When it comes to installing stuff, I’m very trigger-happy. So, from experience…
Installing stuff on Windows (safely)
- Hope it’s on Chocolatey (
choco install) - If not, search for the website online
- Scroll past the AI slop and suspicious Softonic downloads
- Click the website
- Find the correct download button
- Download
- Scan with MalwareBytes (don’t want an STI)
- Run setup.exe
- Verify PATH and wanted feature set
- I do not want to bundle Candy Crush or McAfee
- skim the Privacy Policy to see if they’ll grind my bones to dust
- Install Microsoft C++ Redistributable 2014-2018 (wtf? I already have 4 of these)
- Wait
- Sort the installation shortcuts into my folders
Installing stuff on Linux (safely)
paru some_software- If on AUR, skim
PKGBUILD - If not packaged at all (rare),
git cloneit and either skim theinstall.shor Makefile - Done
- Hope it’s on Chocolatey (
Why in god’s name does it rearrange the order of programs on the taskbar?
The 3 days of settings adjustments, debloating, de-spyware-ing, regestry edits, group edits, service edits, power edits just have a functioning OS that doesn’t bottleneck/ruin your espensive hardware you paid for.
Web browsers are beginning to feel that way these days.
Meh Firefox is very customizable but not a ton of settings really for critical privacy, compatibility or optimization.
Chrome and all Google services can get fucked for just the amount of sites, pages, sub-accounts you have to navigate thru JUST to turn off their tracking bullshit.
I think I have my android and PC as fully isolated from any Google account, software, service or operation short of going full Root of phone and Linux. Which, Linux is on my todo list to go daily driver-Linux and 2ndary boot drive-Windows.
For now tho, local user Windows account and all google accounts and apps either un-installed or disabled on the phone.
Being unable to use local accounts without a ton of headache, and menus always trying to force you to use their services
Being told I should switch to linux
Sometimes friends, in their curiosity, come up to me and ask me, Jordan Belfort-style, “Sell me
this penLinux.” Why do I like it so much, they wonder?And I always tell them:
"Linux is like… the vegan OS. (bear with me) Mac and Windows people don’t really care about OSes. People who switch to Linux either find they couldn’t be assed to deal with it, or they love it, and those who love it love it. Then they always tell people lol.
A good thing though: because everyone’s such an opinionated nerd, the lateral set of problems you run into won’t be ‘solved’ by random Microsoft Forums
/sfc scannows or arcane regedits, but by a nut who debugged the entire thing 30 minutes after the bug came to exist to find a workaround. True story.Buuuut Linux is more of a lateral movement in terms of problems, it’s just a tool after all. You solve Microsoft Recall and start menu ads but run into new but tiny annoyances. I find Linux problems easier to fix than Windows ones because of the nerd army thing but if your Windows setup works for you, it works and that’s really all that’s important. If you do start Linuxing though you’ll learn a lot just by osmosis."
And they usually laugh and decide to keep their routines in place. Don’t hate me vegans.
Ctrl+c not copying on rare occasions. Even if it’s my keyboard’s fault, it could be avoided with some visual feedback to confirm to me that ctrl+c was registered ans clipboard was updated, so that I’d immediately know that it didn’t work after pressing ctrl+c, rather than later when i switched to a different window/tab and pasted the wrong thing
The fact that i can’t route audio between apps (without 3rd party closed-source apps). Why is something so basic not included into the system?
Registry
As a c++ dev: winapi. Right away you are greeted by windows.h adding loads of macros with common identifiers without any prefix to your preprocessor. That’s a sign of things to come for anyone who has to use it. Maybe that explains lack of open-source audio routing apps: nobody wants to deal with windows driver development for hobby - and if that’s the case i sure can’t blame nobody for that.
Copy not working is becoming a frequent issue
windows.h without NOMINMAX be like
“hippity hoppity words min and max are my property”
My default browser at work is Chrome. Microsoft Teams and Outlook open links in edge anyhow. I wonder why!
‘contact your IT admin’
Great suggestion when you are the IT admin, lol
Annoying little quirks of text highlighting and navigation. Oopsie, you moved an extra quarter of a centimeter to the left of the paragraph you tried to highlight starting from the bottom. That means you want everything, right? Yeah we’re highlighting everything. And so on.
Fortunately I’ve picked up some workarounds over the years:
Trying to highlight text in a hyperlink: hold alt
Methods of selecting text blocks (e.g., when normal mouse-select is doing bizarre stuff):
- Try highlighting from end to beginning
- Click point A, hold shift, click point B
- Double-click first word of desired selection to highlight it, or triple-click a paragraph, then highlight letters with shift-right, words with ctrl-shift-right, lines with shift-down, paragraphs with ctrl-shift-down. You’ll see that, for example, when you use shift-down, some text on the line following the selected line is also selected, corresponding to the length of the initial selection before the hotkey was pressed. You can use relevant combos in the opposite direction to de-select this. Or press shift-end to highlight only to the end of the line where your current selection ends, and shift-home to deselect to the beginning of the line. Ctrl-shift-end/home will do the same but for the entire page/document.
- Some other useful hotkeys are available during text input – I make heavy use of shift+pgup/pgdn to extend selections, but this seems to work in Excel, Notepad++, etc., not in this web browser text input field, for example. Holding shift while clicking also extends selections as in the read-only context; holding ctrl while clicking arbitrarily adds to selection just as in the file browser.
I don’t think that’s workarounds, you’re supposed to use your free hand for keyboard commands to effectively highlight and edit text.
My favourite combo is ctrl+z because it reverts the last action. Works in almost every application.
Ctrl+a marks the whole text.
Yes, these are documented features and not some kind of obscure off-label workaround. What I mean is that the use of these features serves as a workaround (or, if you like, an “alternative”) when simple mouse selection should work but behaves erratically.
The mouse issue you describe sounds like a feature as well, since you can mark things off screen by simply going over the edge on the left side.
This is extremely annoying on phone, but I never had that issue when it wasn’t some webpage with multiple elements like advertising and share buttons and scripts in between.
Deleting old installs.
And upon taking possession of and then deleting them how aggressively the browsers I am using are collecting and maintaining files on me. It shouldn’t take 40 minutes to delete browser files from an install that only lasted 2 months.
Trying to install Node-GYP. Dear God the errors
When I was still using Windows my system would often hard crash (haven’t verified it but I blame my 5700XT’s graphics drivers). This wasn’t an issue once I switched to Linux.
Having to use the wrong slash everywhere
Have you ever tried just using forward slashes anyway? It works more or less some of the time.
Yes, except where it doesn’t, which you have to remember, which makes it just another annoyance.
When things go wrong in Windows at an app or third party software, stuff is often fixable. At worst you might need to reinstall the damn thing. But if the OS itself starts doing weird stuff, things often go to the headache territory really fast. Get a weird error, log says some OS component is going boom, no idea how to fix it, official instructions are along the lines of “Well if DISM and SFC are not going to fix it, looks like you need to reinstall the entire damn OS.” Which usually wouldn’t be a cause for anxiety, but blergh, muh preschus licence key, hope I won’t screw that up.
Meanwhile, I ran one Debian install for over 20 years once. Stuff is usually very fixable indeed. There are good logs. It’s rarely a complete mystery why some program is doing what it doing. At absolute worst you might need to look at the source code, which is actually rare.
I’ve spent the entire morning trying to install sql 2022 and it fails on a mysterious error message. The suggested fixes don’t work.
I’ll have the same problems on Linux occasionally but at least I did not pay to have those issues.
