Part of the problem here is that those extra permissions weren't required if you used Apple's ad service. They stifled competition in their own favor.
imecth
It's Microsoft, they have all the data. And quite frankly it doesn't surprise even a little bit, i doubt even 5% of people moved around the taskbar, people are just ready to hitch themselves to every bandwagon they see shitting on Microsoft.
Yes they actually review the extensions, you'll find more information on the blogpost from last week.
GNOME manually reviews every extension, and they understandably don't want to review AI generated code.
It's disabled by default upstream as it's still considered experimental, some distributions choose to override the upstream default.
Congratulations
Thanks. But in all seriousness i was trying to convey that your initial argument - experienced users not enabling pkgstats didn't make much sense. It's just funny in this case because you've been using arch for a decade and yet don't know this basic thing.
Wouldn't that mean the opposite - that you are actually not very experienced, or knowledgeable at least about arch? I've been using arch for a couple of years and "heard" of it just fine.
The majority of users, especially experienced ones don't enable pkgstats.
Why would an experienced user not enable pkgstats? Anyways the biggest bias here is that arch inherently caters to power users which are going to have very different needs and likes than regular people.
Fractional scaling is a compositor issue, not a linux issue, so in this case kwin. But yes, fractional scaling in general is always problematic as there's no way to cleanly multiply pixels by fractions, so you get wonky fonts, UI that doesn't quite fit... and whatever hacks your compositor has on top to make it look better, it's best to avoid it if possible and only increase the font size.
How is it a scam? They're offering a service and asking for a price. It's the same thing everywhere in software, if you want longer support you need to pay up.
Downstream distros are a bit of a special case, as they don't really test these packages so much as inherit them from upstream, so what you're actually getting is ubuntu's and debian's version of GNOME in Mint for example. If you're going to do that, I'd just cut out the middleman and go upstream here as Mint isn't bringing anything of value, worse it's just another vector for untested bugs.
You could always read the original source and find out the intent, but who has time for that?