My BIL is a Google engineer and he gave me (an iPhone user) a pixel 8 pro to test drive for feedback. The hardware is pretty darn solid and felt good in my hands and to my eyes. I really liked that it had both a fingerprint sensor and a facial recognition system to unlock. This made contactless payment a lot easier to use than an iPhone in my opinion. In general, the software is not as polished as iOS, but is more customizable and you can side load apps from alternate app stores like f droid, which is great. The killer feature as far as I am concerned is Firefox with uBlock.

Some people like the Apple ecosystem.

RIP 😭

I had the same problem - see this thread for solution (you have to scoll down to the middle)

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=157700

in short, delete or rename this file: /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules

I’m not technical enough to think it through carefully but I’ve always thought there was an opportunity for an organization like USPS to develop email 2.0 - something that gives people some kind of verifiable and secure email address so that users can easily find each other whilst filtering out spam (or to have spam taken into consideration in the design at the outset). You would design it based on strict standards that would be difficult to get around so that big tech could not easily co-opt it, and adopt for some kind of critical function (taxes, voting maybe?) so that it would encourage adoption en masse. Make it distributed so that users can selfhost it easily, safely, and securely.