GNOME is an abomination, but it's not just that. If you check the video I posted in another comment, the guy talks about how he settled on a Pop OS derivative, which is itself a derivative of Ubuntu, which is derived from Debian, because it actually just worked for the basic writing and note taking he wanted to do. The others failed not because GNOME is awful, but because the two bits of software he wanted were broken out of the box.

The way Linux is, package maintenance is a massive overhead that frequently goes wrong. Linus even commented on it a few years ago, saying it was an inferior way of distributing software compared to competing operating systems, and a waste of the maintainers' time. I tend to agree, the way Android and Windows do it are both superior.

For security we need to be able to modify Javascript, e.g. have a privacy enhancement add-on delete or re-write parts of it. Otherwise it will be abused for spying and DRM.

Linking to 3rd parties is deliberate. It means the browser can use a cached version of that large Javascript framework, instead of re-downloading it and re-compiling it from scratch for every website.

The situation with non-Chrome browsers is annoying. Even Firefox breaks a lot of sites, especially if you have privacy settings turned up. I tried a user agent changer, but Cloudflare detects it somehow even when it isn't active on that site, and you get into a captcha loop.

It must be hell for people with disabilities who need assistive technologies.

One nice solution to this is to introduce a third party, usually the government. In some of the Nordics and in Japan the government negotiates with employers for annual baseline salary increases and on conditions, effectively acting like a union. The actual unions are also involved.

It creates a bit more balance. Not perfect of course, but much better than what most countries have.

The problem is that people inevitably run into some problem with their distro, and their choice is either try another distro and hope it is broken in a different way, or run some command line copy/paste stuff and hope that doesn't bugger things up.

There's a new video like this every week: https://youtu.be/T2bZ2L4e_dw

Guy had an older Thinkpad, one of the best machines for Linux because it has compatible hardware and great community support. Still immediately ran into issues.

The great exodus of people from Windows 10 just isn't going to happen. Many will try it, 99% will give up and go to Windows 11.

You can enable the "this day on Slashdot" sidebar. It's not quite what you asked for, but it does show older posts. The oldest today is Windows iTunes Sells A Million Songs In 3.5 Days from 2003.

Ah, remember when people used to buy music? In a nasty DRMed format too.

Android just goes to show why GNU/Linux will never become mainstream. It fixes the main issues - stable and sane APIs, security that users can actually understand and take advantage of, software distribution and availability.

The fact that it's Linux underneath is hardly even relevant, given that the actual Android APIs have been ported to other operating systems such as Windows.

It's 2025, no one cares about disk space. My Linux server is installed on the smallest SSD I could buy, and the drive is 90% empty.

You left out a word. The great thing about Linux *Distributions* is that you didn't need fifty copies of every DLL. Distribution maintainers put a shitload of work into avoiding the kind of DLL hell that Windows suffered from. However that only works when you play within their environment. As soon as you start stepping outside of it, outside of their configuration, outside of their organised dependency tree, then things start to get ugly.

Linux isn't immune from DLL hell, quite the opposite. Many-a Linux distro have failed a distribution upgrade precisely because of incompatible libraries installed outside of the curated environment distro maintainers have setup, and this is all to frequently the result of someone wanting to be on the cutting edge, desperately installing Awesomething-2.0.0beta1 which depends on Criticallibrary-2.2.7beta1 only to find that Criticallibrary2.1.10-stable was the only allowable installed one on the system. Then someone force installs it all, and at the next distribution upgrade the entire system craps itself as Criticalibrary can't be updated to the latest version due to a conflict.

It's quite obtuse to think that Snap exists only because RedHat is trying to screw with standards. It's the same line of thinking that says Systemd exists only because of RedHat. The reality is Snap is just one of several attempts in parallel by multiple people to solve a very real problem. It's easy to look at Linux with rose coloured glasses on if you've never experienced the problem in question, but there's a reason people dedicate engineering resources to fixing it, and it's not because of NIH or because they hate users.

A few things:
a) the description mentions Hello (specifically mentioning USB) and Cryptography. Both touch on WinRE - it's not just a boot process, it's a micro version of Windows. My guess is they screwed something up there.
b) the Shift+Reboot has nothing to do with UEFI. It has to do with Windows telling UEFI to follow a specific boot process. While at one point Shift+Reboot was an emergency restart that specifically forced a full UEFI cold boot, Microsoft changed Window's behaviour to do a warm boot directly into the WinRE environment. This is windows triggering how the computer is restarted - and that has been a problem since the days of Windows 7 where a "reboot" was not as rebootish as the name implied.

If you're trying to find an easy way to get to the UEFI screen you could try creating a command line shortcut. "shutdown /g" should force a full shutdown and cold boot. "shutdown /fw" should force the computer to open the UEFI screen. "shutdown /o" is the one that AFAIK puts you into the WinRE advanced boot menu.

Not sure if any of those specifically fix your problem.

I should add to this that one of WinRE's primary use cases is to reinstall Windows from installation media, i.e. USB. A version of this pre-dates Visa and USB support has actually been part of it from Windows XP days. But WinRE as an installed system component only came about with Windows 10.

WinRE is not a bootloader. It has had perfectly functional USB support since the days of Vista. Also what is PS/2? Is this something boomers used to confuse for a playstation? (I'm joking, but only kinda, computers haven't shipped with PS/2 for a long time, and the option for PS/2 emulation no longer exists in modern BIOSes meaning you can't even use PS/2 > USB adapters to get old keyboards functional).

But seriously which era is your computer from? You're talking about something I've not seen for over 15 years.

Fix what? The problem of having too much money and not enough lawyers from a large corporation suing you for damages?

That is incorrect on all accounts*. Firstly Waymos do travel on highways at highway speeds. Secondly highways account for only 9% of fatalities. Most fatalities occur in rural areas where idiots are about, but just shy of half are in urban / residential / low speed areas.

* The exception here is if you are saying that Waymos don't have accidents because they actually stick to the speed limit and don't drive like morons. In this aspect I agree with you. Speeding beyond the limit of the designated road is a major cause of accidents.

"Accident" is an interesting word when in many cases someone is directly at fault. Is it an "accident" if the driver is drunk? Is it an "accident" if the driver is speeding? You may note that in official statistics they don't actually use the word "accident" for this reason as it implies no one is at fault and the situation was unexpected and unforeseen.

I'm betting THEN you'll find that Waymo doesn't just have programmers on staff, but also a legal team.