LOL I didn't end up with T-mobile because I wanted to... I was with Sprint, they bought it and obsoleted all Sprint devices within a couple of months... Thus I had to buy from them that phone that refused activation. I had really liked my LG V20, and I still have it and it works, but T-mobile refused to let me use it.

...when your brand new phone refuses to be activated on their network, even though you bought it from them> No activation = no connection = app is useless. Can't call them either because, you know, at that point the phone doesn't work.
And yes, it has happened to me.

I'm happy that my LG monitor, which I also purchased 3 years ago, did not do such a thing. It would have been OK if it ASKED me if I want to download this or that and gave me the option to say yes or no. But install stuff surreptitiously and without my consent? No way. If it did that it would have gone right back to the store, EVEN IF THE STUFF IT DOWNLOADED AUTOMATICALLY WITHOUT CONSENT WAS REQUIRED FOR THE MONITOR TO FUNCTION.

Solaar (GUI app for controlling Logitech mice settings on Linux) weighs in at a hefty 6MB. :)

300MB for a glorified mouse driver, it would be funny if it weren't so sad.

I cannot find that in my settings.
Maybe I should report it to the developers of XFCE as a bug. :)

Just after the Steam machine was announced with specs, and just before hardware prices jumped back in November.
Ryzen 5800X, 32GB, 2TB, RX9600XT (16GB) so above the specs of the OEM machine
It cost me $650 (including some parts that I already had like PSU etc)
It's a nice gaming machine, and a capable desktop PC as well.
It's not a small cube with detachable face plates, but fairly small anyway. I like it.

... is of the kind:
"You should invest a lot of money in OpenAI"
?

Nah. Oxygen++ would turn all of the space computers into Rust. :)

"press F1 to continue"

Arch/XFCE with Steam (flatpak) plays 100% of my 500+ game library (many of which are "Windows-only") without any issues.
Also, many non-Steam games (especially the more modern titles) play without issues using system wine.

A 16" laptop screen located 1.5ft from my eyes (in my lap) appears subjectively approximately 3 times larger than a 59" TV located on the wall, 10ft away.

Why do you think it's normal for one to think they have to open an application that they never intend to use?

You know what's better than OneDrive on Linux? It's called "NAS". A spare, low-power computer with Linux and ZFS, and also OpenSSH. Combined with a cheap domain name (few bucks every couple of years) it allows me to access my files through sftp and rsync from anywhere in the world. And with sftp integration in Thunar, I can access them as if they were on a local drive from any of my machines. No headaches. And all my personal files are located on my own physical hardware.

(oh yeah, works just as well in case I want to access them from a Windows machine which does come up occasionally - only without the file manager integration and I have to use a proper sftp client).

DDR3 was actually extremely cheap about 2-3 years ago. I managed to get 64GB of ECC DDR3 for about $25. Server memory, yes - which is exactly what I needed. Haven't looked at prices lately.