I stopped using it once I found out their entire business model was basically copyright trolling on a technicality that anyone who answers a question gives them the copyright to the answer, and using code audits to go after businesses that had copy/pasted code. Just left a bad taste in my mouth, even beside stopping using it for work even though I wasn’t copy/pasting code.

And even before LLMs, I found ignoring stack exchange results for a search usually still got to the right information.

But yeah, it also had a moderation problem. Give people a hammer of power and some will go searching for nails, and now you don’t have anywhere to hang things from because the mod was dumber than the user they thought they needed to moderate. And now google can figure out that my question is different from the supposed duplicate question that was closed because it sends me to the closed one, not the tangentially related question the dumbass mod thought was the same thing. Similar energy to people who go to help forums and reply useless shit like RTFM. They aren’t really upset at “having” to take time to respond, they are excited about a chance to act superior to someone.

On Super Mario Wii U this happens. My daughter used it to see how to get through levels she was having trouble with. It’s frustrating to watch, though it showed me I was wrong that levels basically needed the run button to be held to make it across the gaps.

And then you can either accept that the ghost beat the level for you or go back to trying.

But, the thing is it’s not very difficult to do this with specific games. You can just record the inputs as they come in and replay those, which is how replays or saved games often work.

Seems like they want to be able to do this for arbitrary games, which requires a much more sophisticated system that can understand what’s on the screen, what the goals are, and how to achieve them using just video and audio feedback (and maybe hint documents from the makers).

It’s such a stupid approach to the stated problem that I just assumed it was actually meant for something else and the stated problem was to justify it. And made the decision to never use win 11 on a personal machine based on this “feature”.

Does ubuntu not support other desktops? I had little annoyances like that with fedora cinnamon, not quite enough to make me miss windows but enough that I’d notice them and wish I could adjust them, also I eventually learned that it was a desktop environment that heavily relied on some form of javascript, which likely explained why it sometimes couldn’t keep up with mouse updates. But then I tried KDE and it addressed all of my issues, plus some others that I didn’t even realize until I saw a better implementation, plus it’s able to maintain that realtime responsiveness cinnamon struggled with (and my machine is far low end).

It’s been a while since I used Ubuntu, and even then, it was just for school so I only really needed the terminal and didn’t care what the GUI was doing as long as it didn’t interfere with that.

Hope they update those to your liking soon in any case.

Is there a predictable difference between an exponential growth curve and a sigmoid curve before the linear growth section? Like I suppose you’d be able to measure the dropoff in acceleration as velocity reaches its peak, but given that this is also a random sample, sample noise would make that impossible to determine in real time.

I mean, it’s a % of people who use x chart, so the only way it won’t be sigmoid eventually is if it drops off as something else replaces it, but I don’t think looking at the chart will help predict where the chart is going any more than how well that works with stock prices.

Before doing the switch, part of my mind thought that it was accepting a new pain that might equal or exceed the familiar pain in the short run but would be worth it in the long run to get away from the frustration of windows.

The reality that I experienced is that it was less painful than wrangling windows to behave more like how I want it to.

I would suggest separate partitions for data/game installs if you want to try multiple distros without needing to reinstall your games. Just need to mount the partition in the new distro, maybe have steam scan it (or just set it as your game install location) and you’re good to go. Encryption might complicate the steps, but I don’t see much point in encrypting a game install partition in the first place.

Edit: Meant this comment to add on to your reply and address the “just set up a single partition”, since you addressed the distro. On that note, I’ve been happy enough with Fedora KDE that I haven’t even gotten around to trying a new distro (took me almost a year to try KDE and realize I liked it better than cinnamon in practically every way).

Now I’m curious, can you be more specific?

How usable did it end up being? Like would he frequently need to change disks? Or just during startup?

The UI of 7 plus the kernel of 10, and the marketing approach of XP, would make a windows that might come close to being as good as linux today and certainly wouldn’t be enabling linux to steal even a few % of market share.

And before that, there were games that spanned multiple floppies. Plus, floppies were less reliable, so there was a higher chance one of the disks would fail to read, leading to the Retry, Fail, Abort menu.

They were only 1.44MB so a 50GB game would take like 40k floppies.

Yeah, I’d consider time from boot to login prompt to be a useless metric. You could design an OS to show a prompt before anything else to “win” this pointless race.

Boot to usable is the only one that makes sense.

Ok, one case where boot to login is useful: you want to boot up and walk away for a bit, so less waiting for a login means you can login before walking away. Though, personally, I find RAM training takes a long time these days if you’re not waking from suspend, so still think boot to login is moot.

Ah mine is always left plugged in, guess it can depend on use case.

To take it a bit further, I found at least cinnamon and KDE to be familiar enough that you can use your “discover how to do things on windows” skills for figuring out many things.

And once you get a handle on the repository software, it can also be easier to find and install new software when instructions direct you to a terminal command that doesn’t exist. KDE even does a search and says what needs to be installed when the command isn’t found. On windows, you need to download shit from some random website (which always sketched me out that someone could take advantage of that trust by making their malware behave as expected) and their search can fail to find something already installed on your machine, let alone figure out what you want to do if the name is a common word.

Can you give some examples of basic features that weren’t working with your dual monitor setup?

KDE might also help with this btw, as while I didn’t have any glaring issues with dual monitors in cinnamon (on Fedora), it improved overall when I switched to KDE. Used to have to change the audio output to my TV whenever I enabled it, now it happens automatically (plus the option to disable my HDMI audio if I preferred the “keep the same audio when switching to a different video output” behavior).

Only issue was that it didn’t work correctly the very first time, followed by it suddenly working the next time when I was intending to troubleshoot it.

Imo, KDE handles dual monitors better than windows even, especially if your secondary monitor is a TV you enable and disable depending on what you’re doing. Two clicks to toggle it, it handles different scaling seemlessly across the monitors (iirc, windows would “pop” to the scaling setting of whatever monitor they were mostly showing on as you moved them). Mouse cursor visibility improves when shaking the mouse, so it’s easy to find it on a giant screen.

Yeah, DHTML popups aren’t much different from the old popups that used to plague the internet. The only real difference is that I haven’t seen them used maliciously like the old popups were to be super annoying, but even “good faith” uses were all “hey, stop what you’re doing and do this for me” without any shame that went along with a real person doing that in a store.

I look forward to the day someone gets an AI to block this shit (on the assumption that it’s more complicated than blocking the old style popups without interfering with legitimate DHTML and needs context awareness).

Yeah, that was an unexpected nice thing about switching to Linux, though also the whole point. Like I knew that I wanted to take control back over my computer and OS, but I was surprised at just how much nicer it is when defaults are set without any profit incentive. There just wasn’t “spend time disabling MS attempts to get me to use their other software” or “dig deep for how to change a setting MS would really rather you don’t change” periods and it made me realize that that was where I’d spend a majority of the “computer maintenance” time on windows.

Don’t ban aftermarket exhausts completely, just the ones that optimize for loudness or dirtier air.

I’d like to see devices that detect when a car is running too rich or lean (bad cases I can smell right away, so it should be detectable at a range), along with enforcement and seizing vehicles where they deliberately mess with those, especially if there’s a switch or function present that can switch between legal and illegal modes to pass emissions tests and then go back to spewing out unburnt fuel or a much higher number of nitrous oxide compounds.

It really depends on what you want to do. Word processing it can handle, scientific analysis it’ll be slow at, 3d modelling it’ll end up in power point mode quicker than newer machines. Coding would be fine, though compiling would take longer and testing may or may not be viable.

Windows comes with its own set of challenges in the form of wanting things set up differently from how MS wants them set up and not wanting to be nagged about using their shitty programs and services. I got to the point where any time the OS or software initiated some kind of contact with me, it would annoy me even if it might have been helpfull because I’m so used to those being from the marketing department.

Like I’ve noticed that Linux can do things without annoying me even if that thing used to annoy me on windows just because I don’t have that expectation that it’s trying to sell me something.