It has newer packages than Debian. And even though Debian releases new stables every couple years, at least historically, it has kept old package versions around for way longer than that. Before I started using ubuntu sometime in the '10s, it was normal for a debian stable package to be upwards of 10 years out of date.

And it wasn't like today where you have containers/VMs, PPAs, flatpak/appimage/snap/etc... if you needed a newer version of a package for whatever reason, often you couldn't just compile it yourself or use the testing/unstable one because it had cascading dependencies that were also newer, so you were just screwed. Being able to have a "stable" release with newer packages was a huge draw for Ubuntu.

Most of the games I play don't work on wine (Teknoparrot), and multiple machines I have are either missing or have broken essential drivers for built-in peripherals like wifi/BT, fingerprint readers etc. So... I had to go back.

One of my laptops has a 10+ year old unfixed kernel bug for the bluetooth not working... and the wifi only uploads at 1mbps under Linux, but works fine on Windows.

I'm sure people that don't happen to have random hardware/software incompatibilities are enjoying linux, but there's also still lots of people that can't switch.

Why do so many programmers seem to be learning Japanese? I have been noticing this trend for literally decades at this point.

This article is about the app, which does not run the model locally. Why would you doubt that a Chinese app which openly claims they send your data to China, actually does so?

I think if hosting an RMA form requires paying for 500x more bandwidth than it's supposed to just because it's being hammered by bots on VPNs, and this was your company, you'd block them too.

I use the DigitalPersona 4500 with libfprint. Unfortunately, there are multiple revisions of the device with the same model number and only some of them work properly under Linux (different encryption method I believe). As far as I know this is not actually documented anywhere. Googling just shows a bunch of unresolved bug reports of people having no idea why it doesn't work.

Anything that uses NFC payments.

Why do you think that?

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

even if they are not as good

Often for professional users, that makes it a non-starter already. Nobody who is making good money from Photoshop has ever said "I just use gimp instead, it works for me".

irreversibly wipe the device

And for anyone to actually go through the trouble of cloning a flash chip, you'd have to be an extremely high profile target.

You Zarkin' Frood!