You're getting soft. I'd have a far more interesting fate for them.

Very simple. Don't comply? Don't make international calls to my country. Which in turn means you're not gonna make any kind of business deals with anyone here.

As far as I know, Russia didn't even comment yet.

What a coincidence.

Neither can most of their equipment.

...provided it runs, e.g. because it was started automatically, which it cannot in our setup. So I'd have to start it. If I find it.

Nope, that's not the program. Unfortunately the Windows-internal screenshot program is inferior and not suitable to my needs.

That they found an easier way to spy on their citizens.

Is that like the old Aussie saying "Try to catch the snake that bit you, we need it for our statistics to know which species killed you"?

I'd rather try to invent something that makes kid spit those things out instead of swallowing them.

If we give it a couple generations, evolution could take care of that.

It's not critical to my daily workflow. That's the problem. Case in point, the snapshot program. I need it whenever I find something worth reporting and need to do a screenshot. What's its name? I know it's in the "graphics" program submenu, and I remember the color of its icon, but what was its name? Somethingshot. But what was that something, because search for "shot" sure won't produce what I'm looking for. What colorful name did their marketing department come up that really made a lot of sense in the mind of a coke-fuelled markedroid's head but certainly won't in a normal mind?

My key problem with this is that I know WHERE my program is in the program menu, but I don't know what it's called. Care to tell me how to search for a program you don't know the exact name of?

And frankly, with more and more programs coming up with more and more esoteric names...

The only application I "need" that I couldn't find a suitable Linux replacement for was Autodesk 360. And that runs fine in a VM.

What else would I need that I can't get on Linux?

We run our own (huge) data center, so convincing our people that we should stay "at home" was easier, especially since we have our own cloud service (with blackjack. And hookers) so they can placate marketing with "yes, yes, we are doing this in the cloud" without even lying, but even here, some felt that urge to move stuff into AWS.

And yes, now we're having severe headaches.

The expense isn't in the infrastructure. That's peanuts. Quite frankly, the metal you need to haul your data back into the data center is pocket change. What really puts the money boot on your back is adaptation of your software, services, processes and of course the manpower you now suddenly need for maintenance.

The alternatives to the cloud are certainly not free. Actually, cloud services do have their niche. When I need sudden spikes of processing power, Lambda services beat on-prem server farms in pretty much any aspect. If I just need to try something out and need to spin up a machine quickly, a cloud container sure is easier to get with less overhead than even an on-prem VM.

But for anything where you have a constant base load, especially if you're large enough to warrant the staff for maintenance, the costs for cloud services quickly spin out of whack compared to on-prem systems.

Cloud systems are a tool. Not a silver bullet. They are not the hammer and your problems are not all nails.

And it even fails at this. Miserably. I can still install Linux on those systems. So what's the goal here?