Except so far the only time they’ve actually gotten any fines paid by anyone significant, the initial multi-billion euro fine on Meta was settles for only a few hundred million euro after half a decade of litigation and ended up including all subsequent fines in what was forgiven despite them continuing the activity. In theory it should dissuade them, but the companies being fined that really deserve it have annual profits greater than most countries’ GDPs. They can litigate indefinitely against the entire EuroBlock and keep making a profit from the activities while doing it.

Bluetooth protocol support for audio is a bit of a mess, and many Bluetooth devices (especially knock off or no-name budget brand headphones/headsets) skimp on applying the standard properly.

Absent the absolute latest Bluetooth standard support (5.3 or better), you’re usually limited by the protocol to very poor quality audio. It gets even worse of your device shows up as a headset inst4ad of heaphones/speaker since it has a mic return channel crammed into the very restricted bandwidth too. The way (mostly quality) vendors have worked around this prior to the latest Bluetooth protocol versions was to use raw data channels with negotiated compression formats and a special “escape hatch” protocol supported by Bluetooth (A2DP). Both sides had to negotiate a shared compression algorithm and implement it for sending the compressed audio so it could be decided at the destination. Poorer quality or older headphones, and older Bluetooth Linix stacks didn’t do this very well.

Not sure if any of that is applicable, but in general Bluetooth is always worse quality than wired because of bandwidth restrictions. And until Bluetooth 5.3 that added LE Audio and a related very efficient audio compression algorithm, it was a compatibility crap shoot.

Far and away the biggest thing I can recommend: Use the same distro yourself. If there ever are issues, you’ll almost certainly encounter them first and know how to fix them quickly. Ideally use it yourself for a bit before you put it on your mom’s computer so you can find any initial issues too.

I experienced that only when doing expert things on my system like trying to install new drivers. I’ve been using 4 different immutable distros for a few years and literally the only “breaking” thing was when UBlue distros moved to Fedora 42, which no longer allowed you to use the ostree admin unlock --hot-fix hack to directly modify your system and made you build your own modified variant using their GitHub template repo.

I’m actually moving my wife to a UBlue distros specifically because I set it up remotely and it just auto updates.

I will warn however that Flatpaks can be a nightmare for basic things like browsers if you want to do things like use a webcam, microphone, or, god forbid, a USB device. Make sure you manually set that up in the (probably flatpak) you’re using before handing it over (probably by using Flatseal).

That’s your prompt’s job. Take a look at Starship, which I believe has exactly this feature.

FYI, this is called “split horizon” DNS, where the location you get directed is based on the network you adk from. Make sure you have short TTLs set on your DNS records, or devices can have problems moving between networks and still having records cached from the prior network

When I install this snap am I getting a kernel driver, a native raw binary, or a containerized user application that conforms to a communication interface? Who knows! They’re all mostly undifferentiated in the store.

What about a third party store? Only if you fork the snap daemon and change the hard coded URL. And good luck with that mandatory Canonical contributer agreement you have to sign.

Want to pick when your apps update? Nope. That’s the official stance. They will never support that. But here’s a way to manually block network access to the daemon if you really really need to. But then everything will update at once when you give it access again.

Want a specific version of a snap? See above. Explicitly will never be an option.

“I guess there’s a fee to pay to get access to quality apps.” Incorrect. There is no real vetting process for what’s added to the store, there’s barely even minimal checking that you’re not overwriting someone else’s snap. You do have to sign the Canonical contributor agreement, and setup an identity to submit as, but even if your snap is proven to be malware there a good chance it will stay in the store, or can be immediately re-uploaded.