It’s a feature of TikTok where you can put your video side-by-side with some else’s video. This seems like a decent explanation.

Carrier lock is on the phone, not the network. You need to enter a code to disable it. There are 3rd party services that you give your IMEI and pay, and they have a way of finding the code. I’m not certain on the details.

It’s not a hardware compatibility problem for you or people who have reasonably new computers. However, for the last decade or so, computers have kind of stagnated and old computers are still very functional, something I couldn’t have said a decade or two ago.

I’m typing this on a ThinkPad x201 which was released in 2010. TBF, I’ve updated it as much as I can (8GB of RAM and an SSD), it’s running Linux Mint because Windows drags, and even then it’s getting tired.

My Spouse’s laptop is an Acer with a 5th gen i3. A couple years ago, she was complaining it was getting a bit slow, so I threw an SSD in it and now she’s happy with how it runs Windows 10, and I’m sure it would run Windows 11 fine if a TPM2.0 chip wasn’t required.

It’s forced obsolesces for a hardware requirement most home users are never going to use.

There was a few months where Wikipedia was reverted to a very old version as newer versions didn’t meet their build standards. That has since been fixed.

This is talking about carrier locked phones, not locked bootloaders.

Given how long this has gone on now, it’d probably be best to inform your community that you’ll be removing BLOBs from the source and for them to be produced during build otherwise this shadow is going to remain.

Many of the BLOBs are essential to allow Ventoy to work with Secure Boot. They are compiled and signed by Fedora and OpenSUSE. They definitely need to be better documented, but they aren’t reproduceable for good reason.

Because insurance companies are filled with bean-counters (not intended as an insult, I’m a bean-counter in a different field) who want to come out ahead. That’s why the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) exists. You’d think organization that does crash tests and promotes new technology would be a government organization, but nope, it’s insurance providers that want to minimize payouts.

I agree with your reservation about Manjaro. However, you did get one thing wrong:

They pushed an update that caused steam to uninstall your desktop environment. Famously covered by linus tech tips…

That was Pop!_OS (unless it happened a second time??)

I mean, if that gets people in places if power to think about climate change, I’ll take it!

That’s a pretty good answer. I knew Mozilla had bought it, and were operating it as an independent subsidiary. I didn’t know they promised to open-source it over 7 years ago.

Has Mozilla done sometime to deserve this skepticism? They were founded on open-source and AFAIK have continued to support open-source. Mozilla is far from a perfect organization, but if this project was a success I think it would be out of character for them to keep it closed-source.

In case anyone else wants to see it, I’ve even queued up the link https://youtu.be/8CTX8W4UZUA?si=uv_bvwoHD40B0YDJ&t=846

I’d say at least half if those would get them sued for Trademark infringement. Once again, this is AI plagairising, but this time it’s with obviously trademarked names.

I was just trying to refute your assertion that, “Trade ins and selling old phones doesn’t really reduce e-waste.” Obviously some used phones are going to be bought by people who need a replacement, and if a used phone wasn’t an option, they’d buy new.

I don’t know why you are soo hostile. Are you okay?

Your new scenario is still supply constrained. No one gets a new phone for 2 out of 3 years.

Those aren’t unpurchased new phones though. As you point out, they’re discontinued, discounted and sold.

I was only trying to refute that, “Trade ins and selling old phones doesn’t really reduce e-waste.” I’m the same as you, buying used phones, and if I didn’t have that option I would be buying new phones instead.

I completely agree with your comment. I was only responding to the claim, “Trade ins and selling old phones doesn’t really reduce e-waste.”

I too wish the developer would respond, but I don’t think this is the catastrophe people are making it out to be. One comment seems to explain why these binaries are included:

Because ventoy supports shim, and by extension secure boot, these files needs to come from a signed Linux distro. In this case they are taken from Fedora releases, and OpenSUSE apparently, as they publish shim binaries and grub binaries signed by their certificate.

Why would you make your scenario supply constrained? Your argument is simply if we sold less phones, less would go to e-waste, and duh. That wasn’t debate, it was whether releasing new phones every year was wasteful vs new phones being released every 2-3 years.

Your scenario also assuming people buy used or they just don’t have a phone. People who buy a used phone generally do so instead of buying a new phone.

That’s empirically untrue. If people are selling their used phones and not keeping more than one phone (which definitely happens, but is unrelated to this point), then the exact same number of phones would be produced as if everyone bought new and only put them in e-waste when they were broken/obsolete.