posguy

Ubuntu is a subpar package maintainer, but in well run distros that middleman who does the packaging makes an effort to ensure you are getting a stable, performant package, and tries to catch eratta or abusive practices that upstream starts pushing (say, Microsoft opening Edge when you run wget or curl in the terminal, rather than calling the real wget or curl).

No, Apple will still have the advantage of not being restricted like 3rd party apps when it comes to running background activities, access to hardware features they haven't published APIs for, and integration opportunities via private Apple only APIs amongst their various apps and platforms that 3rd party apps can't replicate since Apple literally doesn't make those knobs available to them.

Why can't my non-Apple laptop start a tethering session automatically with an iPhone when I open its lid? What good reason is there that a 3rd party tool can't generate an auto-reply to a notification from a chat app with my consent? Lots of user experience niceties that Apple keeps only for their 1st party apps to the detriment of us all.

Google does similar things on Android, but at least you can get most of these features through 3rd party stores like F-Droid.

Seems really expensive given when these were last in the USA they were offering $99 a month leases for 36 months, and you got the tax credits as though this was a purchased vehicle which nearly covered all of the monthly lease payments.

Fighting every municipality and Homeowners Association (HOA, aka Strata) along the way. Running fiber is tough here in the US, even motivated incumbents see a minimum of a 6 month delay waiting for permits in many municipalities to run fiber through existing conduit owned by said incumbent.

CGNAT is killer though, the random connection drops when you don't get a static IP from your cellular provider cause random connection drops whenever their CGNAT gateway burps or misbehaves.

Most people on cellphones don't notice, but it becomes oh so noticeable when your interacting with it every day.

Remember, your still getting a censored perspective of the internet, but now from wherever they are hosting the browser's from.

You might get routed to different servers with differing localizations or feature breakage, and its hard to say you are actually getting a better experience by streaming your browser.

Learn to break your content out into separate paragraphs. Proper formatting makes your content easier to read!

Additionally, any kind of pricing would be great, rather than a "Contact Us" button.

This is one person's passion project and they are writing it in the language they prefer. We need to respect that they are doing free labor and publishing the resulting code as open source.

It sucks that it is not modern C#, but rather legacy .Net 4.8 which lacks the performance improvements and cross-platform compatibility of .Net 5 and above, but perhaps the author will feel an itch to refactor it, or someone else will come along and modernize it and make a pull request.

There is plenty of computing related stuff that Google doesn't do, has stopped doing or outsources nearly all of, whether it be ceasing to be a Domain Registrar, providing voice & texting services (Google Voice being just another Bandwidth.com frontend, Google Fi being an alternative onramp to the T-Mobile network, with identical roaming).

You mentioned social media, what social media happens on Google's platforms? Google Wave is long dead, Google Talk was broken so badly everyone I know stopped using it. Google Groups is a wasteland that just spams up Usenet, so everyone ignores it. Where is Google in action when it comes to social media?

Some university networks are run tightly, others are rather loose when it comes to security, monitoring and debugging network cables that are syncing up at lower speeds. Really depends on who is staffing the IT team...

Many older universities give you a public IPv4 address with no NAT when you plug into a network port.

OP, one neat thing you should try is broadcasting a /25 through /29 and seeing which ISPs this is routable from (eg: Lumen (aka Centurylink/Quantum), Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, Comcast, etc). There are a number of blocks smaller than /24's being broadcast, and it would be quite interesting to see which ISPs are willing to route traffic to smaller blocks.

Mozilla didn't want to fund further development, most of the team ended up at Coqui.ai

Depends if Apple really feels they can run a backoffice banking arm effectively and cheaper than a partner that is already at scale.

Underwriting credit & customer risk, handling edge cases, maintaining relationships with ATM networks, card networks and ensuring compliance with state and federal banking rules is quite an undertaking.

Goldman Sachs did not have scale like Chase, Capital One and others to create a diversified portfolio of clients, limiting their ability to hedge against the risks of a single platform or two dominating their involvement in this market. One bad software update by Apple could flood their support queues, and they can't afford to keep significant staff on hand to keep wait times below an hour (unlike a larger company, who is already staffed up to serve their non-Apple customers).