The support seems quite good actually. I haven't used it personally, but I use a Huawei Matebook (with Arch) hence looked around for kernel patches and touch support – only thing not working for me is hardware buttons and the fingerprint scanner, but there is a patch for hardware buttons on the SP. Lot's of activity on https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/
Like so many projects on the internet: Lots of big words and ideas, but no content. Show us some actual tech and code and I might throw my money your way. Or better: Release your code under an open license and I might even throw my time your way!
From their privacy policy: "We cannot decrypt or otherwise access the content of a message.
We also can not decrypt what physical person actually send or received a message."
Well, that's great to hear, but as always: These are just words on a page, how can I know it's true? Where's your code? Where's your security audit? Who's the team?
I really like the idea, and believe if done right it actually can do some so-called disruption, but I think in this market a real disruption will only come if you manage to decentralize (at least so I don't need to trust your servers to be up for me to get my messages) and open source it, but still cater to the masses.
You're running a freemium business model, a model which works well (some ways even better) also with open source code.
This so much.
The only time i see it making sense to release a full-blown distro is for marketing reasons or making a more unified aesthetic experience like for example Elementary (which certainly has its own issues, but that is another story) or for a very specific purpose like Kali or Tails. There are, however, a jungle of different software and solutions out there so sometimes I appreaciate a "curated" list of de facto software to test. Having to install a whole distro for that, virtually or otherwise, might be the definition of overkill.
As always the problem is in the possibilities: The different systems (both distros and user installs) are so differently configured, that a script most certainly will mess it all up.
The best solution I can see (at least for my use) is to expand the dotfile-approach to encompass applications and more advanced settings too. But I guess it has certain security a related issues?
Great to hear from you guys directly! I guess we (i.e techie internet folks, you included) have been served so many crowd funded promises that it's difficult to believe things that are too good to be true. Although I'm personally a big advocate of keeping stuff open, I do understand that a small company has to have some secrets for themselves.
Now I see you're also a developer at KDE which certainly gives credibility to your statements! But on the same note I truly hope the information from the device will be encrypted on your server, and that an opt-out of this sync will be possible. And if there will be support for Owncloud or the like, you've literally made my dream device!
I truly understand and support that you don't promise stuff that aren't really made yet, and I really hope the privacy concerns will be taken as serious as they are.
"Your thoughts, whether they’re words or sketches, are instantly synced to reMarkable’s cloud service"
Imagine for a company only five years back to literally say that your thoughts are sent to their server. I welcome any product that understand we need less distractions and less help from so-called AI, but there are many reasons to be cautious about this one (preorder, latency claim and lack of technical details being some of them).
EDIT: After looking a bit more around, their technical claims does seem credible. Their CTO is/was even a developer at KDE, so let's hope they also will support open standards and personal servers. If so then it's literally the device I've always been dreaming of!
At first glance, it seemed like yet another silicon-valley-neoliberlist-style lots of words and ideologies, but no code and practicalities. But it seems like OPs thesis has a more hands-on approach:
(...) if future warfighters are to understand, appropriately trust, and effectively manage an emerging generation of artificially intelligent machine partners.
Provocatively naive - does anyone nowadays really think the brain Works like a computer? A much more interesting focus is on non-representationalistic understandings of the world seen in the discussion.
Hence the "(centre)", but according to Wikipedia: "...it has since the leaderships of Lars Leijonborg and Jan Björklund in the 2000s become more conservative and positioned itself clearly on the right"[0]
More great news from the world of communication, but yet again I'm wondering how we can trust the encryption to really be end-to-end without access to the code. Are the messages still traveling through Vibers servers? Is there any way to know?