I’m a big fan of Kubernetes, and for larger projects the flexibility and power it brings is unrivalled. But for smaller projects, assuming equal levels of competence, delivery teams using managed Kubernetes are almost universally later and have more issues than teams that use simpler solutions. Container-as-a-service solutions like GCP CloudRun or AWS FarGate help somewhat, but are not cheap for a given amount of compute time.

Terraform (or IaC in general) absolutely has a place, because even if you use Kubernetes, most projects have more infrastructure to manage than just the cluster - at the very least, lemmy.world has a CloudFlare proxy to manage - and clicking buttons in a management portal is not a repeatable way of deploying that, or deploying the Kubernetes clusters themselves.

Ansible also has a place, particularly if you’re deploying onto bare metal. I wouldn’t use it for new deployments unless I had bare metal to configure and maintain, but lemmy.world is deployed onto a bare metal server as I understand it. Plus, the most effective tooling is generally the one your team understands.

Apple users have been sending text messages interchangeably between their phones and computers/tablets for years.

As have Android users. Microsoft Phone Link/My Phone Companion and KDE Connect have supported this for years on their relevant PC platforms. The Phone Link Android app is even preinstalled on Samsung devices. There’s a teensy bit of setup but nothing complicated. KDE Connect even supports stuff like using the phone as a touchpad, remote keyboard, or media/presentation controller.

If your PC is a Chromebook then you don’t even need these. If you sign into the phone and Chromebook with the same Google account, the integration just works, much as it does on Apple devices.

Most of your arguments can be boiled down to “everything is really slick if you use an all-Apple ecosystem”. Which is fine, but the same can be said about Android - if you use an all-Google ecosystem with Pixels, Chromebooks and Google Workspace then most, if not all of your complaints about Android go away. Pixel Android is more consistent and less buggy than most vendor versions of Android. Integration with Chromebooks works out of the box. Google Workspace MDM is simple and straightforward, and you don’t really need to buy a separate MDM solution.

The difference is that Android at least makes a decent effort to cater for a heterogeneous ecosystem. With Apple, if you’re not entirely onboard with an all-Apple ecosystem then it starts getting messy quickly.

Nvidia drivers have (slightly) more timely support for the latest cards, and more mature support for non-3D uses of the GPU, especially scientific computing. To a large extent they are the same code as the Windows drivers, and that has positives in terms of breadth and maturity of support.

For everything else, the AMD drivers are better. Because they are a separate codebase from the Windows drivers, and are part of the de-facto Linux GPU driver stack Mesa, they integrate much better into the overall Linux experience, especially around support for Wayland. Unless you have an absolutely bleeding-edge card, they “just work” more often than the Nvidia drivers. If you like doing serious tinkering on your Linux system, then the AMD drivers being fully integrated and having the source available is a major win. Also, it used to be that the Nvidia drivers did a much better job of squeezing performance out of the hardware, but today there’s very little in it, and the AMD drivers might even be a little more efficient.

I’ve got both AMD and Nvidia GPUs currently in different machines, and I much prefer the Linux experience with AMD. I don’t think I’ll be buying another Nvidia GPU unless the driver situation changes significantly.

FWIW I don’t stream so I can’t comment on the exact situation, but I have used the video encode hardware on AMD cards via VAAPI and it was competent and much faster than x264/x265 on the CPU. I think OBS has a plugin to use VAAPI (which is the “standard” Linux video decode/encode acceleration interface that everyone but Nvidia supports).