The vast majority of people don't see Windows as enshittified. That's something more unique to the minority of technical people.

Tech people: "WTF can't I install a local account anymore. ENSHITIFICATION!"
Normal people: "Oh look my documents folder is automatically backed up by the cloud!"

I struggle with your argument. You say that Ubuntu does it better than Windows but describe a situation where some of the features don't work, and then sign off with a statement that it's "good enough for you"? That doesn't sound like it's better than an alternative, it sounds like you're accepting of downsides. My own experience is Ubuntu's horrendous management of audio devices is ... charitably said, as bad as Windows, but especially for the likes of communication headsets, significantly worse.

Feature updates haven't taken 30min for about 5 years now. If they are, consider getting your SSD checked. I don't think a Windows Update (feature or otherwise) has taken a computer offline for more than a few minutes at a time. Back in the Windows 10 days I'd happily have agreed with you, they were really bad back then.

I honestly question what kind of system admin you are, or what your users are doing. I would happily wager real money that 99.9% of users have never ever seen, used, or in most cases even heard of Powershell. And the only situation I have ever come across a requirement for someone to use it, it was entirely self inflicted, i.e. the admin's own scripts were the ones that screwed something up in the first place. Corporate IT for you.

Define working? What didn't work specifically? Honestly I've not come across a Windows install that didn't "work" out of the box. Now you may want to adjust it to suit your tastes, but most people use apps on their computers and don't even bother screwing around with their OS. On the flip side I do remember spending an hour to get Ubuntu to try and use both of the connected displays on my dock at home. I actually gave up, but it turns out Wayland worked just fine out of the box. It's better now that it's not a choice anymore, but when your first user plugs a laptop into a USB C port and you need to explain to them the difference between X11 and Wayland that's not a good experience in the slightest.

FWITW, Ubuntu 24.10 did work on my machine out of the box first go, but then so did any Windows I've ever installed. These days I hope it's a wash, but seriously your complaint about Windows here makes little sense to me. And yes I use a default Microsoft image, every driver automagically downloaded, everything automagically worked. Sure maybe you have some esoteric hardware, but that problem still exists in Linux, I fuck around for an hour trying to get my printer going whenever I have a new Linux install at home and that's plug and play in Windows. I fuck around an hour trying to get my GPIB card working in Windows, that's plug and play in Windows.

The reality is for most people it's an absolute wash. Techies frequently are the source of their own problems. We fuck around with the OS (all of them) and find out.

The hardware being unusable of course made a big difference. But you're well and truly overestimating how a *normal* (that should read: no one here on Slashdot) user uses the OS. For the most part virtually no one gives a shit about the occasional popup in windows, virtually everyone expects accounts required as a fact of modern life for everyone (and outright expects it in a modern OS - thanks Android and Apple), and I'm not sure why you think there's a single person out there who considers bitlocker on by default to be a downside.

Why the sooner the better? The price isn't pegged to natural gas, the market has made natural gas the outcome of the system used to price power. That's two very different things (and natural gas doesn't set the spot price always, but it does the majority of the time).

The UK uses marginal cost pricing, just like the EU, many places in the USA, and several other countries. The system is an absolute boon to green energy as well as grid stability. Having the highest marginal cost set the price means that green energy sources become some of the best ROI projects, which is why there's so much industry investment in the first place. Also having the highest marginal cost set the price means that special purpose systems ensure grid stability (batteries / gas peakers).

Decoupling it from gas presents a problem, what's the alternative? Based purely on supply and demand there's incentive to provide grid stability. The bulk power provider gets the majority of the profit, which would probably be large gas plants. If you regulate the production of the price how do you setup power purchasing contracts with the regulator that are low enough risks that projects will go ahead? (E.g. Australia has an interesting regulatory market, and they found themselves in a strange situation recently where a battery operator was ordered to discharge at a time where it wasn't cost effective for them to do so to provide grid stability in the middle of the day, that sort of thing creates tension with people investing in power generation).

And you break the link and the price goes down, what then? How low can the price go? Pure market dynamics would set the price to the point where gas peakers will no longer offer grid stability services since pure supply and demand often reacts too late in the market (also a problem that Australia was dealing with, and one of the reasons they actually have 3 mini-markets in their main market, baseload, FCAS, and in the latter a sub-market specific for producers who can react in sub 6 second speeds).

This is a lot more complicated than you think and there are many downsides to moving away from a marginal cost pricing system on power.

This isn't a bizarre system. It's actually a pretty common system around the world that incentivises producers who can provide grid stability. This isn't even exclusive to grid use. Marginal Cost Pricing (what this model is called) is used in many industries which have dis-economies of scale, where the production of the next unit is more expensive than that of the previous one.

You will find this model in many resource distribution systems around the world. The exception are those with heavily fixed regulatory regimes, e.g. places where the government tells you what you can and cannot do, rather than the market effect pushing you to do what you do.

It's very hard to get rich of green energy. The return on investment for these kinds of projects are a pittance of fossil fuels projects. Green energy is more a target of necessity than of profit. It's why you have countries simultaneously putting solar panels up while at the same time sanctioning endless new oil production projects.

That one makes more sense. Yes that is one of the solutions, but of note, no, all American reactors do not have them *today*, they are still being retrofitted to this day. And at the time of the Fukushima incident they were relatively new in the nuclear world, most American reactors didn't have them either.

We can solve every problem retrospectively, but we can't change the reality of the day. This applies to virtually all industries. Would PARs be mandatory today? Quite possibly, that's the downside of standards written in blood.

Plus it is worth noting that a mitigation layer of protection is orders of magnitude less important than prevention. Dealing with hydrogen build-up in a building means that several things have gone wrong already. Prevention is far more important than mitigation.

Actually that's not the point I was making. The point I was saying is if you want it fixed *ON YOUR TERMS* then you need to contribute. That's not a cliché, that's an invariable fact of you not having any control over application of a finite resource.

Since you have not dictated any terms, don't complain about the outcome.

Yes at all. The fact that the outcome is inevitable doesn't mean this case climate change has contributed zero to it. Time is a relevant factor. Changing weather patterns brings forward the enviable chaos. And if you ignore the factor of time then you may as well say climate change has zero impact on anything given our human capabilities of fucking up everything we touch.

Not the last word, just the last correct one. If you don't post something wrong you won't get corrected by me. It's that easy coward.

I meant that it will be sad how few people there are.

Ok well I would never wish a "terribly uninteresting job" on my kids. That's no way to live. In the Jetsons, George just had to press a button and he could support a family, have a flying car and a house cleaning robot. The problem is that it was a cartoon. No one does a job here in the real world unless they can't be replaced by someone who would accept less pay. In real life, George would be replaced by someone tired of working in a seven eleven for $15 an hour and would be ecstatic about $19 an hour. It is questionable whether the engineer will even be able to continue making a living for himself, never mind supporting a family.

You HOPE the same will be true for the AI revolution. I don't remember anyone saying that the Internet wouldn't be financially viable unless it replaced workers. With AI the only path to viability is that it replaces workers.

Those people are designing robots today. The people who design robots won't go up if there are millions of robots. The whole point of robots is that they only require a handful of actual people. We have had automated tape libraries for years. A hard drive swapping robot wouldn't be that much more complex than a tape swapping robot. Maybe visual alignment gets more difficult, but if the datacenter is designed for robots first and people second then there are robots out there already doing far more advanced jobs.

That's something simple for a robot to do. Or there will be so much redundancy that someone will be able to come once a month and do all the swaps.