AMD GPU + KDE Plasma with Wayland finally gets me close enough to the smoothness of Windows, especially the per-display settings for fractional scaling and high refresh rate were sorely lacking on Linux. It’s not perfect yet (and neither is Windows’ implementation) but it improved the Linux desktop experience a ton!
Seriously. I used Manjaro for a short period about 5 or 6 years ago but ran into so many issues with it. Vanilla Arch on the other hand is very forgiving in my experience. I have a second desktop PC with Arch installed and I only update that machine once every couple of months when I actually need to use it. In my four years of doing that I never had an update break my system.
YouTube Shorts doesn’t even work properly for me. At least half the videos, that are suggested to me, I’ve already seen multiple times before. Boring, as you said. I’ve found myself staying off of social media or news sites more in the last couple of weeks. News’ll make me depressive, social media bores me. Then again, more time for hobbies!
I just went the ol’ VPN route and got a YouTube Premium family subscription in Turkey. It’s about 2€/month for 5 people; peanuts essentially. I wish I could avoid giving money to Google entirely but I’m mostly using Apple devices to consume YouTube content and my four friends who share the subscription with me do as well. So yeah, that’s the trade-off I can live with.
The KDE desktop environment definitely plays a sound when you change the volume. I use my Logitech G Pro X wireless headset on Linux and Windows and just change the volume using the dial on the unit and it behaves the same way in both OS.
Though, to be fair, I do share some of the frustrations you mention. I’m mostly on Apple products apart from my two desktop PCs (one is Linux/Windows dual-boot, one is Linux only) which I own solely for gaming purposes and some hobbyist programming. I usually try to get non-Linux native applications running but if it proves to be too much of a hassle I simply boot into Windows or use my MacBook. I like to treat Linux as somewhat of a hobby and I totally understand that most people would rather have something that “just works”, especially when it comes to proprietary creative applications like the Adobe suite or DAWs. That being said, it’s extremely exciting to see the massive strides Linux on the desktop has made in the last couple of years. It has come a looooong way, honestly; especially for gaming. And I always support open-source projects/foundations - I’m donating to KDE/Arch/Wikipedia on a monthly basis - because I believe in the core values and advantages of FOSS and other community-driven foundations even though I’m far from a Richard Stallman.
My solution was to migrate to Windows 10/11 Enterprise. No ads, no nothing. The LTSC versions are even better but they’re a little too barebones for my use case. Keep in mind that those SKUs cannot be activated legally but as with anything: There are ways to circumvent that issue.
When I was still smoking I had a pocket ashtray. Saw them in some random anime a couple of years back and then bought one.
I use the Enterprise SKU of Windows 11 and you can fortunately still use the Domain Join option with that. Comes without that advertisement crap as well. The only caveat is that you can’t really activate Enterprise legally without a subscription and KMS but there are ways to circumvent that issue ;)
“ According to 49 U.S. Code § 46317, you cannot fly, or attempt to fly, an aircraft without the proper licensure. The penalty for violating this code can be substantial, with a maximum punishment of 3 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.”
https://www.skytough.com/post/fly-without-pilots-license
That’s a lot worse than getting pulled over with no driver’s license.
74% market share for desktop OS is actually a lot less than I thought. Guess macOS had a solid comeback
And they built the Burj Khalifa!
Especially cause CSGO crashes when you change graphics settings in-game all the time
I have two landline numbers that came with my internet contract but I don’t have a phone connected to the modem. So whenever your scenario happens to me I just give them one of my real landline numbers. I’ve tried calling myself and you can actually hear it ringing as the caller but no one will ever pick up lol
That’s why EULAs or other contracts are not necessarily legally binding if they contain specific parts that could be considered “unfair”; at least in the European Union.
In Germany, BMW and VW both offer subscriptions for functionality already built into the car. BMW is notorious for their heated seat subscription here and the Mk8 Golf I leased for a while had a bunch of minor stuff pay-walled like automatic high beams, changing color of the interior ambient lighting, etc.
You can still outright buy those features but it’s totally insane to pay for something that’s already physically inside the car. And it’s not like these are budget brands that need to upsell a bunch of stuff to be profitable. A base Golf starts at €31k…
Probably a gaming PC (as he mentioned Steam) without a display connected to it that’s used for game streaming using Parsec or other software like Sunshine. By the way, if you want to try that setup yourself make sure you get a dummy plug (HDMI or DisplayPort) for the GPU as Windows doesn’t really allow video capture if no display is detected.
Japan was unwilling to surrender for a long time even though Japanese cities got bombed on a near daily basis near the end of the war. The US gambled on, for a lack of a better word, the wow-factor of the atomic bomb. They guessed correctly that Japan’s leaders would assume that there’s no way in hell the US could produce another one of these “special” bombs. They dropped the second one to basically say: “Hey, we got a huge stockpile of these things so we can do this as long as you like”. Or to put it simply: It was a show of force. When Nagasaki got hit Japanese leaders were in a council meeting about the Hiroshima bombing and the Soviet’s declaration of war on Japan and even after the news arrived in Tokyo half the cabinet was still insistent on their own terms of surrender. They didn’t know how many more bombs America had and that fear played a huge part in Hirohito’s decision to end the war after more than 14 hours of debate that day.
Yeah, part of the reason cars back then were so serviceable was because they broke down all the time. A modern car with regular servicing can last very long mechanically. The amount of electronic creature comforts, safety devices etc. are often what drives up repair costs and lead to some cars becoming uneconomical to repair. Cracked windshield? That’ll be 1000 bucks because the rain sensor for your automatic wipers will have to be recalibrated. Dead headlight? $2000 because we can’t replace individual LEDs, have to take the front of the car of to replace the whole headlight assembly and calibrate the adaptive front lighting system so that it follows road curvature again.
The article only seems to mention free consumer accounts, if I didn’t accidentally skip a section. Does anyone know how this will affect M365 subscribers (both consumer/enterprise)? I use Outlook every day at work and the lack of features in the web app make it basically unusable for me.