Sad spyware and adware noises

Is that not what KDE Discover and Gnome Software Center do? Or is this a new one for Gnome?

<insert diety here> was definitely looking out for us. I’ll celebrate this weekend at <insert place of worship here> and with a month-long <insert label for religious adherence to diet, clothing, and activities>

They put some under-the-hood improvements in 10 that they didn’t put in 7, such as a new display driver model and Directx 12.

But that does not make a difference to most people. Industry desupporting of Windows 7 is the biggest con to it.

Eventually, 10 will share 7’s fate. So you’ll have both 10’s regressions and 11’s and so forth to live with as long as you’re on Windows. You can’t stop Microsoft from desupporting and killing their software in the long run.

Microsoft has a multi-decade history of enshitification when they do not perceive any major threats. Internet Explorer, DirectX, Windows Server, etc. all rotted. Some of these are still active and supported, yes, but they all peaked years ago and are aging poorly. Microsoft doesn’t really do the labor of love thing much when customers are bagged.

Linux may be able to dethrone them to an extent if it can reach an ease of access/UX that most people are comfy with. And it has made huge strides over the years. It can also run most Windows software very well.

Mac is still priced very high and still feature-limited and a 2nd/3rd-class citizen when it comes to platform targeting. Offering lower priced conputers would make them a pretty big threat I think.

I think ChromeOS is a decent threat to Windows but it loses tons of features vs all the other options. At least it is really cheap and easy to use.

I’ve had a lot of experience with Linux and I use Nobara currently. My only catch with Bazzite is that I didn’t know the first thing to do. It somehow felt as if most of my experience in Linux was just useless.

Not saying it’s a bad thing, I just decided I’d stick to Nobara for now and try learning Bazzite in the future to give it a fair shake.

I’m also a tweaker. I like to play with ZRam and add other things to the OS, like a custom kernel with BCacheFS-Git to support my gaming darastores. I suspect some of my creature comforts may be harder to get.

I’m not saying it’s wrong if Fabián Basabe ®, (allegedly better known as the ‘funnel-cake’, and ‘sea-men fairy’ to his alleged, countless, male romantic partners) likes to save dinner till after sex. That’s between him and the many men in his life to decide.

And who are we to judge if he prefers body-building men who can carry him to bed and who can appreciate his wispy pillow-talk.

I’m happy he gets to have these things in his life

TVs have a history of listening and collecting a lot more data than a smart device.

With a TV device like an android or Linux box, you can prevent that as well as ad-injection because you can install whatever you want on the device and it’s not as locked down as a TV. You can even disable or physically remove recording devices if you’d like, and many smart boxes do not even come with them.

Also, a pihole does not guarantee you filtered out everything or prevented the TV from interfering with your experience.

A TV can also change its policy on the fly and suddenly start injecting ads. Many TVs do this to add additional income after your purchase.

What do you mean Albuquerque has fewer people than NYC? One time I was at this cafe in Albuquerque and it was packed!

I had to look up that hand gesture because I’d never heard of it, and finding out what is pissed me off. Are they fucking serious? The O-K hand gesture??

It’s so evil and rotten to try to corrupt such a common, useful, and benign hand gesture and to try to turn that into a symbol of hate. Absolutely enraging

If Rittenhouse hadn’t even murdered or physically harmed anyone, I’d still say he’s worth society’s most energetic condemnation on his views alone.

Do we have good malware scanners and anti malware for Linux these days? Forgive my ignorance.

I don’t think I have this on the latest 6.8 RC. I have one of the RDNA 3 dedicated cards as well. Hope they get it resolved either way.

If helps in the meantime, I think you can often TTY switch in order to restart the display signal. Ctrl + Alt + F3/F4 should get you a new console. Then switch back to your desktop with Ctrl + Alt + F1/F2 (the right one may depend on your distro).

This gets my display fixed when it gets any kind of funky 99% of the time. Sometimes it takes a few tries

Yeah, I do. I had that particular counterfactual in mind when I wrote. It’s not like we don’t get bad outcomes with representative democracy as well. The stances on reproductive care, marriage equality, and policies on marijuana have traditionally been either contrary to majority view or else hit back and forth as a spotlight issue.

One should not have to say bundle positions on Israel, abortion, guns, and drugs. Voting for the president like getting cable vs satellite. And the electoral college definitely worsens that, and probably the supreme court as well.

Not saying referendums are perfect. Just saying we in the US aren’t giving a thoughtful referendums process enough of a chance in my view, and the two-party process is such that one party going off the rails causes the other party to be a forced choice.

As a disclaimer, I’m a progressive liberal and I like Biden, and I think Trump is atrocious and fascist and his inner circle are appalling for continuing to support him.

Yeah, if we had a good process to hold referendums on certain important contentious issues, that would seemingly alleviate some of the problems with the two-party system. And drop the electoral college process entirely

I felt like clarifying that the updates issues I faced were the last straw and that if anyone was interested, I listed the other reasons I quit working with them and never looked back. That’s why I wrote all that at the bottom.

Even if Microsoft does some things right, they still have a history of doing things wrong and have a bevy of other dark patterns. I do not trust them to get it right anymore. They could go back to their old ways tomorrow and I wouldn’t be surprised. Thankfully, it’s not my problem except at work

The updates quietly happening in the background are still a problem because they can’t be paused or canceled and they use a lot of sysrme resources to get done. And when they’re complete, your experience is less stable till the reboot.

I usually notice them when my work computer slows down and things start having more bugs than usual. My work computer has very respectable specs

I haven’t used Windows 11 interestingly, so I don’t know if they’ve changed their update habits, and I wouldn’t be surprised either way. Windows 10 is the last edition I’ve used. Since Windows 8, I had plenty of issues with Windows and Microsoft, and it got worse every release. I’ll bullet-form my personal complaints at the bottom of this page.

My final straw for Windows 10 in my personal life was a forced restart, and I had all my update settings where I wanted them, and still, I lost a really important session to that reboot. Since I was pretty comfy with Linux, I went that direction. Since then, Linux has gotten more user-friendly and plays videogames, way more than Mac. It’s still not something I recommend to most people, but probably someday, it’ll get to a Mac or Windows ease of use.

At work, most of us haven’t been migrated to Windows 11 from Windows 10, and I still get updates installing in the background a lot, causing issues even on our Windows servers. I’m sure our ops team can tune these abhorrent update defaults, but it’s just a frustrating experience nonetheless.

I think a prompt or reminder could go really far to let the user configure that during setup.

Here are some of my complaints over time:

• Force installs and bloat. Inclusion of bloat by default. Reinstallation of bloat on updates.
• Resetting of my settings and registry edits regularly.
• Ads on the desktop
• Needless nagging to use their other bullshit like Onedrive. You think it’s good? Great! Let me uninstall it and use the cloud providers of my choice.
• Forcing an inferior start menu without a choice to use alternatives or the old ones.
• Windows tracks insane amounts of users’ data and actrivities, and I do not trust them to admit to all the tracking they do but the tracking they admit to doing is already mind-boggling.
• Windows 10’s forced upgrade and Windows 10 popup scandals were completely dishonest and disgusting, and I have not heard enough apologies for what they did. This personally affected me and broke a bunch of crap before Windows 10 was even well-baked.
• A history of forced updates. A history of forced reboots. A history of lost work. This is me and my family. It sounds like Windows has reverted some of their worst practices, but the precedent is set, and I’ll never trust Microsoft to stick to it.
• The Windows seeker’s scandal personally affected me. They put all sorts of beta garbage on my computer without telling me. This caused a loss of files. They’ve made a resurgence on their unethical behaviors in the browser space. I have faith they’ll continue to revisit their other old habits. Look up Embrace-Extend-Extinguish and it’ll get you started. IE was their old baby. Edge is the new one.
• Buying and killing small companies and studios, such as Rare, a bit like EA had done
• Moving away from some of the nice things earlier Windows versions did, like a start menu with a neat list of organized and searchable programs.
• Having just 1 UI experience that isn’t super customizable and breaking 3rd party UIs.
• Fullscreen popups and nonsense over nothing
• Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior has been a factor most of my life. They still push the boundaries of anti-competitive behavior to the Nth’s degree. Again, that reading on Embrace-Extend-Extinguish will give you a taste of their BS.
• Having fewer features and techs than Linux that I like to use, such as specialty filesystems, IO schedulers, process schedulers, swapping systems (ZRAM/ZSWAP) etc. Being stuck on NTFS (are you kidding me?) REFS is too little too late and you can’t even boot off it
• Way worse IO/Disk performance and features
• inferior memory management

Overall, I don’t want to do business or help in the success in an organization I do not like by offering up my data, watching their ads, and using their products less than necessary. I like some of the things Bill Gates has done, but it doesn’t change any of my views on this.

Yeah, the security in knowing that if you’re way top busy right now, you don’t have to install or even download any updates. And you don’t have to worry your system will suddenly become crashy, glitchy, and unstable because it decided on its own to install some things and let you know you can reboot whenever.

It’s so freaking annoying I have to use Windows at work. It takes liberty to do what it wants and then my workflow gets hosed.

I get that there is security, but if you force updates, I should have some kind of notice or “hey, we need to install mandatory updates. You can schedule in the next 24 hours when or you can get them over with”

The page you linked shows an annual plan of 100$ for 2 TB which means 8.33 per month.

He allegedly does not drink and is allegedly quite the connoisseur of stimulants. Look up “Noel Casler on Donald Trump” for the details of the latter allegation.

From what I understand, they’re divesting resources that aren’t in Firefox or at least involved in a trustworthy/open source AI project.

I see a lot of people in this theead are upset at this, but I’m tentatively excited. If they can pull off a good AI engine, especially built into the browser, that would be nice. If it had offline capabilities, that would be amazing.

Even if they can pull off a good AI solution that’s not built into Firefox but it’s offline, I’d be really excited. I’m not crazy about having especially detailed and intimate information being thrown to some vendor out there, not knowing where it’s going. Modern AI can do some amazing things, but a lot of them reserve the right to have a human read whatever you put in them and warn you about that. This is too limiting to me for my preferred use-cases.

One concern I have is that Firefox and its engine are one of the last non-chromium browser platforms that have a household name and are FOSS. So to me, that has to be the first goal to keep healthy. Maybe the AI thing will help in this respect