Microsoft learned those lessons very well: it's fine to do shady things if you bribe the right people.

That last one -- corporate edict -- is exactly the problem.

I go into the auditorium to teach my 600 student class. There is a computer connected to the projector. I download my slides (in PDF format) onto its desktop and doubleclick to open.

It opens in Edge. Nope -- that won't work.

I right-click it and open in Adobe Acrobat. Our IT folks have removed Acrobat Reader from all the computers. And Adobe Acrobat wants me to log in to my "Adobe Creative Cloud" account. I don't have one of those...

Legal is whatever you can get the government to not prosecute you for.

It was not legal in 2000 when Clinton was president. It became legal in 2001 when Dubya became president and has been legal ever since.

Humanity did some pretty cool things with computers in 1996.

Guess what? The same software that did those cool things running on the same computers will still work now.

Nah, NOT enough random WORDS capitalized.

Also Trump doesn't know what a quisling is.

Right, but you already knew that lying to your computer that you had no internet access was the only way to bypass the Microsoft account thing. You already knew the answer, but it takes people who don't know the answer a bit of time to figure it out, especially when they're used to software that doesn't have an adversarial or at least exploitative relationship with the people who use it.

If someone asks if you want to have sex, you should just be able to say "no thanks". You shouldn't need to lie and say that you don't have genitalia.

Also, these ISO images don't work.

I don't use Windows. But two friends wanted me to help them build a Windows computer, so I figured I'd give it a go. I downloaded a win11 ISO, used one of the standard Linux tools to burn it to a boot USB, and tried to do the install.

It booted into a win11 installer (yay, the boot disk worked), asked some question, then told me that some "media driver was missing" and directed me to put in another USB drive with the driver.

What the heck? Why do I need drivers for this? (It was a standard NVMe drive on a standard motherboard...) It didn't tell me what driver it wanted or what hardware it was trying to find a driver for.

(Fedora installed fine, so it's clearly not the hardware.)

According to some folks, it turns out that Windows ISO's only create work when created from a Windows computer for no good reason, and that the issue had nothing at all to do with "media drivers". Trouble was, we didn't have one. We wound up resuscitating her ten-year-old Lenovo to make the boot disk, and that worked.

It was obvious after NT.

It was obvious before that, too.

My mother is the age of a grandmother; she isn't one only because my partner and I are not having children.

And she runs Linux out of choice on her laptop.

She hasn't had to learn command line flags, since she can do everything she wants using KDE.

I bought Baldur's Gate 3 yesterday. So did a friend who runs Linux on her laptop.

So here are two "Linux people" who are quite happy to pay for games.

Frankly we're at the point where Linux has the "it just works" advantage over Windows once you take away the preinstallation advantage.

I have a nontechnical friend who needed a laptop, so I sent her my old gaming laptop. I couldn't get Windows to install on it, so I just left Fedora on it and mailed it to her. Steam "just worked" and she could play all her games, she figured out how KDE worked, and she remarked "hey, this is so much easier and more intuitive than Windows!"

In a piece of irony, she also bought a Steam Deck without realizing that it was just Steam running on KDE. Something was wrong with the touchscreen, and she asked me if I could help her troubleshoot it. I said "well, can you look at the KDE input device settings? There's a thing called 'desktop mode' that really just means 'close Steam and take me back to KDE'".

She said ... wait, this looks just like my laptop!

This. I have no clue what the Windows version is like since I don't run Windows. But the Linux version has gotten slower and bloatier and more of a pain in the ass.

The challenge is to find folks who aren't that -- purely independent commentators who know what they're talking about and are willing to share. One of the best in photography is Thom Hogan (bythom.com) -- he mostly writes about Nikon, which is the sort of camera I use.

There are others out there who write about other models. But they're hard to find just because they're not aggressively marketed and corporate. DPReview is unique in that it's both corporate *and* reasonably unbiased and honest.

You are insane.

"Used by one people to kill another people" ignores the background to this war, which is Putin wanting to commit genocide against the Ukrainian people for years, then sending hundreds of thousands of troops into their country and actually committing genocide (by internationally-accepted definitions).

The only thing *stopping* Putin from succeeding at that genocide is Ukrainians fighting back.

I thought Valve installs Linux on it from the factory -- you don't have to load (install) Linux, it's just what it runs.

I guess you could install Windows on it if you want, but ... why would you do that?