I don’t trust Microsoft’s motivations, but these are all important considerations you bring up.

The lowest step of pushiness is a tray icon. Cinnamon did(does?) it like this. You have an exclamation point in the tray if you have updates available, otherwise it’s a green check mark on a shield. I thought this was an elegantly simple and effective solution though, as you point out, easy to ignore.

On the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft have gone to the extreme: you will upgrade, you have limited options to defer, you will backup to our cloud. Updates show up and you get to be surprised every upgrade cycle when something that was formerly working is broken.

I will always opt for freedom for myself and others, but I imagine a middle ground that holds the hands of non-technical users would look something like the warning when you access about:config in Firefox. “Here be dragons!”

Ultimately, on a normie-focused OS it may even be useful to provide the user with information about backups and let them choose. "Having a backup reduces your likelihood of losing your cat memes by %. By confirming below you acknowledge that cloud backup will not be set up. To avoid data loss, please follow the 3-2-1 backup methodology (link).

Confirm (y/N)

Yeah, hopefully Patron doesn’t roll over and just removes the option to do it in iPhone. Taking away functionality will make Apple look bad, which they deserve.

Seriously, they were the poster-child of a “good” phone manufacturer. Like the “don’t be evil” version of Google, there was a time when I was comfortable recommending them. Not any more. Let’s hope they find their way.

Sad. Having used the OPX, OP6T, OP9, and briefly the OP10, I can honestly say their hardware is usually pretty good. I went to Graphene on a Pixel for the software. Software was always Oneplus’ weak point so it’s extra silly that they’re doing this. So many hobbyists have bought OP hardware and used it with software of their choice. They started co-developing their Oxygen OS with Oppo a while back and that’s when it really went to hell.

Whoah! Having recently tried the launcher, I could see how that would pair really well with a physical keyboard in that you can get to any app with ~2 clicks by typing it’s first letter and tapping the screen, or even without looking at the screen by typing the whole name and hitting enter.

I never had a phone with a physical qwerty keypad, I went straight from a T-9 and Palm Graffiti (the best input method for a decade!) to full touchscreens. Having said that, this looks interesting and I do think they found a market niche. I’d be interested to mess with it for a couple of days to see how the form factor would work for me.

The screenshot looks like Niagara Launcher.

Yep, my last employer kept telling us about how we could access email on our phones and I kept asking why I would ever want that and telling them to send me a phone. I had a work laptop at home already.

Yeehaw! Sounds like you are set for a while. If you get replaced by AI, you could sell 32 gigs and live off that for a couple of years while still being able to run a zillion tabs at once!

I feel similarly. I pretty much maxed the RAM on my DDR5 gaming/daily driving desktop before this. I wish I had also maxed the RAM on my DDR4 server, though I did acquire significant storage space and a new SSD while it was more affordable. If we see a reasonable dip in storage prices or RAM, I’m buying spare drives in the sizes I use so I can be a bit more insulated from market swings and will have spares on-site immediately if needed.

It can be hard to convince partners and family, so congrats on the success. My partner worked in IT support but is not a computer person and does not own a PC. I simply provide a family Linux computer and some hosted services to be used by anyone in the family, usually EndeavorOS with KDE. They are aware of world happenings to understand why it is important and the biggest complaint I received was that I need to apply more scaling because the text is too small. :D

With all that said, I think both our situations are anomalous, though becoming more common.

Or they’ll bundle it directly with the compute they want to sell you so that you dont even have the option of using your own PC and all devices on the network are 100% validated and controlled by them.

I remember a time when Skype already existed and we would still pay for long distance phone minutes to call our German relatives because they hadn’t updated their internet since the Kaiser was in charge. :-P In the last few years, their speeds are much more comparable to ours.

Yup, I think an ice dispenser and a fancy-schmancy high speed water tap is justifiable for most people, but I can’t think of a realistic use case for a screen that outweighs the many negatives.

When I last bought an XPS 13, there was an option for Ubuntu. I agree that many people will choose a Macbook, but the XPS line has been decent. Perhaps someday they will discover the third OS option.

To top that off, you can dip your toes in by running a live image off a USB thumb drive to check if your hardware is recognized and supported out of the box. I have used Linux for 10-15 years, but never for gaming. This year I made the final jump, the one thing I had kept windows for. I don’t play competitive games with anticheat, and everything is running great. I anticipated more bullshit, because 15 years ago, Linux was not so polished. At this point I’m fine with running Linux on elderly folks PCs. It’s finally “good enough” to do just about everything and legitimately excels at most things.

I guess that’s one way to outdo Internet Explorer.

My city still owns the utilities and the council doubles as the utility board. They’ve been trying to privatize it, but it’s very contentious. Rightly so.

Yup, I’m fine with it being done by a public org in the pursuit of science and furtherment of humanity.

They’ll staff the space factories with felony convicts, kidnapped non-citizens, and orphans who don’t have a place to stay. In addition to your proposed union I would like to see a “made with space-prison labor” disclaimer on these productsm

I can’t bring myself to throw anything out anymore. Someday, when all my working PCs have worn out, a $200 bottom of the barrel 32bit netbook could be the last thing standing between me and having to rent compute from some shitty tech company who doesn’t respect my first amendment rights, hides any advanced configuration from the end user, and has an AI constantly rewriting my files to remove any objectionable language, like YouTube or Facebook, but in my home. I’ll hack my toaster to run Linux before I let that happen.

Currently running a ~10 y/o Dell-XPS laptop that still runs absolutely great.