For all of the MANY, MANY, MANY annoying things that have been added to Windows over the years that make its use a begrudging concession rather than enthusiastic selection, I will see what things I can concede were added to Windows that were genuinely useful since TCP/IP was added in Windows 95...

1. 64-bit support (would you really want to be using 4GB of RAM in 2025?).
2. Desktop compositing (transparency, shadows, variable DPI support, GPU acceleration).
3. Memory management (no more one-app-crashes the OS).
4. Better account and multi-user support (remember that Windows 95 allows you to get past the login prompt by clicking 'cancel'; UAC was off to a bumpy start but running applications in a user context rather than an admin context by default was a net positive all around).
5. Overall disk support (SATA, NVMe, >137GB drive sizes, and on a tangential note, UEFI support).
6. Overall improvements to the hardware abstraction layer and class compliant drivers (Remember how many hardware drivers you had to install in Windows 95? Around a dozen, probably...but it's 2-3 at most on Win11...and not that it's a generally-useful thing, but cloning a hard drive to dissimilar hardware works WAY better than even the Win7 era).
7. Networking improvements (IPv6 support, Windows Firewall, SMB 3.0, optional NFS support).
8. DirectX improvements (90's era games have their own look and a nostalgia feel, but games that look like Cyberpunk simply weren't possible on DirectX 2.0).
9. Peripheral support (USB 4.0 is a bit sluggish out of the gate...but do you REALLY want to go back to the bad-old-days of SCSI, Parallel ports, and 12Mbit/sec USB 1.1?).

There are a bunch of more specific ones (Windows Media Center was the BEST cable box to ever exist and it is a CRIME that none of the OEMs ever mass produced a PC as a purpose-built DVR), and of course there are 10,001 security fixes that have been implemented since then, but those are just a handful of Windows improvements that I'd at least give credit where it's due.

That's a feature, not a bug.

Lots of the people they're selling to pitched the benefits of return-to-office mandates, so this too sounds like a feature, not a bug.

Because this wasn't a solved problem with VPNs and RDP, or Dropbox or Nextcloud, a decade ago...

vague...

Clippy and Cortana didn't excite anyone; Copilot won't, either...

You can't get more than 5TB of storage in Microsoft365 at any price.

For Microsoft shareholders, probably. For folks who realized that Office has been basically feature complete since 2010, that there sounds like some Hollywood Accounting. I'd call it Microsoft Accounting, but that was discontinued in 2009.

Bold of you to assume the certs are going to nginx or apache servers or something else that will serve up an HTTP request like that. Now, to be fair, you may be right that 51% of them are, but the majority of the certs I implement aren't.

Many go to firewalls; Fortigate, Sonicwall, and Sophos all have HTTP frontends to their VPN services; it's not like I can just throw a text file into the server's /var/www folder. Others go to reverse proxies, that don't themselves host the file in question. I've been able to use acme.sh to script the stop-renew-start process needed for nginx at 4AM to make it happen, but the fact that the script has to stop nginx as part of the process means there's a bit more to the process than maybe there should be. Oh, and I've still got 2-3 Exchange servers I haven't decommissioned yet; you haven't LIVED until you've had to renew one of those monstrosities via Powershell...and no, you can't just HTTP that one easily; it's always easier to do it via DNS. Finally, I've got some folks who I have to renew their certs and give them to their web developer, who won't really assist in the process, so it's either DNS or e-mail for them, infuriatingly enough.

There are plenty of places SSL certs are used where the HTTP validation is more headache than it's worth.

You had me in the first half - we agree that 100mph isn't easy to do by accident.

The abuse comes in later on. Give it a year or two, and it'll be amended so it's "automatic at 100mph, on the table starting at 80", and a year or two more before it's an option for *any* speeding violation...

I say this because my county, many years ago, told us that they were going to implement red light cameras. ONLY at the 20 most dangerous intersections to begin with, and the county had a MAXIMUM of 50 they could EVER implement. I really should have bet money, because I *knew* before the motion even made it to the voting stage that we were going to end up with 150 cameras eventually. A year after the first 20 were installed, they placed the order for the back 30 cameras...and twice, they voted to increase the number of cameras, so we've got 150 cameras, like clockwork.

I'll agree with you here, as long as the governor is JUST a governor. How much you want to bet that there will be telemetry data collected and then sold to insurance companies? A speed governor shouldn't require an internet connection, so who wants to bet that putting the thing in a faraday cage will constitute 'tampering'? I'd agree that it's *probably* less oppressive, but unless the law also stipulates that the only information insurance companies will get is whether or not you have a governor, there's every incentive to turn an installation into a data collection racket.

Good news: both iTunes and Amazon still sell many of them in this way. Not all of them, of course (infuriatingly, Apple still won't sell episodes of For All Mankind as episode downloads, despite the existence of Blu-Ray releases...), but many can still be purchased this way.

This has been a pretty big issue for years now. It's exceedingly rare to find something that connects to Wi-Fi and doesn't demand a first party app and an account to be created. I literally couldn't find a smartwatch that didn't require one; I tried several. A client bought an HP scanner that had a very, very indirect way of setting up the printer without an account. Another client who set the printer up without me made one, and the all-in-one won't scan to a computer on the LAN without providing HP account credentials.

No.

I'm glad this guys' story got a bit of traction. What makes it particularly annoying is that none of this is divulged to users up front. One has to Google around enough to hope someone has indicated whether a particular function is account-walled, and hope that someone is able to articulate it enough to make a decision before the purchase.

Here's to hoping Bosch is shamed enough into unlocking this functionality, but even if they did...it would have to come through a firmware upgrade...which one would have to create an account to install....

It's probably worth looking into the rabbit hole of hands the brand has went through over the years.

Back in 2005ish, a company with that name attempted to go legit, selling DRM'd WMA music downloads. They were also pretty innovative in that they were the first company to sell a music subscription service, where you could spend $15/month and download everything you wanted, as long as you synced up your player once a month to reset the timer on it (Slashdot decried the practice at the time, but what happens when you don't pay your Spotify bill in 2025, and how would you implement that in the pre-smartphone era? ...basically this).

The single biggest issue they had was that they weren't compatible with iPods, which meant that their target demographic were the handful of folks that had players from Creative Labs, iRiver, and Samsung, who were also willing to pay a subscription for music despite Limewire being fully operational at the same time.

After that venture imploded once the iPhone showed up on the scene, and Windows Mobile (also compatible with DRM'd WMA files including N2G) lost pretty much all of its market share in a year or two, the company got bought out by Rhapsody. Rhapsody pursued a bit more indirect revenue stream, making deals with cable companies for music streaming channels, and in-store music systems akin to Muzak of the 80's; their direct-to-consumer subscriptions were a bit of a niche. They coasted on that for a bit, keeping the Napster name on the books, possibly a few patents and contracts, but largely sitting on it and focusing on the Rhapsody branding. Rhapsody had a mobile streaming app in the early days, but they were never able to get the general appeal that Pandora did, and later Spotify.

I hadn't heard from either company in years, having lost track of them...but Napster had a much longer lifespan as a legitimate music service than it did as the gateway to copyright infringement for the masses.

I've got at least some backhandedly good news for you...

While technically still available, it's gotten so slow that it's not much of a selling point anymore. I moved to VoidTools' Everything years ago for file searching, and it's instant in terms of looking for file names and types. Of course, if you're looking to search document contents, searching is also instant in Office365...but it's a bit of a headache on a local machine.

The Start Menu has been ground zero for Windows enshittification for over a decade now. Started in Windows 8 because Ballmer's swan song was trying to turn the desktop into a tablet. That got ratcheted back a bit in Win10, but Classic Shell / Open Shell has been a near requirement ever since, if you wanted the experience you're looking for. Windows 11 made it even worse because they rearranged things to make Classic Shell much more annoying to use without ExplorerPatcher bringing back the non-craptastic taskbar, but it's a cat-and-mouse game between Windows updates oh-so-conveniently breaking ExplorerPatcher, and the EP devs fixing it. Of course, the fact that the Start Menu is where Windows has a propensity to put "app recommendations" has nothing to do with breaking things that enable users to avoid them, I'm sure...

This is still semi-true - the Open/Save dialogs have undergone some small iterations over the years; some show the QuickAccess folder tree on the left, while others are the Win95 style that doesn't...while ultimately close-enough to not be confusing, and I do appreciate the commitment to backwards compatibility in this respect, it's something that has at least a few iterations that can be confusing for users who can't find where their shortcut sidebar went.

Definitely still has this, definitely miss it in most desktop environments i've tried on Linux. DIY desktop shortcuts from the applications menu is inconsistent-at-best, and it's not terribly obvious how to make them most times I've tried.

I don't know if Windows still has those things - the last version I had any real experience with was XP. But I sure do miss them just about every day, even 15+ years later.

Well, the good news is that Windows is still trying to appeal to the MacOS and Chromebook crowd, so most of these functions are being removed from Windows in the name of "ease of use" or something...so, whatever you've picked up in terms of getting your Linux environment to work to your needs, keep doing that, because you'll pretty much have to go back to Windows XP to get the desktop to work the way you want...unless, of course, the ReactOS folks manage to make some solid headway...I'm rooting for them!

Sure, and in many cases, all the mobo-integrated stuff is just fine. The request wasn't necessarily for such a board to become an industry standard, just that there are cases where a more complete set of PCIe slots are preferable without needing a Xeon or Threadripper.

The problem is that most GPUs will use 16 lanes regardless of whether they're utilizing all of the bandwidth. x1/x4/x8 cards exist, but they're rare and not typically available on a shelf. Amongst the things that would be helpful would be to have all the slots be full-length and then decide how many lanes each slot utilizes in the BIOS, letting the cards ratchet down to x8/x4/x1 based on the motherboard's settings, but it's rare for a motherboard to give any level of control to the user - the only one I've ever owned that did, to my knowledge, was an Asrock TaiChi x570, and even that was after a bios update.

So, what sort of things would one populate several PCIe slots for? Let's see...

NICs. Of course, NICs are built into the motherboard, and if you're running Windows, you're probably fine. But the 2.5GbE chipsets tend to have inconsistent-at-best support on Linux or BSD, and there are times where 10GbE NICs, or even quad-port GbE NICs are helpful.

Multiple GPUs...but not for SLI or Crossfire. I've built machines with multiple GPUs because the user wanted six displays. I'd like to add an additional GPU to my system to pass through to a VM because I would like it to do some dedicated video transcoding tasks without taxing my regular GPU.

HBA's. My NAS is humble by r/datahoarder standards, but with SATA port counts dwindling on chipsets, PCIe HBAs are almost requirements for a NAS build. They *are* requirements if SAS drives are intended to be used. Similarly, it's basically impossible to have an NVMe-based NAS, because, even if one were to spend a fortune on a PCIe NVMe switch to fit more drives, the poor layout on the motherboard makes it impossible to use them in any real quantity.

Of course, these are absolutely niche, system building, homelabbing, esoteric needs...but so is DIY PC-building at this point, for the most part. If one is building a system, it's because their needs aren't served with an Optiplex or an Alienware. I'm not advocating for *every* motherboard to be built this way, but if there's a market for a Neon Genesis Evangelion motherboard, there's a market for a non-server board with usable PCIe slots.

It's such a pain to get a motherboard with expansion slots these days, that doesn't cost a king's ransom.

Back in the PCI days, a motherboard would have 4-8 slots, and they all worked, all the time. Buy card -> add card -> install driver -> use card. Done.

Now, it's a game of whack-a-mole...

The motherboard has four slots - an x16, an x8, and 2 x1's. The X16 ratchets down to x8 if the x8 slot is also occupied. The first x1 slot is useless because it's immediately adjacent to the x16 slot, so the GPU fans cover it. The only way you can use it is if the GPU is in the x8 slot, which isn't a win because the second x1 slot is itself immediately adjacent to the x8.
Meanwhile, the x8 slot shares its bandwidth with one of the NVMe slots, so if there's an NVMe drive on the board, it ratchets down to x4, but if the x16 slot is populated AND the first NVMe slot is populated, then the x8 slot doesn't work at all. This leaves one working x1 slot, but shoot me now, it's not one of the open-ended ones, so I can't fit this x4 card in and let it run at x1 speeds, so I have to buy a new x1 variant of the x4 card I already have, slap it in and realize that the HBA cables aren't long enough to reach the drives, but it's the only slot that it'll work in...so I get a longer HBA cable and oh, the processor only has 24 PCIe lanes, which are taken up by the x16 slot, the two NVMe drives, and the northbridge...which apparently, needs the bandwidth for the completely empty SATA ports, but I *can* get it to work if I upgrade my processor to one with 28 lanes, which then requires a firmware upgrade to work, but I can't get the machine to boot into BIOS to do the update because I returned the 24-lane processor, and OH FFS.......

NONE of this, of course, is ever described on the box, nor documented in the manual, nor is it configurable in the BIOS so I can at least make some choices and visualize what will and won't work. No, one must search around and hope that some Redditor is in the same boat and took the time to map it out and document it online.

The way around this, of course, is to get a Threadripper CPU that costs $1,500, to power the $1,200 motherboard that has 8 x16 slots that all work, but now the power usage doubles and you need an eATX case to fit it, which doesn't fit on the desk anymore, and OH FFS...

What I would *love*, is for a motherboard that handled quantity over quality. Do I need PCIe 7? no...but if PCIe 7 has octuple the throughput of PCIe 4, and I've got 24 lanes of PCIe 7 from the CPU, make a motherboard that makes it function like 192 lanes of PCIe 4. Give me 8 full-length PCIe 4 slots, 4 NVMe slots, and give the rest to the Northbridge. Every single slot and port works, regardless of what else is populated.

I'll take some variants of this - give me a motherboard that's got only one PCIe slot, but fill the rest of the board up with NVMe slots. Can I fit a dozen? Because I want a ludicrously-fast NVMe NAS without having to buy PCIe switches at $300 a pop. An 8-slot board is pretty much guaranteed to be eATX; I'll take a variant that has 6 slots that's standard ATX size with the same principle.

Ultimately, I'd love nothing more than a desktop motherboard that isn't a game of musical slots....

Honestly, this could probably work...but ironically, the fact that it could work is why the mandate is being implemented in the first place.

So, unfortunately, the Raspberry Pi is stuck between a rock and a hard place, which is sad, because it's perfect for the role.

The problem is that things like Kodi and LibreElec and OSMC will never have official support from any of the streaming services. There are workarounds to get Netflix and Hulu and Youtube added, but they are all CLI-based and take an afternoon to set up, and it's the cat-and-mouse game between those companies and the hopefully-well-meaning individual who managed to reverse-engineer an unofficial client for them.

MythTV is no solution at this point; the pervasive copy protection flags make it useless for a good number of subscribers. Congrats to the iTunes and Amazon libraries for having good-enough DRM to prevent either of these services from having a viable means to play back on a RasPi, either.

This leaves the RasPi to be a tenable solution when the source of content is Plex/Emby/Jellyfin, and some of the sketchy streaming services (the ones who take payments in Bitcoin), but little else. As an added bonus, Roku ends up being half the price of a RasPi.

So yeah, unfortunately, it seems that DRM is the single biggest reason why Roku meaningfully exists. On the upswing, they haven't seemed to fight *too* hard against ad blockers, so a PiHole tends to be pretty effective at blocking most of the ads on the platform.

I'll concede that the last time I had a Samsung phone running Samsung firmware, it was in the Lollipop days, and when they had an update it was "install now" or "remind me in four hours". The nag would overlay on whatever you were doing at the time, and there was no way to schedule or deny the update (4.4.4 was when Android peaked, IMO).
I'm sure they've gotten better, likely adopting Apple's method of scheduling updates for 3AM while charging or some such, but for a while there, they were particularly bad.

This right here is the solution. We can all pack up and go home; this is the EXACT right answer.

Samsung: Our dedicated update team ensures that you get *timely* updates, where 'timely' means "the least convenient time possible", and 'update' means "additional functionality that zero customers asked for, but adds useless icons and notifications".

Apple: "Our updates are generally innocuous, and you don't *have* to take them, but good luck getting any new apps, since all the app developers are going to mandate the new version"

Firefox: "Our update addresses the most important function a browser can have: incrementing the version number."

Hello Games: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these developers from the infinite continuation of No Man's Sky".

Google: "Well, we incremented the SDK and changed the window dressing a bit....SQUIRREL!"