Installed Pop!_OS from Windows 11 two weeks ago myself.

I looked at kagi but I don’t want to pay for it because I’m a cheap bastard.

I use perplexity.ai more than google now. I still don’t love it and it’s more of a testament to how far google has fallen than the usefulness of AI, but I do find myself using it to get a start on basic searches. It is, dare I say, good at calorie counting and language learning things. Helps calculate calorie to gram ratios and the math is usually correct. It also helps me with German, since it’s good at finding patterns and how German people typically say what I am trying to say, instead of just running it through a translator which may or not have the correct context.

I do miss the days where I could ask AI to talk like Obama while he’s taking a shit during an earthquake. ChatGPT would let you go off the rails when it first came out. That was a lot of fun and I laughed pretty hard at the stupid scenarios I could come up with. I’m probably the reason the guardrails got added.

archive.is or archive.ph is what I use for getting past paywalls. If it’s a hard membership paywall there won’t be much you can do about it. If it’s just a splash screen, they work by removing the annoying stuff that prevents you from going further since they have to package the content for SEO. The archive sites basically grab that content as if they were going to index it for a search engine, but then they present it in human readable format instead.