In many contexts "already tried" does not apply under "this and this conditions" though.

You can try the same thing under different contexts and it will probably yield different results (at least in any context that is organizational / social)

how much is there to improve and polish for a taskbar? at most it will be keeping up with macOS throwing breaking changes at you and maybe one or the other weird bug.

but isn't that it?

The EU is a horribly intransparent and dubiously democratic institution.

As a normal citizen you have no real possibility to hold MEPs accountable other then writing an angry E-Mail.

In an actually democratic system politicians would be in their position only by mercy of the people and can be voted down from their position anytime if enough people petition for it. (and not just maybe be called back when elections at home plummet)

Politicians should be afraid of the people and not the other way round.

Afraid of what exactly? Someone starting a Change.org petition that gets a few random signatures and is quickly forgotten? Losing a couple of votes? The consequences are almost nonexistent, so there's nothing to be afraid of.

Same thing in Austria, everyone in mainstream politics basically ignores the topic and when pressured parrot something like "Israel has the right to defend itself" or "It is very complicated"

Repression against students and demonstrators is happening regularly

People in the town square only see my face, they do not automatically have my name, birth date and ID available unless I give it to them or they go to lengths obtaining those (il)legally.

The smart glasses industry is working hard to change that.

Reminds me of how cold fusion reactors are only 5 years away for decades now

Cold fusion reactors haven't produced usable intermediate results. LLMs have.

LLMs produce slop far to often to say they are in any way better than cold fusion in terms of usable results. "AI" kind of is the cold fusion of tech. We've always been 5 or 10 years away from "AGI" and likely always will be.

That's just nonsense. That they produce slop does not negate that I and many others get plenty of value out of them in their current form, while we get zero value out of fusion so far - cold or otherwise.

One's legitimate tool is the other's slop machine

I made my account on a server that a personal friend span up. Said friend deleted it on a whim after a few months after not using it much, not really aware of the implications. Personal connection was not the issue here, ownership of my digital identity was.

Besides, people sometimes have fallings-out.

I hope the people doing the blowback also blowback against flying US flags, a country that is famously responsible for so, so many deaths.

You think flying the US flag INSIDE the US will have blowback?

Second that, even though it seems that there is nothing happening yet, many companies and government agencies in all of Europe are aware of their hard Microsoft dependency and are looking / coordinating to leave.

Same with Atlassian Confluence / Jira.

(Source: Working in a state owend company in a EU member country)

Everyone in the American IT world has been trying to leave Microsoft and Google for decades. In that case, the problem isn't IT push, it's that users refuse to learn new software. I can guess it's the same in Europe.

It's maybe harder in Europe, because you also have fragmentation. For example, Californians are fine using software from New York. Same, same. But Germany prefers to use German software, so far. This makes it even harder, I would guess, for EU developers to establish a thriving standard.