Microsoft : “Set Bing as your search engine now!”
Google : “It looks like malicious software tried to change your settings. Change it back.”
Microsoft : “Wait, don’t change it back!”
Really putting the “dialog” in “dialog box”. What the hell.
That’s hilarious.
If anything will finally result in the “year of the Linux desktop,” it’s shit like this. No one wants their operating system actively working to make it harder and more annoying to use their choice of applications.
The OS isn’t the reason anyone uses a computer, it’s the applications it can run.
This result is predictable for a lot of different things that started as products and seem to be ending up as services.
Microsoft wants Windows to be a subscription service with the associated perks to the company (namely, targeted ads, and also extreme control over anything the system does, including this ad scheme), and so an increased number of people seek a more traditional OS.
The movie industry pushes streaming down everyone’s throat as a highly fragmented market where media ownership no longer exists; thus an increased number of people start to return to physical media.
Car companies push to paywall features of their cars behind subscription services. An increased number of people seek used cars which have no such paywalls.
The patterns are clear, in my view, but the C-suite is always driven by a naïve lust for ever-increasing profit.
(my personal experience)
A couple of months ago, I bought a new laptop that came with Windows 11. I turned off the safe boot stuff, plugged in a Linux USB drive, wiped out Windows, and went to it.
The next 6 weeks or so, i spent about 75% of my time reading articles that included things like, “In order to get this non-Microsoft program/service/etc. to mostly work (‘will still randomly crash, we don’t know why’), you have to get Linux to pretend to be Windows, here is a lengthy process, different than how you made Linux pretend to be Windows for that other program.” The other 25% of the time, I was reading articles about why I chose the “wrong” Linux flavor, and that was the cause of the rest of my problems. “We know you have this wide choice of Linux options, but if you don’t pick this one variety of Linux (that has a fair amount of controversy), no one wants to support you, sorry.” (this just sounds like Windows, with extra steps)
Some of these things to me were basic, like, running Windows I have a good amount of control over the CPU speed, which indirectly helps me manage how much noise the fan makes. The Linux options were “Do you want the worst CPU speed or best? That is all we can do.” Or, i wanted to connect to a hosted file sync service, which it could only do through it’s own graphical file manager, that not all installed applications supported, and that WAS NOT SUPPORTED ON THE COMMAND LINE. An app, built natively for Linux, didn’t support the command line. (meaning, i couldn’t open the command line and see the mounted remote source in the folder structure and correct file names, it was mounted there, but all the file names were IDs in one giant folder) My brain broke a little that day as someone that has dabbled with Linux for Server for 3 decades.
I feel like anyone that has tight enough app expectations where Linux/Windows doesn’t really matter, is probably someone who would be well served by a Tablet and could stay entirely out of the whole conversation. I really wanted Linux as my primary OS, and I worked hard at it, but I have a family and 1-2 jobs, and just couldn’t spend any more time fighting the OS to run basic apps/have basic control. Went back to Windows, installed WSL and a Linux on VM, and spend less time fighting to get non-MS things to work.
edit: For the people down voting, I would love to hear how my personal experience was wrong. I had what I considered basic needs that were not being met, and so I altered what I was doing until I could gain enough information to try again, rather than staring at an expensive doorstop. :)
You are mostly right. Its tricky to get into Linux.
- Linux is not for running windows programs. Linux alternative of such programs suffice my need. although some can be installed using wine but its highly likely you will likely run into bug. Some apps such as adobe suite, office 365, etc won’t work at all.
- Those distro recommendation websites are garbage, don’t trust any of them. There are “basically” three main flavours
- Arch
- Debian/Ubuntu
- Redhat
Everything else is just based on them. Like pop os, Mint, Zorin are basically same under the hood. You can make any distro do whatever you want.
For Steam/games, i was trying to run “windows” stuff, as the games were not native. For other things, like sound (never worked right), Blender (took me a few days to learn i had to run Blender through an app that forces GPU), or the file sync, they were supposed to be native. But I was doing a lot of fighting. I wasn’t reading distro recommendation sites, I was trying to troubleshoot issues. “Here is how you fix this issue on Ubuntu, no instructions for any other flavor).” (but I installed a derivative of Arch because I was interested in the rolling release instead of fixed releases, and turns out there was significantly less troubleshooting material)
I might go back again, maybe with a dual boot scenario, and try again without
Arch wiki is the most comprehensive Linux wiki. Try that.
Gotta keep the shareholders happy with the pyramid scheme.
…that’s not what a Pyramid scheme is.
Everyone puts their money in a stock for infinite growth and then it all collapses once every 20 years because the infinite growth is not real.
Sounds a lot like it.
You’re conflating several different and unique concepts and scenarios together here, which is why your comment and point didn’t make any sense.
You can be angry at how the stock market is manipulated sometimes, but a pyramid or ponzi scheme is a very specific thing, which the stock market absolutely is not.
The fact that you believe that they are similar shows the limits of your knowledge on the subject. You should listen to the other commentor replying to you, they’re explaining why you’re mistaken, but you’re doubling down on your misunderstanding. Don’t make this mistake.
2008 lmaooo
