There’s a good explanation about that here: https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

The issue is that a lot of sites used the user-agent to determine if the browser supported particular features (e.g. show a fancy version of a site if the user is using Netscape, otherwise show a basic version for Mosaic, lynx, etc). New browsers had to pretend to be the old good browsers to get the good versions of sites

This is why getting rid of the user agent is a good thing. Sniffing the UA is a mess.

Do they use the BSD userland instead? Interesting…

I think Alpine uses Busybox, but it’s feasible for a Linux distro to use BSD coreutils. Not sure if any do that, though.

User agents were commonly used for the wrong reasons - fingerprinting, sites that block particular browsers rather than using proper feature detection, etc. so I’m glad to see them slowly going away.

Interesting… I didn’t realise Skylake isn’t supported. I agree with your comment. I thought people were talking about much older equipment.

TPM 2 has been around since 2015ish and I wouldn’t be surprised if Windows starts relying on it more heavily. A lot of businesses have already required employees to use computers with TPM 2.0 for a long time, and enterprise use is a big focus for Microsoft.

not counting systems that use the Linux kernel but aren’t considered a traditional GNU+Linux desktop.

Does that mean you don’t count Alpine towards Linux market share? It mostly doesn’t use any GNU stuff.

You can also compile the kernel with LLVM instead of gcc, use musl instead of glibc, and use BSD coreutils instead of GNU coreutils.

User agent strings are frozen these days, at least in Chrome. They still have the browser major version and OS name at least, but Windows will always report Windows 10, Android will always report Android 10, MacOS will always report 10.15.7, and Linux is just “Linux x86_64”: https://www.chromium.org/updates/ua-reduction/

User agent strings are essentially deprecated and nobody should be using them any more. They’ve been replaced by User-Agent Client Hints, where the site can request the data it needs, and some high-entropy things (ie fields that vary a lot between users) can prompt the user for permission to share them first.

The thing is that most Windows users don’t care and will continue to use it. People like you and I know about the benefits of Linux, but sometimes we overestimate how much regular users care about the OS they’re using.

Forced restart for software updates

If anything, they’re moving in the opposite direction. Windows Server 2025 is going to support hotpatching, which means that system updates can be applied without needing to reboot. Not sure if the technology will come to consumer Windows though.

Require new CPUs and motherboards / hardware, ignoring the market for old computers.

How long do you expect legacy hardware to be supported for?

You can enable a persistent connection to get alerts directly without relaying them through Google, but then you need to have a connection to your Home Assistant server all the time (eg by using a VPN or by exposing it publicly)

I don’t see anything in that article that says that Google store the contents of the notification. It just says that they link push tokens to emails, which is true - they have to know who to send the push notification to.

In any case, if you don’t want Home Assistant notifications being relayed through Google, you can use a persistent connection so that the app connects directly to your Home Assistant server.

There’s a few comments like this in this thread, from people that I guess didn’t actually read the post :)

They weren’t asking how to do it; they were asking why it works out-of-the-box with the standard Home Assistant notifications.

You don’t need ntfy; the standard Home Assistant app notifications work anywhere since they route via Google Firebase.

That’s what I was thinking of! It’s not in the settings section I’d expect it to be in (notifications) so I thought it wasn’t doable any more.

On Linux, input-remapper usually works pretty well to remap the extra buttons. I wonder if it’d work on this AI button.

Notifications go through Google Firebase servers. This is documented here: https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notification-details/. Your HA server sends the notification to Google, which then sends it to your phone. They don’t store the notification they just relay it.

Most mobile apps do something like this. One reason is to improve battery life - your phone can have a single connection to a Google server instead of every app needing its own separate connection.

There used to be a way to use local notifications (meaning you have to be on the same network, either locally or via a VPN), but I can’t find the setting any more so maybe it’s gone now. (edit: this is still possible)

F-Droid is great. My understanding is that apps on F-Droid have to be free (as in freedom), and they build most apps from source so the builds are verifiable - they’ll exactly match the source code in the repo. It’s not just a developer uploading a random APK that might be completely different from the code in the repo.

EV certs used to make the address bar green, so there was a tangible benefit to them. These days, they look exactly the same. It proves that the ownership has been verified, but if no users even see that, does it even matter?

If you run a website: Paid SSL/TLS certificates. Free ones like Let’s Encrypt and ZeroSSL are just as good, and can be automatically renewed.

I hate that these commercial providers are the first thing people think of when they hear “VPN” these days, rather than the actual main use case for a VPN (connecting to a remote network, like a work network, from another location).

AirVPN are probably the best. They’re independent, more transparent than the other providers, and support port forwarding.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnpdoAIhiyo

Probably ozempic, since people going off it immediately balloon back up

Doesn’t that mean that it’s actually working, though? It has an effect when you’re using it, and the effect goes away when you stop using it.

Also the version for weight loss is called Wegovy.