Since the phones have water resistance, they are technically designed to work under water
Oh, so a device that offers no warranty in case of water damage (because you're not supposed to expose it to water) can use an IP certification as a loophole to completely avoid this law? That's not good
While I agree with your view (at least when it comes to firmware, especially given that hardware that doesn't require a firmware upload on boot generally just has the very same proprietary firmware on a built-in memory, so the only difference is that you don't get to even touch the software running on it), the point of this project is to remove non-libre components from coreboot/libreboot.
It doesn't differentiate itself from upstream in any other way, so if it fails to do the one thing it was made to do, then that's in fact a newsworthy fact.
I can't speak for these specific laptops, but unlike x86, ARM generally doesn't have a way for an OS to discover the available hardware, and most ARM platforms historically didn't do anything to help. There is a standard for UEFI on ARM where the UEFI is supposed to tell the OS about the hardware, but as far as I know this is only a thing on ARM servers and these laptops might not support it.
Without any way of probing for hardware or getting the information from UEFI, Linux has to somehow be compiled with all the info about the hardware built-in. And the build will be model-specific (there's a way to pass a file describing the hardware to Linux from the bootloader which enables a single kernel to be used on multiple models and have just a small part of the bootloader be model-specific, but somebody still needs to make that file and the manufacturers clearly don't intend to do that).
proprietary Google-only format
KML became an international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2008.
(...)
The KML 2.2 specification was submitted to the Open Geospatial Consortium to assure its status as an open standard for all geobrowsers.
How much Doritos dust are you willing to inhale?
By taking away the MicroSD slot to force users towards expensive cloud storage?
You can now turn on the “autoscrolling” feature of the Libinput driver, which lets you scroll on any scrollable view by holding down the middle button of your mouse and moving the whole mouse
Am I crazy, or did this used to be a feature? And not just in Firefox
It's a Windows feature that never really made it to Linux. I used to miss it but honestly, middle click paste feels way more useful to me now
If it is an Arch-based distro (sorry, I don't recognize the package manager), then this might just be the recent Wine update that made it 700 MB smaller (which would mean the rest of your system grew 300 MB)
I made a post here about it: this one
Btw, is there a way to link to a post in a way that resolves on everyone's separate instance instead of hard coding it to my instance?
Does UEFI initialize all the cores? I know the OS always starts with only one core available, but I'm not sure if UEFI just disables the cores after it's done its thing, or if it doesn't touch them. Because if it stays on core 0 and never even brings the other ones up, then this issue with core 2 could let it boot this far just fine.
Sure, this is very light usage - just 5 hours SoT over more than 2 days of usage - but I couldn't get this phone to even make it to two days with similar usage on Android 13. And it's comparable to my previous budget phone, so the only thing the 7a was worse at is now fixed for me.
They would have to sign another contract for another 24 months to get it, nobody was getting an upgrade on the existing contract because it's just a bundle of Google services (One, YT Premium etc.) and financing on the phone. And if you don't care about the services, Google's two year financing is cheaper than this bundle.
From this point of view is systemd disaster because it is almost everywhere in the system - boot, network, logs, dns, user/home management…
That's almost like complaining that GNU coreutils is a disaster from KISS point of view because it includes too many things in a single project - cat, grep, dd, chown, touch, sync, base64, date, env... Not quite, because coreutils is actually a single package unlike systemd.
The core systemd is big (IMHO it needs to be in order to provide good service management, and service management is a reasonable thing to include in systemd), but everything you listed are optional components. If your distro bundles them into one package, that's on them.
Pixels never had the SD card slot