I’ve been daily-driving it for several years. I think it’s very good, generally, and am happy to stick with it for the foreseeable future. Murena asks you to sign up for their cloud services on first boot, but if you say no, they’ll never bother you about it again. I don’t use them, so can’t comment on whether they’re any good.

I have found their App Lounge app (Google Play Store/FDroid alternatives rolled into one) to be spotty. Sometimes I’ve found I had to reboot the phone to get it to download/update apps. They have made updates recently that improve this a lot and I haven’t seen it presenting these kinds of issues over the last couple months, but I won’t say they’ve definitively fixed the issues. You can always fall back to Aurora store for Google Store apps and FDroid for FOSS apps if the App Lounge gives you big headaches.

I use FOSS apps where possible over Google apps. Organic Maps is excellent, often better than GMaps. Banking apps work fine for me. Haven’t tried NFC for payments, I don’t use it.

There’s no instances of Murena and related orgs doing anything shady about data collection or anything afaik, their big conceit is privacy and they’d be sunk if there were any scandals around that. If you have a threat model that requires an extremely high amount of security however, you may prefer to steer clear as /e/ freely admit they make trade-offs in hardening for convenience and ease of use. While they incorporate the latest security patches from LineageOS, GrapheneOS continually allege that /e/'s modifications can make their OS less secure than stock Android. How true that is, I don’t know. Assume your phone can be hacked at any time if it were specifically targeted.

If you’re in the market for a phone that’s just good for everyday use but doesn’t have all the Google tie-ins, I can recommend it.

Nota bene: Not just laid off, replaced. With other people.

Basically spent a ton of money and talent and business disruption to turn over 80% of his workforce for shits and gigs.

Zac Bowden used to post a video for every single new insider build of Windows to cover any change he could, he’s bought the original Surface table from 2007, he’s been covering and championing all things Windows for at least a decade. To get someone like him off side, you really gotta be fucking the dog.

Yeah fr. Edge is a better browser than Chrome. I know that’s a bar you can walk over, but…

Hasn’t been the case so far with sidebar, Firefox view, Pocket or any other stuff I’ve not wanted in the past. If they did start doing dark patterns bullshit with this AI stuff, then yeah, I’d switch. In the meantime, I’ll use FF until it gets worse than the alternatives, or an alternative gets better than FF, whichever comes first.

This is good enough for me. If they have an on boarding step/popup to say “Try our AI crap” and I have an option to say “No and don’t ever bother me about this again”, then it’s fine.

It gave up

If they were going to get enshittified, they should’ve been smarter about it to gradually introduce lock-in. The switching cost of going to Jellyfin is almost zero. Did it in an afternoon about a year ago. Ya done goofed, Plex

I don’t know why this is getting down voted. With regulation and healthy competition, this is what happens. When antitrust regulation is weak, R&D and innovation stops and rent seeking takes its place.

They’ve said that this is a big stepping stone towards support for Microsoft’s graph api and lots of on-prem servers will still be using EWS for ages to come.

Anyone hear a loud hissing sound?

Who wants to give me a billion dollars to dig a hole and I’ll give you a billion to fill it back in and we’ll both say to investors we posted a billion dollars in revenue.

I think that’s q bit overblown. You have an option to use a Murena account in place of a Google account. I just said no thanks and everything works perfectly fine with no services affected. In terms of security of privacy of the Murena account itself, no idea. Never used one.

Raymond’s book is an amazing read and full of stories very much like this one.

Communities, friends, family and media are your discovery algorithm! Get involved in things. It makes your music acquisitions meaningful and makes the experience of discovering and listening to music so much better.

I don’t think that’s what they’re saying

I just try to describe it like email. “You’ve got your gmails and your outlooks and your yahoos and whatnot, you pick one you like, but they’re all email and it won’t stop you seeing emails from outlook guys if you’re a gmail guy.”

Took me ages to understand this. I’d thought "If an AI doesn’t know something, why not just say so?“

The answer is: that wouldn’t make sense because an LLM doesn’t know ANYTHING

It’s actually a really good representation of how execs are viewing AI. It’s a bunch of meaningless graphs and pictures of robots with the word ‘AI’ sprinkled over the place, the whole thing is backwards for the worker, and it’s imaginary.