Technology

Four Horsemen of Apocalypse

1. The country where a lot of tech countries are headquartered in, elects a wanna-be dictator
2. Android restricts "sideloading" (aka: non-approved install)
3. Windows has mandatory AI
4. Mandatory ID Verification

I finally troubleshooted why my Linux usb boot drive wasn’t working. Planning on making the switch when I have time off work.

So long as I can get Steam and Jellyfin working, I’ll never switch back.

Windows is becoming so trash that a bunch of my not-that-tech-savvy friends have been hitting me up asking about gaming on various Linux distros. (Just a few years ago it was all “Linux? Haha nerd”.) And the non gamers are switching to Mac at a remarkable rate.

And things have progressed so well that even for the non-technical crew, after installing Mint and showing them how to use ProtonPlus to install and select Proton-GE, they’re pretty much off to the races without much further hand holding.

Microsoft literally wanted me to convert my desktop to e-waste as it lacks the magical TPM chip that Win11 demands.

I said "fuck that" and pulled the Boot SSD, kept the existing non-boot drives for data, and put in a brand new SSD, encrypted it and installed Pop OS in one shot.

Not only was it easy, I lost literally zero critical functionality vs. what I had with Win 10. There is a Linux app equivalent for everything I had before. I had a few driver issues but most were auto-discovered including obscure ancient printers and scanners on my network.

Finally got my last PC switched off Windows. It feels good.

We have three windows laptops in the house. All for use in schools which were always heavily pro-Microsoft here. I haven't paid much attention to Windows 11. The last time I used Windows other than setting it up or fixing it for someone else was probably XP. All three users of those laptops come home from school/work, put them on a charger then head to a linux machine to play games, edit video etc. They know they have linux support and they have grown up with Linux. Not one of them has asked to upgrade their laptops to Linux yet.

Perhaps Microsoft isn't annoying regular users as much as the tech press and tech users think they are. Remember people still use shit like Facebook not just willingly but in some cases enthusiastically. We are a diverse lot. Some people, probably the majority, will put up with the same shit every day and not think to change their environment. I don't know whether it is too difficult or they are scared of change or they don't realize it is possible or perhaps they simple aren't bothered by the same things. Possibly all of the above.

Called it

I’m dangerously close to moving my gaming pc to Linux. What’s the consensus for the best distro for gaming?

I’m comfortable enough with *nix, as my daily is MacOS and I have a home lab/server.

Crazy to me that windows is finally worse than MacOS

Long time windows user, games retained me but I found Proton so bye bye forever windows. Now convincing my wife to switch it's the real challenge haha

Not sure why we're surprised. And even then, it took a while for the "good" OSes to get good. Windows 7 is remembered fondly because it ended well, not because it started well.

Windows 95: OK Windows 98: Bad Windows 98 SE: OK Windows ME/2000: Bad Windows XP: OK Windows Vista: Bad Windows 7: OK Windows 8: Bad Windows 10: OK Windows 11: Bad

I upgraded to Windows 11 last week after my laptop initially came with it 2 years ago, but was so bloated and slow I installed Windows 10 from USB.

With the EoL I reluctantly upgraded due to company policy, and it was running surprisingly smooth. Really thought they'd fixed it. Only that two days later when I booted the system, I had a blue screen - the first one I have seen since Windows XP.

Page fault in non-page area 0x50 - google suggests reboots, or if they don't bring any progress, boot into safe mode and update all drivers. Only that I couldn't boot into safe mode, the BSOD locked me out.

Second suggestion was faulty RAM. Did a memtest from boot stick, no fault.

Third suggestion was to run checkdisk and scm or whatever it was called (some system file integrity check). All good.

Fourth suggestion was to boot into recovery mode, roll back into the system image the Windows 11 installer created, and redo the upgrade. Only to find out that the system restore point had not been created, despite the info box during the installation that this was happening.

Last suggestion was to reinstall Windows 11 from the repair mode, and select the "keep files" option. The offline installer crashed at 25% repeatedly, the online installer moved to 92% and stopped there. Repeatedly, again (tried 3x, and it takes about 1h to get there).

After all that frustration I had enough of that shit and installed Windows 10 IoT LTSC with updates until 2032. When the time comes I'll either have a new job where I can use Xubuntu, or Microsoft installed on a chip in my brain. Let's see.

I hate windows 11 so much. Notifications are so much harder to read compared to 10 due to the right menu being nonexistant, instead we have this floating notification area that I never use. Everything takes ages to load, even on my beefy pc Settings still takes like 10 seconds to open. And it feels like the programmers died halfway though re-coding the context menus. Everything slightly more advanced can only be done through the old stuff so you end up with this awful mess where there's no design consistency, and it takes twice the clicks to get to something.

Glad I ditched windows 11 for linux mint.

Windows is still a fixture in my life due to work, but I’ve ditched Windows at home for years and won’t ever go back.