We don't, but from what I've seen in the past, those sort of forums either require registration or payment to access the data, and/or some special means to download it (eg: bittorrent link, often hidden behind a URL forwarders + captchas so that the uploader can earn some bucks). A simple web crawler wouldn't be able to access such data.
private
If it's on the public facing internet, it's not private.
Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).
Screen magnification is already present in KDE (Meta + +, Meta + - to zoom in/out). There's also a magnifier tool (KMag). There may be similar functionalities in other DEs.
My issue is the lack of an overall GUI automation tool, ie, like AutoHotkey. X11 had PyAutoGUI, but there's no such AIO equivalent for Wayland yet, and the PyAutoGUI devs don't seem to be interested in Wayland support - it's neither on their road map, nor have they even answered any Wayland questions on their Github page, which is disappointing. But this isn't Wayland's fault, when other tools have shown that automating the GUI is possible, we just need someone to put together a complete package like PyAutoGUI / AHK.
That looks promising. Thanks!
So how do you do it? Like, what's the Wayland equivalent of xinit ssh -X user@remote-server startkde to forward an entire desktop session?
improved resume from suspend in ALSA
YES! Hopefully this means no more needing to restart the pipewire service after resume.
Curiosity. I was a curious tweenager, and I was already a bit of a geek at the time. I read about Linux in computer magazines at the time, and decided to give one of the free CDs a try - with RedHat 5.2 on it. To be honest, wasn't really impressed with it. I especially disliked having to recompile the kernel, which took ages on those Pentium 3s. But it got me exploring other operating systems, and I found QNX, BeOS and NetBSD. I was really impressed with with QNX and BeOS in particular - Linux felt quite clunky and amateurish in comparison. I especially liked the multimedia performance of BeOS, and the lightweightedness, polish and desktop responsiveness of QNX, which featured a real-time microkernel. QNX felt lightyears ahead of it's competition at the time. My first run into it was a free 1.44MB demo floppy that the company mailed me directly, complete with a full developer manual (which was completely wasted on me as a tween, but I still appreciated it and tried to comprehend bits and pieces). I was already into making custom bootable floppy disks at the time, so I was extremely impressed that they managed to fit in a full fledged GUI desktop, complete with a browser that supported Javascript (along with network drivers and a modem dialer) - all on a 1.44MB floppy disk! Till date I've no idea how they managed that. Even the tiniest of Linux WMs are massive in comparison and look fugly (twm), but QNX's Photon microGUI somehow managed to make it good looking and functional. Maybe it was all coded in Assembly, I don't know, but it was, and still remains, very impressive nonetheless.
I digress, but all this started getting me into exploring POSIX systems and distro/OS hopping. It was only when I experienced SuSE that I fell in love with Linux. Finally, I had a polished Linux desktop, with a full-featured settings/control panel (YaST) that made it easy to use even for a tween like me. And that's when I switched to Linux as my main-ish OS, with Windows relegated to gaming duties. However, I didn't fully get rid of Windows until Windows 7. I was actually impressed with the Windows 7 beta releases and was prepared to buy it at release, but... I wasn't expecting that price tag. I was hoping I'd get a student discount, but it wasn't applicable where I lived (or there was some catch, I don't remember exactly). In any case, I couldn't afford it, and I was really disappointed and angry at Microsoft that they were charging so much for it here, compared to the US pricing. And so, on the release day of Windows 7, I formatted my drive and switched to Linux full time, and never looked back.
Same model, different device id. It happens.
No, that's a marketing issue. Different device id == different model, technically speaking. Hardware makers won't just alter a device ID for no reason at all.
There are tons more of device IDs out there that don’t work on Linux than those ones that do.
Perhaps, but [citation needed].
No, you can’t just use any random fingerprint reader which totally works on Windows.
First of all, no one is going out and buying random fingerprint readers - these are usually bundled as part of their laptop/desktop - in which case, it's the buyer's responsibility to verify Linux compatibility with that computer as a whole. You can't expect to pop Linux into any random computer, or connect any random peripheral and just expect everything to work automagically. I mean, it does happen, but that's generally with known good Linux hardware. Eg System76s, Frameworks, ThinkPads etc.
Also, even on Windows, a fingerprint reader doesn't normally work out of the box - you'll need to install the drivers for it to get it going (unless of course you're using a Windows build provided out-of-the-box by the system manufacturer). Either way, it's manufacturer's responsibility to create and upload drivers, and it's their responsibility to create a Linux driver. Otherwise it's up to the community to create it, in which case you're back to usual rule-of-thumb where you buy only popular hardware models with known good Linux support.
shows the same model over and over again
That's incorrect - check the hardware IDs, they're different. If it's the same model they'll have the same hardware ID.
Your linked thread is also from three years ago - that's a long time in the Linux world where things change quickly. I could just as easily dig up a thread about x not working on pretty much any topic, so it's not really evidence of anything.
Edit: I just checked the Gitlab releases page for libfprint. Not only have they added more devices (that aren't listed on the page that I linked previously), it also proves that support for many new devices have been added over the last three years. So claiming that nothing has changed in these past three years, is being disingenuous towards the good efforts made by these devs.
FWIW, most ThinkPad fingerprint readers (except a couple of models maybe) work out-of-the-box on Linux. Like the one on my Z13 for instance, I didn't have to do anything to get it going on Fedora.
Also, take a look at the libfprint compatibility list here, there's nearly 200 compatible readers listed, so I wouldn't exactly say the number of readers that work on Linux are "rare".