Three side remarks about China, which can be a peculiar example to compare to for Russia, maybe even any other country:

• They actually banned consoles for a quite significant 15 years (2000–2015), which strongly tilted their market towards PC.
• Their companies actively make PC-type gaming handhelds, and many of them are even well-established in the business ahead the current “Steam Deck” wave/bandwagon: GPD (once called GamePad Digital, first release in 2016), OneXPlayer (2020), Ayaneo (2021).
• Chinese gaming companies are quite at the whim of the censorship, and occasional “crackdowns” out of the blue, and many have therefore reoriented themselves for an international audience to de-risk their business.

GIMP is a special case. GIMP is being getting outdeveloped by Krita these days. E.g.:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/9284

Or compare with:

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Krita-2024-GPUs-AI

GIMP had its share of self inflicted wounds starting with a toxic mailing list that drove away people from professional VFX and surrounding FilmGimp/CinePaint. When the GIMP people subsequently took over the GEGL development from Rhythm & Hues, it took literally 15 years until it barely worked.

Now we are past the era of simple GPU processing into diffusion models/“generative AI” and GIMP is barely keeping up with simple GPU processing (like resizing, see above).

Have people actually checked the versions there before making the suggestion?

F-Droid: Version 3.5.4 (13050408) suggested Added on Feb 23, 2023
Google Play: Updated on Aug 27, 2023

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.videolan.vlc/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.vlc

The problem seems to be squarely with VLC themselves.

https://fosstodon.org/@jimsalter/110441094176772187

AMD’s support for AI is just fine

This is quite untrue, especially if you do actual research and not just run other people’s models. For example, ROCm is missing in many sparse autograd frameworks, e.g. pytorch_sparse, or having a viable alternative to Nvidias MinkowskiEngine. This is needed if you do any state-of-the-art convnets with attention-like sparsity.

Yes. But one should also note that only a limited range of Intel GPU support SR-IOV.

And a decade ago, Google itself sabotaged XMPP in their version of embrace, extend, and extinguish: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/google-abandons-open-standards-instant-messaging

You know, there are several built-in functions in phones, that are already viable methods to communicate remotely?