I’m surprised they had to outsource that as they have been producing so much shit for decades.

Quod Libet can do all of these things to my knowledge. It is currently my favorite linux music player.

What a sick joke.

Fwiw, mine has worked with no issues on any of my Linux PCs.

From what I understand there are better dongles now than that they can perform better than the Apple dongle, but the one everyone raves about that was $20 - $30 or so is now hard to come brand is going for closer to $80 (I think it is the Jcally JM20 Max). I don’t see a reason to bother spending more money chasing this crap now that I’ve had to buy both my wife and I standalone music players. What I do know is that the first company that releases a decent phone that has a headphone jack that fits my other needs is getting my Money. If Fairphone has brought it back, it would have been them since they have decent ROM alternatives (though not GrapheneOS).

I’ve used three: one was generic (it was at the time the only way to get one that could charge and have a headphone out in the same dongle), one was from Fiio (surprisingly bad sounding, maybe worse than the generic in some ways, but better build), and one was the official Google dongle (sounded clean, but was super weak. Couldn’t power even my lightest headphones that weren’t IEMs). The only one I still have is the Google dongle because the others broke, but I don’t use it because it still kinda sucks. I ended up being forced to buy a phone without a headphone jack fairly recently because Google more or less killed my Pixel 4a and there were no replacement phones with headphones jacks that I could put GrapheneOS on. I ended up buying myself a portable music player to list to music on. My phone is now only for listening to music in the car and it sucks :(

I definitely had issues with my 3070. I ran it in Linux for 4 years before recently switching back to AMD. It was usually only minor issues like it not playing well with certain DEs, but sometimes certain driver versions would make my system unusable/unbootable until I could roll them back. I am glad some people never had it happen, but pretending like it wasn’t a thing just makes you ignorant.

I have used both AMD and Nvidia cards on Linux for a long time and with Nvidia it’s mostly fine now days, but their driver situation tends to be fine until the rare time that it isn’t. I switched back to AMD last year due to the occasional driver issue that left me dead in the water. And by occasional I mean like once every year or so, not something common. It is entirely possible that you’ll never have much of an issue, but I started to take note of my Nvidia driver versions and and especially noted when GPU drivers were updated so that I had some notion of where to try to roll back to if I ran into issues. I haven’t had any issues like that with my AMD cards for a long, long time in Linux (with Windows obvious the situation was more of the reverse of this).

My wired earbuds cost more than ten times that and will probably last me until I retire. The vast majority of those USB-c to 3.5mm adapters are cheap crap that have a worthless DAC and/or fall apart after a short time. I have purchased my wife three such adapters since she decided it was worth it to get a phone without a headphone jack and none of them have been good.

I ended up having to buy her a separate portable music player to use. So thanks for that Google, Apple, and the rest of the greedy shithead OEMs.

It absolutely does not require too much space. And you can still buy phones with headphone jacks, just not any of the (ironically) higher end models because OEMs know they can push their first party bluetooth headphones to these customers.

We used it for our dev and systems groups at my former company for a while and really enjoyed it compared to anything else that was around. When it went away, we switched away to IRC due to how easy it was to host and maintain. I actually don’t see a big overlap between Wave and chat and Gmail for how people use it, but I suspect that was a big part of the problem. The uses where Wave was superior didn’t really catch on until Slack came on the scene and had MS and Google then scrambling to make similar tools.

Google Wave was actually pretty awesome. Google just had no idea what to do with it and it was too heavy for phones of the time.

I was lured to use it during those days as well because of all the cool and wildly different screenshots I had seen. I did manage to get it working and looking super cool, but it was fragile and complex. It was so easy to fully break it in my experience. I tried to use it again about 8-10 years ago and while it was easier than the 90s, it was more trouble than I was willing to put up with for a DE these days. Especially since Gnome (with extension) and KDE could trivially look nice.

That is an absolutely wild fail rate.

I just recently replaced a bunch of 1TB and 2TB drives with an 4TB SSD and 8TB HDD pretty cheaply back in December. I was trying to get those in before tariff shenanigans. Technically, those old drives are still in use, just for redundancy now. Even the scary old Seagate drives!

To be fair, I believe the increased pricing then was mostly due to sales, and thus production, tanking post COVID along with the big inflation for a couple of years. There was almost certainly greed from the most prominent memory makers tackedo n though.

I would love to see your data on this if you have it available.

The only drives I have ever had die on me were actually both WD, but it’s all anecdotal, and I’ve had tons of WD drives that were great (my favorites were the raptors and velociratpers). I’ve owned way too many HDDs over the many years, and I can say that I haven’t had issues with any, but again I do my research and only order from what I believe to be good runs of drives. In case you have never done so, take a look at the reports that Backblaze puts out on their drive reliability. I found it pretty eye opening. Before Backblaze start sharing their data, there used to be a site that crowd sourced HDD lifetimes and failure causes that I used to use when buying drives and I always entered my drive data there. I can’t recall the name of it now nor do I know if it still exists, but you could definitely spot the “bad” gens on there and WD and Seagate were both pretty even as far as I recall. I remember Hitachi being statistically worse, but it made sense as they bought IBM’s derided Deskstar business from them. Ironically, WD ended up buying Hitachi’s HDD business years later, but I think it was considered OK by then.

I know people love to dunk on Seagate drives, but it was really just the one gen that was the cause of that bad rep. Before that the most hated drives were the “deathstars” (Deskstars). I have a 1TB Seagate drive that is 10 years old and still in use daily. Just do some research on which drive to buy, no OEM is sacrosanct. I’d personally wait 6 months to a year before buying one of these drives though, so enough people have time to find out if this generation is trouble or not.

I remember when our local Florida county redid their DMV office and made it actually not suck. Once word got out, we got such an influx of people driving in from other larger counties that they had to ban them except on a specific day.