I'm partial to macOS and I agree, I think Windows font rendering looks like garbage. On GNOME, I've found things to be okay. Sucks that patents are involved in this mess
Pixel 6 & newer, newer MediaTek devices, anything with the Snapdragon 8 gen 2 or newer. It took Qualcomm a while because many companies (including Apple) were holding out for VVC, which to this day isn't in a great state. iPhone 15 Pro & newer support AV1 hwdec
Pop! OS
Stopping software mainly used for piracy has equated to the inability to do what you like with what you rightfully purchase
Mostly positive. My encoding utility Aviator can be shipped with a custom community-backed SVT-AV1 fork in the background without anyone noticing any issues like they would if I linked to system SVT-AV1. Flatpak makes this kind of thing easy, and users don't have to think about it.
FYI, the Pixel 8's processor is certainly less efficient than the S23's. If it is reportedly getting better battery life, that's likely software related.
I see a lot of Framework recommendations, and I had the 12th gen Framework for around a year running Fedora. I faced a bunch of excessive power use issues, and had to add some kernel flags just to get maybe 4 hours of battery life. The device is notoriously repairable, but the one thing that conked out on me was actually the mainboard, which was like the price of a new device. Support spent two weeks trying to find out if it was anything else before sending me a replacement mainboard.
My friend recently got a Zenbook 14 OLED with the same processor. The entire device was $200 cheaper lightly used than the Frameworks mainboard alone, and the only issue is the speakers don't work. That being said, he gets almost double my battery life, and a 90hz OLED screen on top of it all. Plus more ports; even with Framework's modular add-in cards I don't feel it is as flexible a system as having >4 useful ports.
My time with the Framework was great, but I wouldn't recommend it. Getting something secondhand is an environmentally conscious option, and you can get great stuff secondhand.
It sounds like it is time to defederate. We'll miss the instance but we understand why it must be done
Let me know when you can use RCS on an Android phone without Google Play Services outside of Google Messages
Sounds like you're entrenched. If that's the case, don't look at Linux until you've accepted that things aren't going to be identical to Windows & there will be drawbacks to your workflow as well as benefits
Apple’s tracking has also proven to be far less severe than Google’s through Google Play Services on Android. And much easier to opt out of
Unless your computer has issues, can’t you just power off from within macOS?