PrefersAwkward

PrefersAwkward , 11 days ago

I love this animation style so much haha

PrefersAwkward , 1 month ago

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.

PrefersAwkward , 2 months ago

What is a cache file?

PrefersAwkward , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Using swap isn't always a sign you need more RAM. Typically, if you use a computer for a while or have a lot of IO operations going on, Linux will decide to swap some things to make more room for cache.

Sometimes Linux just finds that you have a bunch of inactive app memory and it can swap that out to cache way more stuff. That's just good memory management, but it's not worth buying more RAM over

PrefersAwkward , 2 months ago

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.

PrefersAwkward , 2 months ago

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

PrefersAwkward , 2 months ago

I think the question is: if a person is going to make such a tiny swap, why even use swap?

Such a small swap is unlikely to save a system from memory problems and it's does not seem likely to make a noticeable difference in performance when it's only able to swap out small amounts of memory.

Why wouldn't one just put in larger ZRAM or a larger Swap with a reduced swapiness?

If I have a raspberry pi with 1 GB ram, I don't think a 2 MB swap is worth bothering with.

PrefersAwkward , 2 months ago

I wouldn't put swap on an SD card, no. Even if it had an NVME, it seems like putting up at least a double-digit percent would be more effective than 1%.

Also, since 6.1, swap has been a lot better, with MGLRU. ChromeOS gets away with paltry amounts of RAM due to swapping. So classic overcommitting seems fine as long as you don't run into situations where more RAM is active at once than is available by hardware.

PrefersAwkward , 2 months ago

If they go from the resolution they used to native 4k, they waste a lot of battery life. If they go the other way, you have low res. I think they happened to pick within a golden DPI range. Not too high or low.

On KDE Wayland, I really don't really see any blurriness issues. I'm not even on KDE 6 yet.

PrefersAwkward , 2 months ago

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

PrefersAwkward , 3 months ago

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"

PrefersAwkward , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

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.

PrefersAwkward , 3 months ago

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

PrefersAwkward , 3 months ago

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

PrefersAwkward , 3 months ago

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

PrefersAwkward , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

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

PrefersAwkward , 4 months ago

And this incident has been reported. As have all your activities, searches, sites, and keystrokes

PrefersAwkward , 4 months ago

When will these bugs be fixed? I prefer to face to the right and would also like to be able to sleep on my stomach

PrefersAwkward , 4 months ago

If you would just continuously use our proprietary, wireless DRM-enabled, subscription disinfectant, the wounds we keep cutting into you will (likely) remain uninfected

PrefersAwkward , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

I remember about a decade ago, when I was a student, I helped a small company with some office work. An office admin showed me various things using her computer, such as their QuickBooks data.
The bevy of ads I saw suggested to me that she was a religious, dog-owning, single parent, and she was clearly seeking a partner and she was about 50 years old. I got all this just from the front page of her yahoo and was blown away at how specific and personal those ads were. And some of the ads were Spanish so she's easily bilingual.

Totally creeped me out and I wasn't sure she even knew that her computer was just broadcasting to her office all her personal info. She regularly collaborated with countless others, even new faces, using this same computer, where anyone could see what I saw.

PrefersAwkward , 4 months ago

To add to this, if you VM, you have to find a way to hide the fact that your VM is a VM. Often, the GPU is the number one problem doing this, so a passthrough is enough.

PrefersAwkward , 6 months ago

What distro?

PrefersAwkward , 6 months ago

Ideally, you should use Pamac (if you're doing CLI), not Pacman, to update Manjaro. Haven't used Manjaro in a while, but this is gospel most of the time.

EDIT: clarity