That push and pull is exactly why they’ve been intentionally using them to rot people’s brains. The dumber and more apathetic you can make your users, the more you can monetize them, you first minimize the push so you can maximize the pull. This is not an accidental “quirk” of modern algorithms, it’s part of the design. Money must be maximized at all costs, including the mental health of the users and the stability of society. Money uber alles. The techbros will drive our society into the ground without a second thought if it makes them a few bucks richer. They’re not planning to stay here anyway. We are just a resource to them, and they will exploit us to the fullest to pursue their unachievable techno-utopia fantasies.

I don’t agree with your premise that the performance and functionality is so far below every competitor. That is not my experience. What are you basing your claim on?

They are well made machines with high quality components and are in most cases perfectly capable of going as fast as the plastic allows. And if they don’t, a few minor upgrades to the hardware will get them flying as they’re typically mostly going to be hotend-limited. Are you competing the actual realistic maximum acceptable performance of comparable machines that have been independently tested by an experienced reviewer, or are you comparing numbers someone copied from marketing? Because these are not the same thing and only one of them actually reflects reality.

As far as functionality, the only feature I see wanting in Prusa’s lineup is IDEX, which I prefer over toolswitchers for making large numbers of small parts. I keep hoping their next model will be a spiffy little IDEX model, but no luck so far.

Prusa is tuned for reliability and consistency. They occupy a weird and illogical niche, for people who don’t want to have to tinker with their machines AT ALL but want to have the ability to. I personally fit in this niche, and I love my Prusa, but they really don’t make a ton of sense for most people I think, and there are probably better choices if you don’t fall into this niche.

It might actually be. Linux gaming has come an awful long way thanks to Wine, Steam, Proton, Wayland, etc. Driver support is improving with or without the manufacturer’s help. OpenGL’s constant playing catch-up with DirectX has given way to the limitless potential of Vulkan. The web has moved almost entirely to properly open standards like WebExtensions and Canvas, and has become powerful enough that many well-known apps are literally just Electron wrappers around a HTML/Javascript core that can run on any plaform. Likewise Mono has implemented almost all of .NET and even Microsoft’s own “.NET core” cross-platform (mostly so it can run on containers and cloud more effectively, not to help Linux specifically, but we’ll take it) All these buzzword technologies add up to a seriously strong open source gaming ecosystem, and distros like SteamOS, Bazzite, and others are finally starting to put all these pieces together and polish them into something seriously usable as a daily driver and for gaming.

And once you’ve got the gamers and enthusiasts, you’re on the cutting edge, you’ve got the tip of the spear, and the rest of the spear tends to follow where they lead. Is it happening? Too early to tell, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility. The “Year of the Linux desktop” has always been a joke, but some people weren’t joking and have been seriously working on it. That work appears to be starting to really pay off. Combined with Microsoft’s various Windows 11 missteps continuing to fuel the fire, a lot of people are increasingly receptive to alternatives.

We can helpfully answer that for them by making sure they get sued.

Florida is basically the unofficial US Capitol now, so it would be confusing and ambiguous to have it associated with the traditional forms of unexpected insanity. Now it’s going to be an entirely new kind of unexpected insanity, so Ohio has been selected to represent the old kind of unexpected insanity that Florida used to represent.