This seems unlikely since it boots with a monitor attached. From past experience most laptops that refuse to boot while closed don’t boot even if an HDMI display is connected.
I don’t really have a source. It is just me thinking logically about the system and many offhand comments I have read over time. Other than the privacy policy which I have linked.
The difference is that the popup is optional on X. They can also just access the window data directly. On Wayland they have no way to access other windows without asking for permission via the “Portal” popup.
For sure. Lots of people here are enthusiasts that like trying out different things and different distros. Most people will just find something they like and stick with it for years. Don’t get me wrong, it can be fun to jump around, but don’t feel compelled to. Fedora will likely serve you well for many years.
To be clear Steam will download the Linux build by default on Linux. No user intervention required.
(If you need to for some strange reason you get run the Windows build in Wine via the “Compatibility” menu but that is unlikely to work better than the native build.)
I don’t think there is much concrete, but here are some things that it effects.
Performance. You view almost everything via your instance. So picking one running with capable hardware and ideally close to you (network wise) will give you a better experience.
Reliability. If your instance goes down you are basically offline. This can be hard to predict for the future.
Trust. Your identity is “owned” by the instance. So if they wanted they can impersonate you. This can also be very hard to gauge.
Longevity. If your instance shuts down it will be quite inconvenient and your identity will be lost, so you may want to try to predict which instances are likely to last.
Moderation. If they block too many other instances you won’t be able to see content that you want to see. If they block to little then you may be seeing content that you would rather not. Or the instance may be blocked by other instances if it becomes known for spamming.
Content is actually not really on my list since you can subscribe to any communities from any instance. It is true that the instance can provide some content discovery purpose via the local and known communities page but I would argue that separate service which track communities across all instance are better for this purpose.
I don’t agree. If I like LOTR and giraffes I don’t want to create an account on both “instance groups”. I want to do like today and create a single account, then subscribe to the communities I am interested in wherever they are.
To me it sounds like you are sort of mixing up community location and community discovery. This is sort of the case right now because instances have a list of local communities but I think that it is best that they are separated. For example on Reddit I don’t generally find new communities by scanning the entire list of communities. I usually find them when someone mentions a related community in a comment of a community that I am already in. Or when I stumble across a community when searching the web. When you discover and subscribe to communities this way it doesn’t really matter where they are hosted or if they are grouped. You can organically discover things that interest you over time (although I agree that it can be a bit slow to start).
I can’t way I have tried. But Wayland uses a socket, so many you can set file permissions to let other users access it?
I don’t know what your exact use case is but if you just want programs to have different “profiles” you can probably do something like setting $HOME to point somewhere else or otherwise configure their data directory.
IDK, maybe I have a particularly bad memory but it is basically as easy for me to bookmark a URL as it is to lookup and remember a bang that they defined. Plus local will always be faster, more private and more secure.
Firefox has keyword bookmarks which is basically identical to bangs but you can customize them to your preference and they don’t require sending your query to a third-party remote service.
Just set the “Keyword” option in a bookmark and type mykeyword foo in the URL bar to search using your bookmark mykeyword. I use a lot of one-character keywords such as m for https://www.google.ca/maps?q=%s, g for https://www.google.com/search?q=%s, d for https://www.dndbeyond.com/search?q=%s and similar. I also have a keyword e which runs a bookmarklet that fills in a one-time email into the currently focused input field.