No, it is not the beginning. That happened many years ago, when they first started to betray their original USP feature: just a simple textbox on a white page that searched very well and did nothing else. Add to that their massive Google Analytics privacy invasions and Google landed in my hate box a long time ago. I've basically dumped them (with the exception of maps) back when DuckDuckGo was first announced. For a while, I did still fall back on Google if I DDG didn't give me what I wanted fast enough, but over time I've just completely stopped using Google for search. The thought of maybe trying them when a search doesn't do what I want fast enough doesn't even come up anymore.

And yes, I also hate that even DDG has been adding crap extra features. Whenever they do, I disable those as well.

I did have a rarely used (i.e. secondary) Google e-mail address at one point, a couple of centuries ago. However, I dropped that as well around 2012 or so and I never looked back. I don't want them auto-reading my e-mail for their own nefarious purposes.

Are you sure you didn't start out talking about Windows?

Bloated and no longer supporting the original hardware on which it was developed. Check

but no price. Does anyone know the cost?

https://academy.canonical.com/shop?:

Using Linux Terminal

Prove your basic operational knowledge of Linux by demonstrating your ability to secure, operate and maintain basic system resources. Topics include user and group management, file and filesystem navigation, and logs and installation tasks related to system maintenance.

Price: $ 100.00

Same here. I used to spend endless time on /., even while at work, as so much of what happened over here was somehow relevant to my job anyway. Of course, I no longer do that same job, but even if I did I still wouldn't be a daily /. visitor today. Sic transit gloria mundi, I guess, but very sweet memories nonetheless.

Downloading the floppies for Linux 0.12 at work and then almost literally running home as fast as I could to get it installed is another of those beautiful memories. Especially as it actually booted and worked. :-) I sure didn't get a lot of sleep on that first night towards killing DOS on my home box.

It's been a while, but I tried to used LibreOffice for several years on Win10 and eventually had to drop it for a copy of Office (not 365, fortunately), There were just too many subtle and less subtle incompatibilities with the Office that I had to use on my work PCs.

I even tried to get the Libre team to address some of those (e.g. as options), but they said "We're not a copy of Office" (fair enough) and "We do it the right way" (which I honesty did not always agree with). Regardless of right vs wrong, some basic Calc manipulations were so "non-standard" for no other reason than arbitrary choice, that I had to abandon Libre. It cost me far too much frustrating loss of time (with an implied risk of loss of data), and it caused too many problems for the people I had to share my files with and who I could not force to switch to Libre.

I don't like Windows. I never did. But I sadly have one machine on which I need it. That one currently is on Win 10 and I most definitely do not want it to be upgraded to the even more privacy-invasive, ad-invasive, user-ignoring Win 11. Fortunately, it doesn't have TPM 2.0, so it currently can't, which suits me just fine.

What's more, that machine is aging and I've started to worry that it will physically break down within 1 year or so - judging by what happened to my earlier ones.So, recently, I went shopping and found a brand new "older" computer that does not satisfy Win11 's requirements, and which is now sitting in storage until I need it to keep Win11 out of my life for another 6 years or so. Hopefully by the time that one also breaks, I will finally be able to escape Windows altogether.

And yes, I do know about the risks of running an unsupported OS. Fact is, nothing truly sensitive is stored on - or connected to - that one machine, and I only use it for certain specific tasks, which allows me to shield it from many risks "by default". And it's sitting behind a double firewall anyway (and for one application even a triple one, as the relevant service provider also applies serious scanning and filtering to the point of annoying me with false positives).

My keys are with me at home and I know where they are, but not with me as in "always on my body". If I have to carry them literally everywhere where I might need them to log in (3 computers in 2 fixed and 1 mobile location, spread over 3 floors) and also every time I change between regular clothes, military clothes, and DIY clothes, then that is when I will "loose" them all the time.

Very much this. Early Chrome wasn't without it's flaws, but it WORKED and it was fast. I'm fuzzy on the details and can't be arsed to look up the timeline, but IIRC IE7 was being pushed out and the flaming heap that was IE8 was being forced upon us enterprise Windows users. Both browsers had matured to the Hot Garbage phase of early 2000's software.

Despite the whining of the rest of my IT department, who would only support IE, I switched to Chrome about a week after public release and haven't looked back. It's both better and worse than it used to be, but Chrome is still my daily driver browser. I've tried most of the alternatives, but I keep coming back to Chrome.

Civil cases (like this one) and criminal cases have far different standards.

I tried a few of my old e-mail addresses that no longer work.

• One very old one that I know was leaked at least twice around 2000 (but no longer know when and how) was not reported.
• One was correctly identified as leaked in the 2003 Adobe hack - I knew that already.
• One that stopped working in 2014 was reported as not leaked. I am, however, about 80% that it was leaked at least once around 2010-2012 (I don't remember the specifics of that, however).
• One was claimed to be leaked in the 2021 LI scraping, but... by then this address had been obsolete for 2 years and had 99.999999% for sure already been removed from LI.
• Two more that LI knew about in 2021 were not reported as leaked. Quite weird.

It can give you hints, but they can be just as meaningless and confusing for non-native speakers. One extreme example: in German (and in Dutch as well) the word for "boy" is masculine, whereas the word for "girl" is not feminine but neutral. To make things even worse, if in German one would try to make "girl" feminine, one would get "die Maedchen", which actually means "girls" (plural).

At least in Dutch the latter would not be the case, since we append an 's' to express the plural of "meisje" and change "het" into "de" at the same time (similar to how German changes "das" into die"). Or how adding some redundancy can help...

So why do they bother cloning in the first place?

In case you delete/hide your repo? Or they may want to make changes later, but not upstream them?

I have one Win 10 Pro laptop that runs just fine, but is not illegible to run Win 11. Anyway, even if it were, I would not want to get 11 - to many annoyances. And/But I most certainly don't want ads to sell me Win 11 for/on this machine. So I've been keeping it frozen on specific Win 10 versions for several years and have been blocking all surprise updates for a long time now. In fact, the machine was upgraded only once over all those years and even now is not on the very latest Win 10, because each time Windows get updated to a new release too many things break or too much time has to be spent getting my personal preferences set correctly again.

Last week I was actually starting to look at upgrading to the final Win 10 later this year or early in 2025, prior to EoL, but if that means that I'll be facing forced Win 11 ads, it just will not happen. Blocking Win 11 was my original reason for my policy after all.

I will definitely not update until someone publishes the right registry hack to kill those !@#$%^&* ads.

I fully get your point - I am a bit of a privacy nerd - but let's see..

Joe D.(igitaly Illiterate) Random's router is infected. So an employee of a three letter government agency shows up and explains that his router has been used by teh Rusians to attack the DoD and DoJ, and that a software update needs to be installed in order to stop this. What are the chances of our dear Joe allowing this to happen? What are the chances that he'll accuse the government of trying to illegally invade his privacy, or even wanting to install a secret "5G" feature in an attempt to wirelessly control his brain via the microchip they implanted when he got vaccinated against smallpox as a child 40 years ago?