Ah i see kde has fixed the issue where dropdowns had broken behavior when scrolling https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kirigami/-/commit/f6ca218607ff7e5d5066eb3224154c3256cb9516 this was my main blocker why i couldn’t use it when i tried it around 2020. Maybe i could give it another try?

Actually the naming scheme you propose e.g. USB4 80Gb is the real naming scheme! It’s officially what the specification demands manufacturers label their products. “USB4 version 2” and so on are explicitly only the names of the internal standards that only concern people writing drivers or designing chips.

I have no idea what tech journalist are smoking. This has been a problems for so many years but they keep using the internal names. I mean nobody is complaining about having to always say “IEEE 802.11bn” instead of WI-FI 8

What non standard thing are they doing with the power supply? The PSU looks like a regular usb c PD supply to me (even supports 12v, nice!)

Edit: wtf! 5v@5a yeah thats non standard. What were they thinking?

The system tray is the one thing i need to see that/if email/steam/chat is running and if there’s new messages. Otherwise gnome works great for me

There are portals: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/desktop-integration.html#portals . they allow secure access to many features. Also any flatpak app still has access to a private app-specific filesystem, just not to the host.

Doesn’t work for all applications but for many sand boxing is possible without a loss of features.

only option for messaging between Android and iOS.

Well aside from like all the messaging apps, right?

It might sound surprising but it makes a lot of sense to have different standards supported over USB-C. USB-C is just a form factor of the connector.

For USB 3 or USB4 speeds you physically need more wires in the cable, while for USB 2.0 you only need 5 wires. Also if you want really high data transfer rates of 40 or 80Gbit/s the cable can only be around 1 meter or 3 feet long.

So because USB-C supports different USB versions, a charging cable can simply be USB 2.0 and be cheaper and long and do it’s job just fine.

If USB-C was only USB4 it wouldn’t be all that useful. Devices like wireless mice or DACs or game controllers wouldn’t/ couldn’t use it and the cables would all be thick and expensive and short. And for charging regular things we’d still be stuck with micro USB.

The only downside is that, yes if you are doing a thing where you need high speeds such as connecting a screen or external disk to a PC you do need to check that you’re using a high speed cable, but pretty much all good quality fast cables have the speed printed onto the connector housing.

But yes the iPhone restricting speeds to 2.0 is strange and most definitely just a trick to sell more pro models. There are plenty of devices that simply have no need for anything besides 2.0, be it because they send no data or just very little. But phones really aren’t in that category.

I get screen tearing when gaming on x11 so i use wayland and I only switch to x11 if i need to screenshare on discord.

Well it being in the middle of a desert makes it more wasteful.

But yes giant festivals that encourage a lot of travel and needlessly burning things are in general wasteful and potentially excessive. There are other leisure activities, so discouraging festivals is not equivalent to working nonstop.

yes these are the terms that are not supposed to be used in product naming or by consumers and are just intended for use by people developing USB devices.

Well you have to differentiate somehow and USB 5, 10, 20, 40 or 80 gbps sound like reasonable terms for normal people.

Yes it was never intended that any consumer hears about something like “USB 3.2 Gen 2” that was strictly internal naming for people developing USB devices.

In fact the naming guidelines we’re simplified even further than in the older version you linked: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/USB-IF-language-usage-guideliens.pdf

But yea borderline fraudulent manufacturers and uninformed tech journalists are to blame for all this confusion

The v2 part here really just refers to the fact that it’s version 2 of the specification. Consumerrs only need to know the term USB4 and the speed that their device operates at. It’s sort of like complaining that the ietf has terrible naming schemes because HTTP is defined in half a dozen RFCs with 4 digit numbers. This versioning is just meant for people developing USB things.

Actually this article here is one of the few times where even mentioning the version 2 part is reasonable since the details of these specifications actually matter to kernel developerrs. For everybody else it’s just USB4 80 gbps.

Get a cross body sling, One of those travel digital nomad things. The brand ones aren’t cheap but it’s like somewhat fashionable. Maybe that could work?

They had some serious cryptography issues (including no perfect forwards secrecy!!!) but they have promised to fix that. I’ve not yet seen any paper analyzing the new protocol. But maybe it could be good?

Edit: Here’s a paper with some of the issues: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/623004/main.pdf

They conclude that:

The seven attacks we have presented highlight fundamental weaknesses in the design of Threema. Indeed, the Threema protocols lack basic properties that are nowadays considered de rigueur for a messenger app to be regarded as secure: forward secrecy with respect to a malicious server, and protection against replay, reflection, and reordering attacks. We believe that the cryptography in Threema has design flaws that need to be addressed in order to meet the security expectations of its users

They have redesigned their protocol since then but again i have yet to see a third party look at it but TBH i haven’t looked into it.

Tipp for people wanting to get into rechargeable AA and AAAs: get IKEA Ladda batteries and their charger. They are cheap and japanese made. Some people argue that they are just relabeled Panasonic eneloops!

Edit: Oh also if you used rechargeable batteries in the past and you remember them sucking that’s probably true. But the battery chemistry is better now and it’s possible that your batteries degraded quickly because of “dumb” chargers. Modern chargers like the gray 4 battery Ikea charger detect how and for how long to charge and thus will not ruin the batteries.