Yeah, noted.
I did go and read the report myself. The blog combines lot of stuff and makes its own narrative, but it's not wildly inaccurate as far as I can see and I can't say it changed my overall level of disappointment.
The strategy letters from the Chair and the President are full of AI mumbo-jumbo and they've expanded the board from six to ten people, taking on four new members who are supposed to be able to guide them towards this new, fantastic AI-filled future. Quite large percentage of the board is now meant to be there for "building better future with AI".
Their income is still largely (81%) tied to one customer and the rest are scraps from VPN and Pocket subscriptions. Basically the whole corp sits well and truly in Google's pocket.
The Foundation President gets $300k year, the Corp CEO gets $600k year, but somehow also qualified for $6.3M bonus totaling $6.9M. That's a nice raise from $5.4M last year. Sure, the CEO compensation packages are globally totally fucked up and I guess it's easy to point to "competitive roles elsewhere" and motivate the need for year on year extra millions, but they have been firing people due to shrinking revenues, so not sure what her performance bonuses are tied to.
As to them abandoning Firefox. That's perhaps a claim taken too far. Gotta do some creative between the lines reading. They say they're building this fantastic, bright AI future on the base of their core products (so Firefox and Thunderbird). I think they'll stick around and I think it makes sense for Google to keep it going in some marginal market-share capacity order to avoid anti-trust watchdogs.
Dell supports pre-installed Ubuntu on the XPS Plus configuration. You can order it with Ubuntu installed out of their webshop. They also have repos for all the drivers.
I've been using XPS 13 as my "daily driver" for about 4-ish years now (I think the 9300 model came out in late 2019? Maybe 2020. I can't remeber tbh). It's been running Debian and I've never really had any problems with it. I didn't order the Developer Model as I wasn't going to run Ubuntu and I don't really need Linux preinstalled (and as added bonus, it comes with Windows OEM license, which you can use in your QEMU).
It has a shit battery time, but so does every Linux laptop. I don't want biometrics on my devices, so I've never used the facescanning or figerprint sensors, no idea if they work, I'd assume they do.
I've connected it to a USB-C hub with dual 1080p screens, webcam, microphone, external USB etc in the office. Works perfectly. I travel quite a lot, it's light and easy carry, I bought a small USB-C travel charger. Trackpad palm detection in Linux is bad, so I normally carry a small travel mouse with me and disable the trackpad if I need to do some writing.
It's got a SD-micro card slot, which is very useful, I can store my disk encryption keys on it and take it with me when I need to leave the laptop in hotel rooms etc.
Never had a problem connecting it to any presentation display at customers. I miss ThinkPad keyboard layout, but it is what it is. Not a dealbreaker.
Overall, it's served me well over these years - and there's not much signs of wear and tear on it. Solid build quality.
It would be nice if the entire world didn't consolidate into two mega corps. Good on CDR for having their own vision.
CP2077 + Phantom Liberty are excellent. I just started a new playthrough. I wish it had released in this shape.
Running FF on Pixel 7. Have only uBlock Origin, no other addons. Runs great, never any problems. Syncs with my desktop.