I’ve been slowly pivoting toward Perplexity.AI as the search engine. It basically does what I do, search + find the resources and summarize it but it is automatic with Perplexity.AI.
I rather pay them 20$ because that is saving me time a lot (and time is money in my case). Kagi’s search is okay but I can get nearly the same by using ublocklist on Bing or DDG for my use case.
Many people follow specific channels and only look at content from them, not random bullshit teenager videos that show up in the random/new/trending pages. If you only look at these contents, then yes, you’re going to get those bullshit annoying videos.
It’s the same with Reddit, Lemmy, and others, people follow the specific channels they want and avoid the trending/random/new stuff.
For an example, I follow Digital Foundry channel for their detailed analysis/reviews, The SciShow, Sorted Foods, and so on. I click my subscriptions on youtube and it only shows these high quality content for me. Our family spend hours on these contents. They’re not available anywhere else.
Pop is semi-rolling distro, they don’t need to release “point updates”, they’re not behind Ubuntu at all.
It is not the same 22.04 build from two years ago. It’s using the same Ubuntu 22.04 LTS baseline and updates whatever they can with their own repos overwriting Ubuntu, such as mesa, kernel, and drivers. Every updates released to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS repos is made available to Pop users as well.
I just got an update on Pop for kernel 6.4.6 yesterday. Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS is the most recent update and it only uses 5.19 kernel.
It is not entirely data farming, a lot of this is due to use of heavy assets like fonts, frameworks, images, videos, etc. A lot of that is downloaded as part of loading the site initially and then the browser has to render/compute the site’s use of JavaScript, CSS, etc.
Fonts and some JS assets are cached by the browsers and CDN to try to minimize redownloading it but it doesn’t change the fact that average websites today are much heavier than it was back in 90s.
See how fast this site loads: https://text.npr.org/
Or https://tildes.net/ compared to Reddit.
Your problem is fixed by not using this or any other app in the first place. Just because you’re annoyed doesn’t mean everyone is nor should it prevent apps from existing.
S76 isn’t going to have every option available to appease everyone’s unique asks; a separate app for other folks can pick up the slack. Otherwise Cosmic will turn into KDE with so many options that it becomes difficult to find or use.