What I care about is how it's hard to have an honest conversation about any of this stuff without it becoming a Microsoft hate-fest
That's a very, very weird thing to care about unless you're being paid to feel that way. Since Microsoft has done so much shit to so many people in so many ways it's otherwise inexplicable that anyone would come out of the woodwork to defend them. It's like when George Bush pointed out that Hitler had a dog.
We're going to need a law that customers have the right to talk to a person because the AI isn't going to be reliable.
The humans are usually no help regardless. They are often not sufficiently trained to do their jobs, and they frequently have no power to do anything for the customer anyway.
Traditionally, if the printer understood Postscript, you wouldn't need much of a printer driver. Meanwhile, Windows users were instructed to download a very specific driver for that printer model, even if it would just pass PS through.
Sure, but if you knew what you were doing you could install the generic adobe postscript driver with the appropriate ppd... so what we're really establishing here is that Windows never "just worked" and required a lot of specialist knowledge that people have just willfully forgotten about apparently in order to support their argument that Linux is hard.
all a new user needs to learn to get started in a CLI is one command: man
That's like saying that all a new pharmacist needs to learn to get started in dispensing is one book: The PDR. The information on the medications is in there, the knowledge to comprehend it is not. If you had an infinite amount of time, and one of the really well-documented versions of Unix, what you say is true, for an educated and/or talented user. But not all man pages are very good, and some are missing entirely and it's not obvious where to find the documentation.
Some things are also only documented in the pages for programmers, but I've never seen a Unix system come with the kind of documentation you'd reasonably need to start learning C, or in most cases even shell scripting (although the modern bash man page is pretty good!)
This utter hatred of going to an office has its roots in Covid.
Even in the article, it notes a 2 hour commute. Before the WFH situation grew people lived far away from their workplaces. During Covid times, many chose to look for cheap living expenses, and often lived much further away than 2 hours.
This might be true for some, but it's rather simplistic.
We've lived in the same house for 30+ years. My commute, both pre- and post-Covid, often runs 1.5 hours. When Covid hit I was getting ready to file my retirement paperwork because I thought I was tired of working.
What Covid actually taught me was that I still enjoy my job, quite a bit. What I HATE is the commute.
Post-Covid, I've been able to still work from home three days a week. Those two commute days are still wearing, and I probably am going to retire in a year or so - but I was absolutely sick of the commute before Covid was a thing.
I agree with you overall - I work because I need income to live, not because I give the least damn about my employer.
Of course we need income to live, but I don't think it's that black-or-white. At least some of us also factor in wanting to work in an environment where we feel like we're making a difference (e.g. non-profits, educational institutions), which typically means a relatively lower salary than is the industry norm.
... Windows has gotten tiresome and hostile.
IIRC that happened around 2003-2005... which was when I left Windows for good. Although arguably it was already happening even earlier. I was dual-booting Windows and Red Hat earlier than that on my old Dell Inpiron laptop.
Yeah, either there's something wonky about how their counting... or they just asked ChatGPT to gather the "statistics" (which I guess will fall under the former). There's no way there's a five percent swing in such a short period.
That statement is not about someone's argument, it is about someone's person.
If you read what I wrote, you didn't understand it.
Feel free to ask for clarification, or simply to point out any parts of what I wrote that you find unclear. I'm looking for ways to better explain this.
General public just believes what the AI company say.
General public believes whoever has the most money deserves it.
Then someone new has the most money, what happened to the old guy? Fell out of God's favor? Never mind all that, we're looking at the new shiny shiny, we've got no time for any other kind of reflection.
Prosperity theology is the dominant belief system. To the winner go the spoils.
implying that someone is unsophisticated is an ad hominem
When you say that someone's argument is bad because they are allegedly unsophisticated, that is ad hominem. When you say that someone is clearly unsophisticated because of their foolish argument, that is not ad hominem. This is probably the most widely misunderstood logical fallacy, if only because it's the most familiar — if not well-known, in that it is not well-understood. It means argument from a person, and if you are not arguing that someone's argument is bad because of some thing about them which doesn't affect the argument true or not then it's not an ad hominem.
For example, pointing out that someone's argument is potentially biased because they are relevantly economically involved is a valid response to someone claiming they have no reason to make deceptive statements, but it's still not a valid argument for or against a position because it doesn't make specific testable claims. It's just window dressing intended to engender an emotional response. Even though it's not an insult, if you're depending on it to prove something did or didn't happen or to distract from a lack of proof, it's still the same logical fallacy.
If you think someone is being needlessly insulting, you can just say that. There's no need to invoke ad hominem to point out that someone is being a bell end.
What makes you think they'll be inexperienced?
That's literally the premise of this thread.
There is no sacred government experience, it's a job just like any one other and that it should be.
It's not that it's sacred, that's a dumb take. It's not just a job like any other, that's an ignorant take.
Perhaps it should be, but it's the private sector that should change, to provide more accountability.
DMV jobs are complicated because the law is complicated.
IRS jobs, potentially the same. It depends on the level of the person you're talking to.
Or, maybe better terminology, the year Microsoft finally fscked themselves with no backwards compatibility with even (well maintained) 10 year old laptops being good enough for 99% of the web.
Microsoft needs OEMs to buy licenses, even at a deeply discounted rate this is important (and importantly, has been dependable) revenue. They only do that when they are selling PCs. Microsoft had to help those OEMs sell PCs to capture that revenue.
Microsoft knows that source is drying up. Companies will be able to move away from Windows. This is why they have been shifting their focus towards the cloud. Like IBM, they have become a services company as they became staid and unable to execute on delivering exciting products, or in fact products people want. Instead, the best they can do is products they're forced to use. The money is all the same color no matter what the feelings behind it are...
The methodologies of these surveys are often mysterious and when we find out how they work they are usually bad, so you shouldn't take any particular major change seriously unless you know specifically why it happened. If you read statcounter's FAQ, they basically say they publish data as they get it, and then say they make some modifications, and then say that's basically publishing data as they get it, pinky swear! So you probably shouldn't take it seriously ever.
I started using Linux at a time when it was still pretty common for people using Unixlikes on PC to not use graphics, though I did put in a 1 MB VGA card and start using X right away. Still, maybe that kind of perspective is why I consider more things to be "using Linux" than some people do. Even Android is recognizably Linux underneath, when you consider it from the shell. You can put a full userland on it and have hundreds of users logged into your phone playing rogue and using icb, if people still did that.
Lots of things including changes in methodology or changes in default browser fingerprints could have caused this.
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein
