Windows 11 is already a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside of a train wreck anyway. AI will damage it further and its quest to become more of an advertising platform rather than in operating system continues. It's only a matter of time before a windows emulation layer on top of Linux or BSD starts taking users away simply by doing the basics of what an operating system is supposed to do... well. (Which Windows doesn't actually do anymore.) Your "fancy auto-correct" copilot will eventually show it's true worth (unless you can convince it that division-by-zero isn't meaningless).

What could possibly go wrong?!? ...go wrong?!? ...go wrong?!? ...go wrong?!? -- This AI hype binge is getting supremely stupid and "AI"-ification is going to be responsible for a lot of "enshitification" of OSes and services once it's all said and done and we're on to the next stupid distraction.

I, for one, welcome our new V'ger overlords.

Who cares? I don't. Plex is on the enshitification war path adding features and services no one asked for nor really wants all in the name of "more, more, more is better". When the AntiVirus crowd did this one and two decades ago I dropped them for being too bloated and stupid. The very same could apply here if they push it too much. Emby and Jellyfin prove that there are other options that will eventually be less painful to use and less advertising-crap-infested for the average user. Next platform please.

I've been using pfSense for right at 19 years now, since version 1.2. That said, the project is now "owned" by Netgate and they're doing "okay" providing a community edition whilst also commercializing the product. I think they've done some good and some bad overall. That said, pfSense is the firewall/router you really do want to use. They make it easy. The FreeBSD core OS makes it solid and bulletproof. Yes, even better than Palo Alto, Checkpoint, DEFINITELY Fortinet, and Crisco (which I will not use forevermore). My next recommendation would be to consider a line of APs built such they they do not require a cloudy baloney based login that usually both snoops on you and costs you money in the long term, I chose Zyxel. They have their Nebula Control Center thingy but they also have Stand-Alone Mode. And "no", you don't need NCC, and "yes" you can make AP to AP roaming work just fine in a home or small business if you're willing to learn how to do that. The rest is mainly just metrics and management that most people will never bother to use. I say to use a commercial AP vendor because you're going to want WiFi6 and/or eventually WiFi7. It's a great improvement over WiFi4 and 5. I've chosen the Zyxel WAX650S for my latest upgrade and I went there because Zyxel is also making a line of 1/2.5/5/10GB capable switches that I will eventually invest in (the XS1930 line) when a local provider finally gets Fibre-to-the-Premise to my front door. Their 5Gbps symmetric product is cheap. And I know that the Zyxel and pfSense with an add-in Intel X520 10GbE SFP+ card will support that traffic. But all in all, I get you. You want to prevent the general malaise of internet snoopyness while controlling your own destiny. I feel like that's the right path for me but others usually complain about my "tinfoil hat". If you want any more advice, just reach out. And good luck.

...and Windows is only a step away from not being in operating system anymore. OS-as-a-Service doesn't really count for much. See also: Windows wants me to log into a Microsoft account in order to use the hardware right in front of me.

Enshitification engaged! Honestly, they act more like antivirus software of a decade ago where they just keep adding features that few need or want and making their memory footprint bigger until you have to find something else because they're a pig now and you can't tolerate the garbage they throw at you. I DON'T NEED OR WANT SOCIAL "FEATURES"! Once Enby or JellyFin have a decent Roku app I'll be considering moving to those platforms. Also, Plex on Win10 is frakking miserable. Don't bother. If you must move from Windows 7 to something else use Ubuntu Cinnamon or something similar and just "bite the bullet" and do the hard work now rather than later. Windows 10 and 11 are becoming garbage as well.

I remember earnest talks back in 1996 about IPv6. I've heard those same conversations over and over and over and over and over and over and over again over the years. I was "ready" for IPv6 back in 2016, providing real world access to real people. And here is is, 2024, and we're STILL talking about the same da**ed things over and over and over again. CG-NAT and NAT have taken a LOT of US carriers farther than they ever could have imagined and because of that they STILL haven't implemented IPv6, so don't cry for them. About the most that any American consumer can do is bug the crap out of their upstream provider to support IPv6. Or you can pay the 4-10 bucks a month for an IPv4 address and take the easy way out. Your call.

Ya know, "backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey" isn't the compliment or the trust builder someone thinks it is. Perhaps they should stop mentioning that part if they want users to adopt it because it sounds like "we'll sell your commoditized user *ss up the river AGAIN, just like we did with Twitter". I'll stick with The Fediverse, thanks.

I've been a FreeBSD evangelist since 1997 or 1998. Back then it REALLY out-performed Linux in security and its network stack. A certain website I helped shepherd took 850 Million discreet hits per month on FreeBSD which was impossible on NT, Apple's AIX, HP-UX, or even Slackware at the time. I've ran a FreeBSD desktop on and off several times but I kept getting sucked back into the Windows ecosystem because of my damnable day jobs. With Windows 11 and beyond finally hurtling towards becoming a giant sh*t sandwich in favor of Microsoft making even more money, I still use FreeBSD religiously as a server, occasionally as a desktop, and am starting to land on using Ubuntu Cinnamon as an experimental desktop environment for the really stupid people (ie: my users) in my life. Both Linux and FreeBSD can provide an excellent foundation for virtualization (unlike Hyper-V, which gives you a whole stack of unstable NT kernels to fight with almost daily) and both are generally very secure. That said, FreeBSD has also seen more than its fair share of challenges over the years, perhaps more so than Linux, and yes, much of it self-inflicted.... But I can tell you that when a large corporation or a government defense contractor wants security and stability they reach for FreeBSD most often and occasionally Linux when it solves a specific problem relatively easily. And the driver situation also hasn't changed much over 20+ years but it is finally getting better, not because the individual OSes are getting better, but because the notion of FOSS or "Open Source" is becoming generally much more accepted. Now, all of that said, I HAVE to leave a foot-note here to also state that I very much loved SGI's Irix back in the 90s before they imploded in a fit of ignorance, arrogance, and hubris, but FreeBSD was even better than Irix back then. No question. I can't count the number of would-be switch gear and router vendors that started a project using FreeBSD because it was just a "better all around" operating system to base a product on. To this day I still contribute resources to The FreeBSD Foundation just because I want to give back to an OS that has given so much to me.

And Threads' TOS will make it patently clear that they (think they) own whatever content touches their servers along with any related traffic and metadata that they'll hoover up. Meta/Facebook has no business polluting the Fediverse and trying to control the environment. It's the Microsoft "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook and I'm convinced they'll try to wreck it if they can't control it. I will block Meta/Facebook in every environment I encounter them in from now until the heat death of the universe. I am tired of crappy, manipulative social media giants (Yes, we already know how they operate, thanks. Hard pass.) trying to stain anything and everything new that comes along to try to compete with them. With any luck it will be one giant attack surface against them.

Google and YouTube can choke on the what-might-amount-to-$10-per-quarter in ad revenue from me. I'll keep my ad blockers and use YouTube even less, thanks.

And perhaps the thing we really really want is for Microsoft to stop "re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic", slathering on a "fresh coat of paint", or dropping new eye candy to "please the peasants" and actually do things like dump the NT kernel and use a Linux or FreeBSD core, make it more difficult to "pierce the veil" or offer better anti-virus solutions, and to provide a basic OS that is an OS, not a service in the cloud that makes for a distracting user-stupifying experience, that performs on the level of Linux or BSD. That just f***ing works. For more than 45 days between reboots. But no, "We'll give you another Clippy and you'll like it."

Dumb-ass British law being what it is (they completely lost me at Brexit), Signal itself is still just "meh" to me. When Signal disabled the trivial but useful application PIN at launch and told me, "just use the android lock mechanism" I was pretty much done with them too. Now it's just another app, not the end-all/be-all. Like "The Great Firewall of China" other solutions will arise for the Brits who still have some brains left and are willing to push back against encryption back doors.

Why is it that this country can't even punish its most blatant offenders? Elisabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried are going to get out of prison with millions or billions of dollars in the bank after defrauding thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people and the justice system is poised to just let them get away with it.