I know this thread is likely to quickly descend into 50 variants of “ew, snap”, but it’s a good write up of what is really a pretty interesting novel approach to the immutable desktop world.
As the article says, it could well be the thing that actually justifies Canonical’s dogged perseverance with snaps in the first place.
Exactly this. There’s no nefarious motive to doing this, because Amazon can already do everything nefarious that they want to do with their current Android-based Fire OS.
I’m actually willing to take Amazon’s reasoning at face value for this. They say that Android is too heavyweight and inflexible for embedded IoT devices, and that they want to build something lighter. This makes plenty of sense, and is indeed something that Google themselves have also said as justification for their move to Fuschia for their own embedded devices.
For Linux fans, it’s probably a good thing that Amazon has chosen another Linux-based architecture rather than doing as Google are doing and moving off Linux to a different kernel.
Android is already free software, and see how far that gets you. The kicker is that you’re tied into their services (with all the data harvesting, targeted advertising and monetisation that that involves).
If you’re after something for digital art this probably isn’t it, but for note taking and basic handwriting it should be alright. They sell a specific active stylus themselves, so it can’t be too useless.
Wine doesn’t have any inherent overhead. It’s a native reimplementation of the Windows APIs (and not an emulator), so there’s no inherent overhead compared to Windows itself. It can be faster or it can be slower, but this has more to do with optimisation and implementation than anything inherent.
If your want something that just works, Ubuntu is pretty hard to beat. Snaps are really not a big deal anymore, performance wise; a lot of the bad rap on slow startups etc. are from years (and many versions) ago.
If you don’t want Ubuntu and you don’t like Mint, there are also other options in the Ubuntu/Debian family. Pop_OS and Zorin are both popular.
I use Thunderbird on several machines, and I use broadly the default config (no fancy business). I also have the same email accounts set up on my Android phone (Gmail ones on the native Gmail client app, an Outlook one on the Outlook app). When accessing my email on a machine which doesn’t have Thunderbird set up for me (such as my corporate laptop), I just use the webmail interfaces.
And it all works…fine. why wouldn’t it? Thunderbird and the Android apps just send their service calls off via IMAP and it all sorts itself out without any fuss from me. All the data lives off in the cloud anyway; it’s just a different way to interact with it other than the web interface.
I just happen to like having all my email accounts in one combined place, running in the background and throwing system notifications.