SteamOS seems to not be counted at all in the first page. Apparently, it’s not just “All OSs combined” vs “Linux only” but there are additional filters applied. Perhaps the first page is desktop-only. The article either also cares about desktop gaming specifically or is uncritically parroting the survey page. I think both Valve and the article writer should be clearer about what they’re talking about.

This is very obviously false. With the default filters with all OSs shown, Arch has 0.20% marketshare and Linux has a total of 2.29%. That means Arch is about 8.73% of all Linux systems in the survey. If you select the Linux only results, then SteamOS appears as its own entry, alongside a few others like Flatpak. We can see two things here:

• SteamOS Holo is 36.47%. This was very clearly not counted as a part of Arch Linux in the all OSs tab.
• Under these filters, Arch is even higher at 9.7%.

What’s impressive here is not just the confidence with which you called the article dishonest and uninformed while not spending half a minute to check your false assumption, but also how many people upvoted you. This was trivial to prove wrong and in fact people have already done that below. Why are people so eager to believe the article is wrong that they will jump to agree with a blatantly wrong comment while having no knowledge of the situation themselves?

That’s only really feasible for phones they knowingly send to regulators. The phone would have no practical way of knowing that I’m having staged conversations around it and keeping track of the ads I see.

But even if you’re right, that doesn’t change the fact that a lack of objective measurement means all these stories are unreliable.

Thanks for the heads up. I am aware of the spying issues with smartphones (and any way you access the internet really). This is part of the reason why I don’t think proving the unauthorized use of the microphone to spy is really important and why we need systemic solutions to prevent abuse in any case.

All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you.

According to the Signal foundation, the reverse is true. They claim they got banned for revealing that info.

https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see/

There are billions of smartphones out there. Thousands of people getting ads relevant to what they just discussed is normal. And it’s not just about the number of stories. It’s also about how unscientific these reports are as well. If you want to come up with actually useful evidence you would have to test this multiple times to prove it’s not random and you would also have to objectively measure the effect. You need to show a significant increase in the probability of getting a relevant ad, which in turn means you need to know what the baseline probability of getting one is (when the phone has not been allowed to spy on you).

All that being said, I don’t think proving that smartphones spy on us is all that useful. The fact that it can happen very easily is already a problem. Security and privacy are protected when we design systematic solutions that prevent abuse. They are not protected in unregulated systems where we might sometimes prove abuse has happened after the fact. There’s plenty wrong with a modern smartphone regardless of whether it happens to be spying on you right now.

The sooner the screen stops moving the sooner your eyes can lock on, focus and read.

On the other hand, if I’m reading through a command’s output and searching for something, abrupt movement of the contents make me lose track of where I am and it costs more time to reorient myself than the smooth scrolling animation would take to play out. More importantly (to me), it takes less mental effort as well. It’s just a more comfortable experience. Ever since I switched to neovide instead of plain nvim I find myself enjoying long coding sessions much more.

It sounds like you just might not be negatively affected by the abrupt movement as much as some of us are. You might now get why we care about smooth scrolling because it happens to not do anything for you. That’s fine and a good implementation would allow the user to toggle it on/off based on their needs.

Also you could scroll and end up with half a line visible on the top or bottom, which is just kinda weird and wasting space.

No, I imagine that’s not the way most terminal emulators would implement it. Scrolling would still be done in whole lines, it would just animate smoothly towards the final position rather than jump instantly to it. You would not be able to end up on a half-line or something.

Is the bootloader really that important for a lost phone? If someone finds your phone can’t they just tear it apart and read the storage with external tools? A locked bootloader sounds more like an anti-tampering measure and not for protecting your phone’s content after it’s lost.