Urbanists.video is what I’m binging now. As a child, I wanted to be a transportation engineer and as an adult I’m a frequent cyclist, so I find this stuff interesting. Plus, most of it is in English when many peertube instances are not.

I hate new Outlook. Might as well switch the whole company to Yahoo mail or Hotmail. :D

Recently I found some peertube instances that had good quality content that was interesting to me and had more of a chance to test drive it than I have in the past. Very nice!

Lol, the minimalist window decoration had me thinking you were running a terminal inside of the home directory of your file manager. :D

I’ve seen weirder things.

My Logitec MX Master devices can be configured on Linux via Piper. Logitech Options (the official software) is for Windows and I’ve never messed with it, even on my Windows devices. The two MX Master devices I have work plug and play and having 2 Bluetooth connections and a dongle channel lets me easily switch between my computers without swapping mice. Apparently with the official software, I could drag the mouse from one computer’s desktop to another, but I’m happy to mash the little button on the bottom to tab between devices if it saves me having to interact with another hardware manufacturer’s half advertisement/half utility app.

Still using a 5 year old laptop with no degradation in performance and expecting at least another 5. All I had to do was uninstall some malware that was eating up all the system resources and popping up a bunch of ads. It was called Windows. :-D

Good point. If I know it’ll meet my needs, I’m sometimes inclined to buy tech that’s a few years old, especially if the newer version just adds cloud, AI, or something else I don’t want/need. In many cases it’s still marketed the same so I think end of support dates should be clearly marked on the product itself so the consumer can make an informed choice. Intentionally bricking a device should be treated as littering and the company should be responsible for disposal fees.

Linux is a different story because of the volunteer presence. If anything Linux should get subsidies for keeping e-waste out of landfills after the manufacturer has long abandoned the product.

My laptop is about 5 years old now and still runs as fast as the day I bought it, if not faster. I replaced the battery twice, but this thing could go another 5-10 years if I don’t drop it or spill something on it.

I’m ashamed to admit I totally forgot about ddwrt/openwrt. It’s been a decade or so since I messed with that. Good call.

Good point. Startup effort is not the same as effort once you are comfortable with your system.

I had my turning point early on when I first learned to update all my packages from the terminal. For me, this changed the game compared to how Windows programs handled updates at the time and Linux became officially easier than Windows… for me.

I could see how this “point of equal ease”, could come later for some users, especially those who want to run Windows software or do something advanced.

Yes, I’m several years into my de-googling process and a solid email client is not something I’m worried about. K9 is great and, as Thunderbird, we can only hope that it gets better.

I bought my first handheld anything, the Palm Zire 31 in high school. Everyone thought I was weird, but I was also organized. :P

And the Tidal app has an amoled dark mode, which I don’t think Spotify has. Sometimes the little quality of life things make a big difference.

I’d be active in there. So many companies hide their pricing and gimmicks so you don’t know until you start using it. There’s few advertisements for useful unshittifying tools like RES or the one that fixes Facebook, tools that let you download Instagram photos, etc. Free alternatives like grrrrmin which can generate strava-likeheatmaps from your Garmin data can also be hard to find. Lemmy has been good for this, as Reddit once was. There are a lot if things that are only usable to me after extensive unshittifying.

I switched from Spotify when they cut my family off of my plan because some of them don’t always live with me. I like Tidal a lot, but wish it was easier for me to share a song with friends who don’t use it. Ironically, I don’t think any family members but my dad actually use my Tidal plan, so basically I just switched out of spite.

Those last 2 lines really sum it up don’t they. If Windows was a family member you would disown them.

I had to do all the same things on my work computer. If MS could stop shitting all over my taskbar that would be an amazing expression of basic decency. I’m about to go to IT and ask for a Linux computer that I can test with my day to day tools to make sure everything works. Typically only a few devs have them and those of us in support roles are on Windows. Microsoft is literally sapping away the time and effort my employer has paid me to put towards their customers. I use Linux at home and it has none of these problems. Actually, the worst problem I’ve had in years was a broken package that I simply uninstalled and re-added from a different source.

I think this is mostly because people who know about it have a mental block that it’s only for nerds. Millions have been using Android on their phones for years, though we’ll limit ourselves to desktop GNU/Linux type distributions for this discussion.

Actual usage of Linux has gotten much easier since 2006ish when I first tried it out. With all the popups and ads in Windows nowadays, its rapidly becoming harder to use than Linux, something I did not expect. I don’t see a combined Linux User Group/ Bingo Club/ Bridge Group forming anytime soon, but Linux Mint isn’t any harder to use than Windows, even for normies with an average level of tech skills.

You mean after the price hike they also hiked the number of ads? I canceled when they hiked the price and managed to get it down to the old price a few months later, so I renewed for the personal heatmap. Looks like I’m definitely canceling again. I doubt they’ll give me the price break twice anyway.

Baking ads into a timeline like Strava and some other apps do has to be the worst app trend ever.

You put words to the feeling I get whenever I turn on my work PC. It has relatively little to do with my actual work. It’s the dread of the psychological abuse of everything asking me to update, upgrade, and look at how cool our AI is, try all of our other products, share your opinion, etc. etc. etc. I would be twice as productive if they let me BYOOS (bring your own OS) and if my day to day tools were Linux compatible. There are best practices for this kind of thing, but many of the most “reputable” tech companies willingly disregard them in favor of mind games and dark psychology.

With MS enshitifying Windows at an ever increasing pace and the hard work of open source developers, volunteers, advocates, to make Linux better and more approachable, I won’t be surprised at all to see that percentage move up.

“You mean its free and doesn’t try to sell me other products the whole time I’m using it?”