EagerEagle posted a good comment under this post going over the client code stuff, pretty enlightening stuff.

Saw someone post that City Journal article on mastodon a couple days ago and I'm amazed that so few people picked up that the City Journal and the article's author are basically puppets of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. I know most people aren't tuned to look out for think tank propaganda but it came off as really obviously FUD-y and unsubstantiated.

This isn't really a highly direct solution, but you could try increasing the screen zoom of the whole device by a notch or two. Somewhere in Settings > Display > Font Size/Screen Zoom or something like that may size up the UI enough that it's comfortable for you. I think you can mix and match font sizes and screen zooms, so you can keep text from getting too big but size up the UI buttons. This will naturally affect all android UI, not just the music widget, but maybe that's okay in your situation?

Yeah, Gnome 46 has been a really solid, small upgrade in my experience. I swear it's made things smoother and more consistent, plus some of the minor visual tweaks and refinements are welcome. Turns out a lot of what they did is under-the-hood optimizations and improvements to accessibility, so the Gnome desktop update itself has been a small but welcome improvement.

So far I haven't had any issues elsewhere I'm Fedora 40, but maybe that's because I've checked for new updates pretty frequently and done some restarts since the upgrade, that might be keeping things fresh.

It's wild to me that anyone would say that sentence and not immediately realize they sound like an emotionless robot. Like damn, who would've thought people have a great need for authentic human connections? Not me!

This kinda shit you hear from people so deep in the world of product marketing is sickening and really shows how disconnected from they are from both reality and the point of selling a good product: benefitting people. I guess I'm just glad to see more stories of people ditching dating apps as they continue to become more predatory and less helpful.

Yeah unfortunately I agree, as much as I dread knowing Meta's going to be behind a lot of the VR/AR developments as it gets more common, this isn't really an indication that they screwed up. They're not the first company I'd want to lead the VR market but it looks like they will be regardless.

You and me both, their 13in AMD model has been the best device I've bought in years, and their dedicated Linux support team has done a phenomenal job especially considering how small a team they are.

I know nothing lasts forever but I really hope they get close, if they keep selling previous gen hardware at lower prices I think they could end up in more average people's hands. I guess I'm just very hopeful for these guys.

You said it pal, not me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah seriously, I was surprised at how plain and illegible rpm-ostree felt in comparison to dnf, I really wish they put a little color or some extra separation just to make it feel less cramped and give people more glanceable info.

I think one worth adding is ZorinOS, it might feel more familiar and modern than Mint, and it's worked well on the old hardware I've run it on. Still an Ubuntu derivative, so you can't really go wrong with any of these.

I would say yes to this, but elementaryOS still doesn't have in-place upgrades to the next major versions. I recall there being some progress on changing that, but I would wait till elementaryOS 8 before really recommending it.

This might be a bit of a hot take, but fractional scaling is generally not worth it, it almost always leads to some apps rendering things blurry and uses slightly more graphics resources. I've got a Framework 13 and I can say that just turning on the Large Text feature in Accessibility settings does the trick for me. This obviously doesn't work for everyone's needs, but if you're like me and just want things to stay crisp but big enough to read, this could be a viable alternative.