Left hand: mouse.
Right hand: actual directional cursor keys, ins/home/pgup/pndn/end/del, ctrl, shift, \, backspace, AND THE ENTIRE NUMERIC KEYPAD.

wasd? ewww. Seriously?

....where you own nothing!

....until it can produce ID.

...they're just projections. Stop raising them to some techno wonderment achievement. It's just a projector.

I haven’t meaningfully used Windows since September 2023. I'm approaching two years on disability and am about to take early retirement for health reasons. My work laptop (still running Windows) has sat unopened this whole time. Once the paperwork is finalised, it’ll go back and good riddance to it.

I use Mint, Debian, and OMV across my machines. My daily driver is a Framework 13 with an AMD board and 64GB of DDR5 RAM. Total overkill, but I love it. Even when I code, I barely touch its resources, but that's likely down to the fact that I rarely compile anything. In my work life, I was a data scientist, so I coded in Python and R, and when I code now, it's Python or BASH scripting itch-scratching utilities. Anyhow, just browsing Slashdot and syncing with NextCloud, my CPU idles around 2%, RAM at 4%, and it's running at a balmy 41C. Why add bloatware to that?

Now contrast that with a family friend I recently helped. She's almost 80 and only uses her computer for email and browsing. Her CPU was pegged at 100% and her 4GB of RAM was constantly maxed out. I’d already replaced her spinning drive with an SSD a while back, and recently upgraded her to 16GB of spare DDR3, yes, DDR3, I had lying around. Still, her system crawled. Why? Windows telemetry alone was eating 49% of her CPU. We cleaned up startup junk and malware, but she’s still stuck on Windows 10, on a dated Lenovo G505 that was low-end even when she bought it. If that's Windows 10, how much worse is 11, with its Copilot interference, Microsoft malware, and nearly irremovable junk?

I honestly don’t understand why non-technical users who only browse the web feel locked into Windows. It's like people with limited computing resources feel the need to give away their processing power to corporations that monetise their data and make their machine unusable for what? a familiar UI? Her only installed application is Firefox. She doesn’t even use a stand-alone email client. Meanwhile, I keep an old first-gen i7 Toshiba Tecra running Debian 12 with XFCE around just for its optical drive. That chip is from 2009 and it still feels faster than her 2015 Windows 10 machine.

This isn’t 2001 any more. Running Linux on the desktop isn't niche, just practical. Most web traffic is bots, spam and a few portals anyway. It just sucks that Windows is so abusive to the folks who buy it and they as for plead for 'more please'.

I think it’s time I updated my .sig. Spammers have moved on from polluting blogs...

I worked at a big bank and knowledge management was an after-thought. Confluence was seen as a "A place where knowledge goes to die". I heard about StackOverflow for teams and thought it was a good fit -- we have a lot of siloed (even worse with Covid/WFH) developers and a lot of large complex systems. Just knowing who to ask was often a mystery. Having a place to ask and share would have been a great tool.

Unfortunately management churn ensured it never made it to the funding stage, and then co-pilot (which totally lacked our institutional knowledge) was posited as an alternative. That was the end of that. Sad.

What we've all be clamoring for all this time: better ads. Wow! Who knew?

I've been using Linux since I've been on Slashdot. I use Mint now mostly because I can't be arsed to use anything else. I am not sure if it's faster than Windows or not because for my last two laptops, I removed the SSD, put a new one in and installed Linux. I'll take your word for it.

I bought a friend a laptop and let Windows 11 install itself. What a pain to install. It took hours with all the updates and reboots, then hours removing bloatware, copilot and ads. Something is messed up when it takes editing the registry edits to remove crap. That's before even installing apps. I'll bet the unwanted stuff comes back on the next update.

SMFH I don't remember Windows being that much of a PITA back in the Windows 7 days or was that just forgetting stuff because it was so long ago..

Until you forgot to shave, try to open the door three times, get locked out and need to make an appointment at the "genius bar" in two weeks just to go home.

The first Mac users are now in their 80s. They'll never think to look there. There will be phone calls.

"We don't make products, we make money".

Yeah, good luck with the TWA capitalism game. Let's sell the factory to make our quarterly! Shareholders will be happy (this quarter, never again after).

Both hemp and bamboo grow many times faster than trees. Wouldn't that be a better carbon dump?

The idea that we want personalized, relevant corporate content is Bespoke Spam. We don't actually get to personalize it ourselves, like shutting it off. It's all push, push, push by marketing departments and and poor tools for us to make our own decisions about that content we actually want. The dog wags you.

Is that not the norm? I think I've done 3 returns in 15 years, one was an empty envelope, one was a "new' tablet that couldn't connect to WiFi with someone else's data on it. The other was a car part that I got wrong.

0) Document what you do on your Windows computer then categorize them as must haves and good to haves so that you're ready for the second bullet.