Huh I didn’t realise that. I’m Australian but have been living in the USA for around 11 years.
Australia’s consumer laws are far stricter than the USA. In Australia, the store is responsible for fitness and quality of a product, based not just on its advertising but also what sales reps in the store say to you.
Obviously you can’t return something nor ask for a repair/replacement if you’re using it for something other than its intended purpose (like using a chainsaw on bricks or whatever), but otherwise, the law is in your favour as a consumer.
Stores must also accept warranty returns and not say that you need to go to the manufacturer. It’s not legal to say “no refunds”.
Products must last at least as long as a reasonable consumer thinks they should last. For example, a fridge would have to be repaired or replaced under warranty if it stops working after 4 years, even if the warranty is only 1 year, as most people would reasonably expect a fridge to last more than 4 years.
It means some stuff costs more, but it’s absolutely worth it for the protection you get.
And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you
I recently encountered one that paused the hold music for around two seconds before the “your call is important to us” message. I hated it because every time it happened, I thought that someone was answering the call!
Changing your own lightbulb was illegal in Victoria Australia until 1998.
Australia is pretty strict about electrical stuff, and only qualified electricians can perform electrical work, including work on any electrical fixtures. Light bulbs were counted as a fixture, until the law was amended in 1998 to specifically exclude light bulbs.
Australia is still a lot stricter than the USA in terms of electrical work you can do to your own house. It’s still illegal to replace a light switch or outlet if you’re not a qualified electrician.
Explicit sync. It’ll fix most of the issues with Wayland on Nvidia CPUs. Wayland landed support for it in April, and Nvidia recently released a beta driver that supports it. I think every graphics driver will implement explicit sync eventually, since it’s a lot better than implicit sync.
My understanding is that the core system is immutable (read-only) and major upgrades essentially just swap out that whole layer. Updates are atomic, meaning the entire thing either succeeds or fails and you can never end up with a broken half-updated system. UI apps all run using Flatpak.