Overlap with desktop Linux means support for that is support for these mobile Linux distros, and desktop Linux gets support from a range of people and companies, not just Google.

Maybe? Depends on what costs dominate operations. I imagine Chinese electricity is cheap but building new data centres is likely much cheaper % wise than countries like the US.

That’s becoming less true. The cost of inference has been rising with bigger models, and even more so with “reasoning models”.

Regardless, at the scale of 100M users, big one-off costs start looking small.

From what I’ve heard at work and from others, MS uses version queries to stall tickets because they constantly release updates that they can point to and say “you need to update before we can help”.

I think it might be confusion between inspecting plaintext metadata like SNI vs actually inspecting encrypted contents (e.g. HTTPS content, headers, etc.).