It does still have some issues, but it is being heavily worked on and has been for 12-18 months at this point. Has taken huge strides, and if you’re in the beta channel you’ll see lots of work being done.

There is, check out the Music Assistant add-on for Home Assistant.

I think it’s pretty hard to make that sort of call from a single photograph, of pre-release hardware. You’ve used the literal cheapest common denominator of keyboards that look like this, something you could probably get on aliexpress for a dollar that’s been rebranded. Besides that, I’m talking about using either one of two open microcontrollers that would make the device and it’s firmware hackable, which is still much cooler than what you probably got from Amazon.

I wonder if that keyboard is via a wired interface only. Because something like that would be perfect for a Pico W or ESP32 so that it works detatched. I think this would be great on a desk with a kickstand and the keyboard detatched. There might even be some pins leftover for a “wireless” GPIO header on the keyboard, which would be really cool if you were using the included VESA mount for the tablet

There’s actually a European open source initiative that funds them. However, the program is being sunsetted :(

The dev of this developed Caddy? Hmm… at least there’s talent behind it. I’m a little worried about creating that sort of record, but this guy seems earnest in wanting to liberate personal data.

It’s easy in Aurora Droid at least, there’s an “Other Versions” tab on the app page.

Welp, egg on my face because it in fact, did crash.

Edit: Okay so I installed a much older version from the f-droid archive, 3.1.7.17 (random choice) and got it to show me the list of apps. Clearly some sort of regression happened. If I had the time, I’d figure out the exact version.

Edit 2: Which is the only way I can install play store apps. Play Store through microg crashes when I try to look at an app.

Alright, so apparently I’m about to get loved? Aurora just worked for me, but I installed Waydroid under Bazzite using one of the included just-scripts. So I went and figured out how it does it. To “configure”, which is the second step in setting up (on Bazzite) it calls this set of scripts: https://github.com/casualsnek/waydroid_script

The microg installation handles Aurora. In case you want it here’s the just script, tho it’s obviously tailored to bazzite: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/d5097a5e971c46912188a9004b2289cff3798221/system_files/desktop/shared/usr/share/ublue-os/just/82-bazzite-waydroid.just

the subway showing up without the rest is beta software compared to other choices. It might route you three tomes as far all because it doesn’t know buses exist.

If it’s not ready for use, it either shouldn’t show up by default, or it should have a visible disclaimer. Otherwise it could be dangerous…

That’s fine, your definition just doesn’t seem to be the norm. I think as things have changed over time, and it’s possible and easy to do it all on the device, that the definition has shifted. To me it means installing applications from outside of official channels.

I installed it under Waydroid recently and it included it by default. Maybe it’s a newer thing? Or dependent on which image you choose?

Installing an APK directly is sideloading. It’s literally on the “Get F-Droid” page:

To side-load our app store you may simply have to download the official F-Droid APK and install it.

It’s kind of weird to give that instead of just a general PT option that routes multi-modally with a menu to disable each type manually.

The only way to get it outside of sideloading is flashing a custom ROM like LineageOS that includes it. It’s not exactly available in the play store.

The OS can’t get to the point of loading cpu microcode without that outdated, embedded microcode. The reason it can persist is because there aren’t a lot of good ways to see what that UEFI microcode actually is once it’s installed. Plus, only the UEFI tells you that it has successfully updated itself. There is no other more authoritative system to verify that against. So the virus could just lie and say it’s gone and you would never know. Hence needing to treat it as the worst case scenario, that it never leaves.

Hey, that’s really fair, thanks for being honest :)

Except that doesn’t at all explain the wider recall of 100 million units. Not every single one of those airbags were faulty. First of all, how could we know? Testing an airbag is a potentially dangerous thing to do, let alone on an enormous scale that would require under-qualified persons to run the tests. Secondly, it’s not a 100% failure rate. If it were, it would have been picked up far sooner than it would take to sell 100 million units. If it happened just as severely no matter the unit’s age, it would have been picked up during crash-testing. What actually happened was an analysis of statistical averages that showed a far higher rate of failure than there should have been.

The similarities to me come from a comparison to Schrödinger’s cat. In the airbag example, you don’t know if the unit in front of you is going yo fail until you “open the box” by crashing. With the AMD vulnerability, you don’t know if ur motherboard has been infected by any virus/worm/etc until a “crash” or other signs of suspicious behaviour.

In both cases, the solution to the vulnerability removes that uncertainty, allowing you to use the product to it’s original full extent.

Look at it this way, imagine if this vulnerability existed in the ECU/BCU of a self-driving capable car. At any point someone could bury a piece of code so deeply you can’t ever be sure it’s gone. Would you want to drive that car?

Sorry, I reread it and I understand now that you were referencing the AMD chip in a comparison. I guess I still would compare it most to the Takata airbag situation. You’re right that nothing happens on it’s own, but once you’ve “crashed the car” then it kind of is a lot like an airbag not going off. It infects your computer on a hardware level, and any future OS running off that motherboard is potentially vulnerable in a way that’s impossible to tell.