Plus lots of Thorium to make U-233

We've last 50 years defending democracy by ignoring our own.

And even more nines' worth of people want nothing to do with Slashdot.

Statistically nobody wants their OS to break, but Windows is fragile AF and breaks all the time. It produces a lot of revenue for a lot of different people in the process. I got a good PC (a dual-core Athlon back when that was still pretty neato) for fifty bucks because it came with Vista and they had problems with it, and were all like fuck this whole PC. Without changing any hardware at all, I put Linux on it, and it was fine. I reinstalled Vista from the restore files on the disk first just to see what that was like, fucking agony. I think the machine had maybe 2GB of RAM.

Anyway, enough about Microsoft's greatest misses, it's been a while now since Windows 7 (IMO their greatest hit) was supported. Whichever enemy of theirs convinced them to do that dumb Windows 8 UI shit is a goddamned superhero, what a masterstroke. And frankly, I can only just barely grit my teeth hard enough to bear Windows 10, I don't even want to think about when they finally "upgrade" me to 11...

By comparison, practically any Linux distribution is a peach. If you want the least drama and also nominally the least bullshit then I suggest you run either Debian or Arch. Either one is fine and has a large community. Just stuff it into the VM of your choice and poke at it, it's not a large time investment.

I'd like to replace my front camera with pepper spray. Get me and the cop trying to force the now fake face unlock.

The invisible hand of the free market has decided there are a lot of customers that are into Nazi shit.

We have a few start ups that are basically just IRC or Jabber with a desktop client that is a bundled Chrome browser. Some of these are billion dollar unicorns now. Amazing how much recycling goes on in the virtual world.

It was charming before systemd. Now I have to use Devuan to get rid of that. (Once burned, no thanks.) It is not a big delta from Debian, but it's enough that it's a hassle to replicate the effects on your own. Not being on the cutting edge just isn't charming any more, because development of enough of the system is sufficiently active that not being current is a significant detriment.

I had to go scrounging around for firmware for I think literally all of my ethernet devices, except maybe the onboard RTL8125 2.5 GbE, but some is weird and some is old: I also have a dual BCM5709 GbE and a M.2 WiFi-slot MT7925 (160Mhz WiFi 7/BT5.2) and I definitely had to go find some for both of those. Otherwise, no complaints.

I went Nvidia one last time for this PC (5900X/4060Ti 16GB), but the poor quality of their drivers is going to scare me off next time if not addressed. They will weep all the way to the AI-scam bank, I'm sure. I use the runfile for Nvidia drivers, so that they don't cause problems with Debian and therefore Devuan's multiarch setup. Fun fact, you have to both set TMPDIR and specify --tmpdir=/dir if you don't have room to unpack Nvidia drivers in /tmp. Why not just respect TMPDIR?

Russia, Iran, and North Korea have nothing on good old American ingenuity.
Nobody fucks the USA as hard or as deep as the USA.

You ever try doing that with Windows?

In any case they're wrong. Converting Linux between being a server and being a desktop is trivial.

I use yopmail.com for a lot of truly throwaway stuff. I bookmark the account in my browser.
Be aware: the site itself is riddled with ads, which are easily blocked. But the way it works is you don't have to give it any information about yourself, not your name, not your phone number, nor an email. You get a URL to check your inbox, it's all wide open of course, anyone with the URL can ready your email. It's good for those sites that insist on an email address to access features. Once you get that first "verify this email" message you can just treat the address as a black hole.

It's a very different use case than Proton Pass or Firefox Relay.

Debian often has unfortunately old packages. I've resorted to removing a lot of software and building it myself. And since Debs can be a bit of a hassle I usually just install to local or opt.

Japan is not even kind to repatriated Japanese, many of whom have left again because of the discrimination they experienced. They're discriminated against abroad for being Japanese, then come home and get discriminated against again for not being sufficiently racially pure.

I've had many Windows upgrades fail. Some of them resulted in an unusable system, others reverted themselves and only wasted hours of my time. And for that matter, just running Windows Update without an upgrade to a new Windows version very frequently breaks Windows Update so that it will not work, and on a few occasions has resulted in an unbootable Windows system. In fact even my work machine has rendered itself unbootable with a Windows Update, and I work remotely... I had to go in to the office to have them address the issue, that was a fun waste of time.

No, Linux is not perfect, but you don't get to declare that Linux is not ready for the desktop when it has problems that Windows also has.

They have lots of problems. We know because we see their confused posts on Microsoft forums, which are usually followed up with "solutions" which don't work.

Our IT department forces a windows reboot once a week even if Microsoft doesn't, because they have found that this prevents a lot of problems.

I don't have to do this with my Linux systems. This is not to say that they are trouble-free, only that they don't need to be rebooted weekly to work as well as they are going to.