If the character limit is exceeded, messages are cut into unordered pieces, or the message is truncated and part of the message is simply deleted.
I'm not saying RCS is the answer, just pointing out that SMS is garbage.
I recently got tired of streaming, and started collecting music the "old" way and rebuilding my library.
Bandcamp has been awesome for this. $10 for a DRM-free album in Flac is perfect, most other services are charging double that for lossless downloads. It's a win-win that the sales go more to the artists as well.
I suspect adoption will grow considerably. The previous interface conventions were unusual and clumsy, and were the primary barrier for those curious about switching packages.
I switched to Blender after using the beta for several months. I have put thousands of dollars into licenses for Modo and Maya over the years. I would much rather put that into Blender donations, now that I can actually use it. The things a good user interface team can do.
DigitalOcean is fine, too. I find some of their distro tooling to have annoying and longstanding bugs that never get fixed, though. I eventually moved all my servers back to Linode to avoid the small pointless hassles.
For a markdown editor? I see most Patreons with tiers around $3/$5/$20, and those are actually complex/ambitious.