I have a houseful of PCs, but only one will officially run Win11 -- a low-powered netbook that ironically is the least competent hardware I own (its horsepower is on par with my laptop from 2003). I'll give it this -- Win11 does a good job of downshifting to match the environment it finds itself in; Win10 would struggle on that netbook.

Which desktops did you try, and what issues blew it for you?

I had a hard time finding a linux I could live with, and I first started looking over 25 years ago. It's only been about six years now since it's become sufficiently stable and complete. And implementations vary wildly. I prefer the KDE desktop as being the most functional (and least annoying), but KDE on Kubuntu is not nearly as slick as KDE on PCLinuxOS.

But at the far end, IMO current Gnome makes Win10 look stellar.... good gods, who thought a cellphone makes a good desktop??

I never agreed to be subjected to the last two decades of stories about idiots buying HP printers and whining about their problems.

Oh yes. Poor, oppressed academe. Can't just take their grant money and produce their narrative aligned results in peace. Someone on X might say something mean about it!

Is there some reason we have to pretend there will be some grand effort to educate, train and employ US citizens for this? They're just going to multiply F-1s and E1,2,3s and import a bunch of Asians. What are we even talking about? What constituency exists to hinder this beyond non-college whitey? The D's get lots more POCs to pander to. The R's get kudos and campaign bucks from their paymasters in industry. The chip companies get their visa slaves. The US gets it's fab industry back. What else is there to discuss here?

The front end is filled with sensors and cameras. The rear end is filled with sensors an cameras and fragile motors. Some of it is mandated by regulation, the rest is endless featurization. All of it is so close to one-year-only components it doesn't matter, so every impact is a $10,000 repair that can only be done at a dealership, because the technicians qualified and equipped to deal with this stuff are rare, employed almost exclusively by dealerships, and priced accordingly, and the components have to come from Japan or Europe or wherever and there are no qualified aftermarket parts for most of it.

Even with the right parts, the best technician and the correct diagnostic equipment, the repairs frequently don't take, so a cycle of rework begins, usually ending in a sale on the used market. The insurance company gets billed for some of it and the dealer has to eat some of it, and all these costs get amortized into the rates and prices of everything car.

Most of them are running Blink by way of Chromium. It's not the problem you imagine.

TikTok — for obvious reasons — is not as responsive to pressure from establishment thought police. That's it. That's what this is about.

The Powers That Be live in constant anxiety over everything that's said on social media. Nothing consumes more of their attention than what is being said about them and their policies on Facebook, TikTok, X, etc. While they can, and have, backdoor all the US based platforms and disappear wrong-thinkers, they can't fire off an e-mail from a quasi-government democracy saving pressure group address to some TikTok apparatchik and get the result they expect. So, in their minds, TikTok is evil and something must be done.

Oh, the story has one good function. It points up how in isolation, such metrics are garbage.

Otherwise.... what you said.

You say that now. Wait till a door pops out, slices a vert stab off and puts 300 people into a smoking hole. We haven't had a major air disaster like that in the US in a long time, and when we did we weren't anywhere near the mass of dysfunctional children we are today. You are failing to appreciate the degree of collective cognitive meltdown that will erupt when this eventually happens.

Even plausibly answerable questions are subsumed by endless gaslighting today. How can you expect answers to subtle questions such as these?

Soon, a couple hundred people are going to get killed in one of these cost optimized aircraft. At that point I'm thinking we should just stop this nonsense: the US is no longer competent to build or operate airliners. Mr. and Mrs. hoi polloi can just zoom or drive, and leave flying to people that can afford to do it properly. Then maybe stop the driving part too.

The "Alternative Marketplaces" that are already in Apple's approval queue to launch imminently in the EU are filled with emulators.

The problem here is that the open app ecosystem available to the EU creates a massive disparity between the capabilities of the platform there vs everywhere else in the world. The headlines about emulators coming to EU iPhones have been going for a few weeks now. If you can run emulators in Europe but not in the US, users simply are not going to stand for it.

I was going to say the Apple is about to have their Lunch eaten, but in the context of gradeschool cafeteria analogies, it's really more like they are the bully and they finally got their nose punched in by the little scrawny kid.. only that kid was the EU and maybe not so scrawny. Keep it up!

XP64 here. Same philosophy. Block the garbage, don't be stupid, glory in my lack of visitors, and remember that attack vectors are mostly discovered by reverse-engineering the patches. No patches, way fewer clues.

Whatever small risks are well offset by an OS that doesn't continually make me long to reach through my monitor and throttle a UI developer.

Should a human impersonating George Carlin (or anybody, really) be able to profit off of that person's voice, mannerisms or likeness?

Are you claiming we actually stop something at the border?

Lies.