Tekdeb

Yes, I think that’s a pretty accurate way to describe it.

Yes, their only point is that it looks better “in their minds”, as you say. This feature in particular isn’t meant to improve performance.

Personally I think the more subtle application of it can look pretty good, but it seems hard to control and does more harm than good. And that is even ignoring the massive performance impact that almost guarantees it to be unusable. Nvidia published some performance numbers that looked impressive, but that was using pretty agressive upscaling and 6X frame gen which is stupid because for frame gen to be decent you need a high base frame rate, which they didn’t get on anything other than the 5090 and arguably the 5080, or by pairing the GPU with a lower resolution that doesn’t really make sense for them (like you wouldn’t normally buy a 5070Ti for 1080p).

Not if you follow the normal safety precautions for using the AUR. There are several things you can do to look for red flags, but the most essential thing is to read the PKGBUILDs. And helpers like yay, paru and Shelly can all show diffs which makes that much easier after the initial installation because in most cases you’ll just see that the version and checksum has changed which means it’s as trustworthy as last time.

This has always been the case, and will continue to be the case unless the Arch team restricts the AUR which quickly can make it lose exactly what makes it so good.

While I believe most of their results originate from Bing, according to their Wikipedia page they have used over 400 sources including Bing, Yahoo, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler. And even if 100% of their results were from Bing, saying it’s “just bing search” is very misleading.