• 256 Posts
  • 124 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • Literally never had the need to disable defender or change anything about my Windows install.

    This doesn’t mean anything if you’re not saying what hardware are you running. I saw what was happening in task manager no matter how much time I gave it. I don’t have time to debug a product I paid for, especially if the free alternative „just works”.

    Driver support is far better on Windows than Linux.

    For things that Linux supports (which is most of it and the older the better) it’s a much better experience since everything just works out of the box. You might have trouble with bleeding edge hardware but in year or two stuff gets done and keeps working. You might encounter issues on some cheapo laptops with broken ACPI implementations but those are just trouble in general.



  • I just contributed to this. My gf bought her old work laptop for cheap (an employee perk) for simple survivors-like games. It should have been perfectly capable machine (i5-8350u, 16GB of RAM, fast NVMe drive) and it’s compatible with Windows 11 so I went with that. I’m a Mac guy these days and but use Windows at work so I’m only familiar with LTSC versions. I wasn’t ready for how much of a shitshow it is.

    Couple of hours later I had debloated it and disabled Defender yet it was still running dog slow. The laptop had trouble with Thunderbolt 3 docking station, not recognising anything beyond connected displays. Intel graphics drivers were so unstable games kept crashing left and right.

    I got tired of fighting it and installed vanilla Ubuntu (didn’t want to disable Secure Boot). I’m not a Linux newbie by any means but these days it’s home server stuff and the like. I stumbled on Bitlocker protection that I’m 100% sure is there to discourage people from switching. Microsoft set it up so that when you look at it funny you have to find unlock keys at your account page. Funny thing about that - when my gf was typing the address for that page in Safari with Google search on her phone the first autocompleting result was a scam page. I’m fairly sure Google does this to spite Microsoft. Fuck big tech but I digress.

    After that it took an hour to install including figuring out that I had to add DisplayLink drivers for the dock myself. The process wasn’t great but I guess it’s a real niche case. Either way, this machine is now flying and Steam+Proton handle everything pretty well.

    Last time I used Windows on desktop was around W8 and it wasn’t half that bad. Microsoft is doomed if they offer this kind of experience. I was critical of Proton before but I need to acknowledge that some working solution had to be created ASAP to get people off this dumpster fire.


  • This is not up to Harris or politicians to fix, they are not capable of getting people out of this. They will just let you down in new and innovative ways. You talk about the changes they are doing now but I was talking the changes that they’ll need to get reelected in the future - it will be grim and similar to what’s happening all over Europe. Centrist liberal parties are becoming indistinguishable from parties they lost power to (Labour in UK, Renaissance in France, Civic Platform in Poland). It will discourage even more people from participating in politics.

    People need to get out in front before it happens to minimise the damage. This means more respect towards people we don’t agree with and that unfortunately includes less poo slinging at bigots. This also means less involvement in treating symptoms because it depletes our capacity for change („orphan-crushing machine”).


  • Yeah, that’s what I’m warning you about. This approach has been tried. Whatever happens, it was already decided because you’re not going to course correct at eleventh hour and root cause of general discontent is much deeper than you want to admit.

    If you lose you’ll go into democratic resistance, fight every single thing Trump does. By second or third year regular people notice that not much is changing in their lives and then you lose all of your steam. When actual bad stuff happens nobody cares.

    Then in a couple of terms people will get tired of the right, vote for the libs and then you realise that those Dems have adopted lots of stuff Republicans did because that was the only way to get back into power. And that it was always about power. I’ll be there to say „told you so”.