Android Auto is a proprietary standard that’s basically glorified spyware - if one thing isn’t being fed to it 24/7 exactly as Google wants it so they can sell it, it breaks. It’s basically just that there are a lot of dependencies that it would need that are fundamentally incompatible with privacy.
I think that would be useful! I also think that anyone putting that much work in should look into hosting their own server, because they’ve already done the hardest part of hosting a server in the fediverse. A big part of the issue is that a lot of ActivityPub apps don’t really have granular enough customization baked in to support that sort of thing just yet; you can get some apps that do that on the user side, but anything on the server/community side is usually just “block all” or nothing. The admin of my Mastodon instance is always complaining that he can’t just hide certain instances from the “all” tab without blocking then entirely, and he just wants to hide them so they don’t overwhelm the server, not block them from showing up for people who choose to interact with them.
Honestly, I’ve seen the Fediblock thing on Mastodon, and it’s…pretty terrible. A whole lot of minority groups get targeted disproportionately by that stuff, especially by misinformation about their instances. The answer is really to leave instances if you disagree with moderation policies and the admins won’t listen, and to join instances that are philosophically aligned with you, because unlike in a centralized/capitalist model, this actually works at cultivating a community that you can engage with in a healthy manner. If not, and you go with something like Fediblock/the one big blocklist site, you’re just gonna end up with most instances that serve 2SLGBTQIA+ people getting blocked or having more harmful misinformation spread about them. Hell, if a lot of Lemmy had its way, anything but being capitalist and pro-USA would be banned.
But also, a lot of clients can subscribe to feeds already. ActivityPub is pretty great at cross compatibility with Mastodon and the like. You just subscribe to someone who uses a microblogging platform based on ActivityPub and it’ll show up in your feed.
All my notes for tabletop RPG stuff, mainly! I run a few Pathfinder campaigns.
Trillium is my personal choice for self-hosted notes. I haven’t really had issues with using it on mobile, but I also just tend to put the stuff I think of when I’m out and about into a single note that I periodically go through and reorganize. It’s been good to me so far, and it has all of the features I really need. If I need something fancier (or public-facing), I toss it in BookStack instead. Then again, I don’t use either of them for business (mostly for tabletop RPG stuff and instructions to friends/family about using the other stuff I self-host), so if that’s your application, I have no clue how it holds up.
You can use nginx or traefik as a reverse proxy locally without opening ports 80 and 443 to the world and host your own local DNS service that points to your server’s IP (and even use a self signed certificate to get HTTPS working).
The Vulkan vs DirectX thing isn’t an absolute in terms of performance. In addition, it’s worth keeping in mind that Windows is horrifically bloated with unoptimized “features” and can use up to 8GB of RAM at idle plus 10-50% of your CPU at idle depending on your configuration as well as which unnecessary services are bugged in that update. That in and of itself makes a huge difference; my W10 install was using 8GB of RAM and nearly 80% of my CPU on system services for almost a month straight before they finally fixed the bug and reduced it to 2-4 GB + maybe 15-25% depending on the day, meaning I was getting huge stutter playing games as simple as Old School RuneScape. My Tumbleweed install on my much worse specs-wise laptop, on the other hand, used effectively zero CPU and less than 1GB of RAM at idle (fairly confident on the RAM thing but I’d have to check for exact numbers).
Having played Halo CE for PC recently…no, it doesn’t have split screen at all. That was only on the Xbox version (which is technically superior in quite a few ways). The only way to have split screen on Halo CE on PC is via console commands/mods. That said, I do agree with your overall point and I would love to be able to do split screen MCC on my PC without mods.
If you’re watching movies with friends and want a FOSS alternative, Jellyfin is the way to go. It’s basically a way to host a media streaming center that others can connect to. It might be a bit overkill depending on your needs, but it’s great for that exact purpose. It doesn’t have chat or anything, though, so you’ll want to keep something else around for that.
The article explicitly talks about that multiple times, though. Were you reading one of the articles that this one references? It mentions repeatedly how inaccessible and unaffordable healthcare is, using both of those points, and then moves on to discuss the issue as part of a broader societal trend.