And it’s also client-side. Kagi filters them server-side AFAICT, so from your POV it’s instant and without client-side filtering jank.

I don’t care for the LLMs or Tiktok but Translate is becoming more and more useful with alternative translations and such.

Deepl was sort of the gold standard for translation for a good while and Kagi Translate can do everything it can for my purposes. And I just get it on top of the search engine I actually paid for without paying any extra. Quite amazing.

There’s also the option of just leaving an offline disk at someone’s and visiting them regularly to update the backup.

Having an entirely offline copy also protects you/mitigates against a few additional hazards.

If you don’t process any user data beyond what is technologically required to make the website work, you don’t need to inform the user about it.

None of this puts the user out of control; they’re free to add the Flathub repository should they wish to do so.

He

I hate to be that guy but OP gave no indication of their gender. English has the luxury of having a “natural” neutral pronoun; please just use that.

which these suggested Fedora Spins are designed to integrate with as tightly as possible

Could you explain what exactly this “tight integration” pertains? AFAIK these are just regular old global-state distros but with read-only snapshotting for said global state (RPM-ostree, “immutable”).
Read-only global system configuration state in pretty much requires usage of Flatpak and the like for user-level package application management because you aren’t supposed to modify the global system state to do so but that’s about the extent that I know such distros interact with Flatpak etc.

Bazzite is completely the opposite of an OS designed to run one app at once, which means you haven’t tried it before rubbishing it as a suggestion.

That is their one and only stated goal: Run games.

I don’t know about you but I typically only run one game at a time and have a hard time imagining how any gaming-focused distro would do it any other way besides running basic utilities in the background (i.e. comms software.).

Obviously you can use it to do non-gaming stuff too but at that point it’s just a regular old distro with read-only system state. You can install Flatpak, distrobox etc. on distros that have mutable system state too for that matter.

Could you point out the specific concrete things Bazzite does to improve separation between applications beyond the sandboxing tools that are available to any distribution?

It’s true that I haven’t used Bazzite; I have no use for imperative global state distributions and am capable of applying modifications useful for gaming on my own. It’s not like I haven’t done my research though.

“No your honour, we do not offer users any patented software, we merely ship a system which directs users to this other totally unrelated entity that we are fully aware ships patented software.” will not hold up in court.

I also imagine RH would simply like control over the repository content they offer to users by default. Flathub acts more like a 3rd party user repository than a “proper” distro.

I don’t assume you to be stupid, so lack of information is the most likely explanation for not knowing what “it” refers to here.

Read the linked issue first perhaps.

Offering patented software would open Fedora (a RedHat product mind you) up to legal issues in places that know software patents (primarily the U.S.).

There is no distribution that does what you’re looking for. All the ones recommended by others in this thread are just generic distributions that do nothing special to separate user applications and I have no idea why they saw fit to mention them at all.

The best recommendation here is Qubes but that’s arguably not a distro but rather its own operating system that can then run some instances of distros inside of it with strong separation between those units.

The only thing that somewhat goes the direction you want is Flatpak but it’s not anywhere close to Androids really quite solid app separation scheme.

The reality of it is that most Linux desktop apps are made with the assumption that they are permitted to access every resource the user has access to with no differentiation; your SSH or GPG private keys are in the same category as the app’s config file.

Standard APIs to manage permissions in a more fine-grained manner are slowly being worked on (primarily by the flatpak community IME) but it’s slow and mostly focused on container stuff which I’m not convinced is the way forward. There does not appear to be any strong effort towards creating a resource access control design that’s anywhere near as good as Android’s in any case though.

The closest thing we have is systemd hardening for system components but that’s obviously not relevant for desktop apps. It’s also (IMHO) inherently flawed due to using a blocklist approach rather than an allow-list one. It’s also quite rigid in what resources it controls.

I’m not convinced any of the existing technologies we have right now is fit for a modern user-facing system.

Here’s what I think we ought to have:

• A method to identify applications at runtime (e.g. to tell apart your browser from your terminal and your editor at runtime)
• A generic extensible way to declare resources to which access should be controlled within a single user context (i.e. some partition of your home filesystem or some device that your user generally has access to such as your camera)
• A user-configurable mapping between resources and applications; enforced by kernel-level generic mechanisms

No need for any containers here for any of this; they’re a crutch for poor legacy distro design that relies on global state. I don’t see a need for breaking the entire UNIX process model by unsharing all resources and then passing in some of them through by overly complex methods either.

Eventhough they’re quite simple and effective, I’m not convinced UNIX users are a good primitive to use for application identification like Android does it because that implies user data file ownership needs to be managed by some separate component rather than the standard IO operations that any Linux apps ever uses for everything.
I think this should instead be achieved using cgroups instead which are the single most important invention in operating systems that you can actually use today since UNIX IMHO.

The missing parts are therefore a standard for resource declaration and a standard and mechanism to assign them to applications (identified via cgroup).
I haven’t done much research into whether these exist or how they could me made to exist.

That is not relevant here in any way. That’s a distro made to easily run one app at a time without really caring about data security w.r.t. that app.

Note that even with this it’ll be quite likely that games don’t work. WineD3D is much less compatible than DXVK.

You need a device that can do Vulkan properly. The best for that are AMDGPUs and Nvidia ones but I wouldn’t recommend the latter. Newer Xe Intel GPUs should also work but they’re quite a bit behind anything AMD has to offer in terms of performance.

The newer of your GPUs meanwhile is a design from ~2015. Vulkan released in 2016. Just to get you an idea.

The issue here is not Linux, it’s that neither of your GPUs was made for modern gaming. On windows that might sometimes work, especially with games targetting older graphics APIs that your GPUs were made with in mind but on Linux everything is Vulkan (a very modern graphics API), even games that only use older APIs.
A modern Vulkan-capable card is a requirement for painless gaming on Linux.

It uses the same technology but that’s it.

Right I can see where you’re coming from but that incentivises using Kagi less which IMV is a really bad incentive for all parties involved.

What if they made it so that a single search per month was fine too? You’d be back complaining that it’d be $5 if you only made 2 searches that month.

It’s really hard to set a cut-off here.

On the one hand yes but on the other hand this would also kind of set wrong incentives: to use Kagi search less because you’d need to pay more.
That’s not an incentive they or you would want.

I think what I’d like is how my mobile carrier handles their data limits: It’s not an entirely fair comparison because in that case, contrary to Kagi, there is no real cost associated with my degree of usage of the service, making them entirely arbitrary and unnecessary but besides that the unused data rolls over to the next month and that’s something Kagi could mirror.

I hover around 600-1000 searches per month but sometimes exceed 1000. If I could pay for 1000/month and accumulate a little buffer in the months where I search less, that would work for me. Though perhaps I’d still want to just simply pay for unlimited usage for peace of mind.

This sounds like FUD. Do you have a source for that?

As a paying member, I know that they started charging (and presumably transferring) VAT last year.

Before that, they claimed they were simply too insignificant to even be eligible for VAT.
I looked it up and there appears to be an exception for such cases where VAT is charged in the company’s jurisdiction rather that the customer’s (it’s usually the other way around) until you reach 10000€ annual turnover. Information on this is extremely intransparent however, so this might be wrong.

They do. The $10/month search plan is unlimited.

The only LLM stuff in their search product is the quick answers which can be turned off and page summaries which you have to explicitly click on in a submenu in any case.

As someone aware of how limited LLMs are, I’ve actually found both of these features to be useful for gauging whether a site is worth visiting or not at times which is part of the core feature set of a search engine IMHO.

A good while back they claimed that Google search index fees make up the vast majority of their costs, so I doubt any of your money is going towards LLM BS unless you actually pay for their assistant product.
I doubt Google has given them any discounts since then.

I’d expect the development of all of their product to be mostly funded by VC. If they can get VC idiots who fell for the “”“AI”“” hype to subsidise building an actually useful thing (the search product), that’s a win in my book, even if they also have to build the AI crap on the side to keep said VC idiots happy.

Even with root it’s not anywhere near trivial.

You can’t, for instance, make a backup of the userdata partition block device and expect to be able to restore it because it must be decrypted by a key in the phone’s security module that gets wiped when you boot a new ROM.