I wish they stopped only making GPUs that have the cost, size and power consumption of a household appliance just so it can run 3000 fps in 8k resolution and started making something reasonable in performance and price again for most users who run 1080p screens and don’t care about ray tracing.

It was exactly the reason I was thinking

What was it, not even two months ago when they said they “listened” to us and that they wouldn’t go forward with Recall? And we all said they would still roll it in later when the dust had settled? Yup, we were right.

That’s extremely uncharacteristic. Are they trying to prepare for an antitrust probe?

They’ll just do it anyway quietly later on

Nah, I’m just a bored guy on the internet

Day 1 after implantation: this is great! I now have photographic memory of everything! Best decision ever.

Day 20: I’ve memorized so much so fast, I’m going to have to go for the next higher up subscription level to unlock more storage.

Day 200: I’m running out of space again. Going for the plus subscription.

Day 600: ran out of storage space again. I can’t afford the next higher subscription. I’m going to have to start deleting unnecessary memories. My brain has lost its natural ability to make and retain memories by itself. I can’t even function on a daily basis without free storage space.

Day 700: I have run out of memories that I’m willing to part away with. I still can’t afford the higher subscription. Luckily there is a cheaper tier. All I have to do is give NeuraLink full access and rights over my memories for marketing and AI training purposes.

Day 900: They have increased the cost of subscription. I can’t afford it. I’m going to lose half of my storage space. I have two days to choose which of my memories to keep. The rest will be no longer accessible to me, but will still be used by Neuralink for their own purposes as they own those memories now.

Day 1200: the chip will no longer be supported next month. I can’t afford the new model. It will be disabled in 30 days.

Day 1235: I have just found this diary. It explains a lot. I only wished it told me what my name is.

I’ve lost count of how many times Microsoft, and many other big tech companies, hindered me from doing something I wanted to do on a device that I own for “security” reasons while it had absolutely nothing to do with security and everything to do with forcing their users to comply with their business model.

DRM chips have nothing to do with device security and everything to do with further controlling what you can and cannot do on your machine and making more money off of you.

You really shouldn’t believe the Corporate bad faith arguments used to justify anti-consumer practices.

So Microsoft wants to force everyone to ditch their perfectly good machines so they can make more money off of selling OEM licenses.

I’m just waiting for Europe to sue their greedy asses for planned obsolescence.

No shit. Now do Amazon, apple, meta, Microsoft, Disney and all the food conglomerates. Then it will have been a good start.

Switched to Linux earlier this year when I saw the end of Windows 10 support coming. I haven’t looked back since.

I don’t miss that “not for now” or “maybe later” being the only option beside “yes” in prompts.

I revived a 15 year old laptop by installing Linux Mint on it (and replacing the hard drive for an old SSD I had kicking around). It does everything a modern laptop would do except play new games now.

I guess I’ll stop closing my browser tabs to make use of it

As someone who recently switched to Linux and doesn’t like to tinker much and doesn’t have very deep knowledge of Linux, I’ll share my experience. Whether you ultimately try or not is up to you.

Your requirements for accessibility suggests you should look into a distro with KDE Plasma as many said already. It is an extremely flexible and customizable DE.

I personally started with Mint and ended up somewhat wedging KDE in it because I didn’t like how cinnamon was handling multiple monitors. It worked but was a little rough around the edges in that setup, as it should be expected with a distro running a DE it wasn’t meant to. If you don’t mess with the DE however I’ve found Mint to be super easy and approachable. But ultimately it might not be what you need.

After doing a lot of research and comparisons I then switched to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with native KDE plasma. A few things took a little extra tinkering and learning to get them to work but after that it became the setup I am happy to stick with for a long while.

I have no experience with them but KUbuntu and Fedora Plasma Spin might be also good alternatives to look for.

Running games is very easy through stream and still relatively easy with Bottles, which is rather easy and straightforward to lean to use. As long as you have the right video drivers installed. I have an NVidia card which made it a little more complicated but I made it work still. My understanding is that this shouldn’t be any issues with AMD cards right out of the box.

Ultimately it will require you to learn a little here and there whenever you come across something you don’t know. But as someone who only has an extremely shallow understanding of how the OS works and basic common console commands I have found no problem so complicated that I couldn’t handle with a quick web search.

Microsoft needs to be broken up.

Any company that can be so blatantly anti consumer and still makes boatloads of money is obviously abusing its dominant position on the market.

The sad part is that all of this is all self-inflicted in the name of “growth” for the shareholders. They absolutely could take 7, modernize it, call it “12” and release it as a lightweight, fast and more privacy-respecting OS. It would probably be far cheaper to make as well.

But that’s not what the Corporate elements of the company want. They see the OS as a platform to force feed to the users features that they can market as “lucrative” to the shareholders. Nobody else wants that. I predict that Windows 12 will have some sort of baked in “AI” that you can’t get rid of as a bare minimum.

But this is none of my concern. They’ve finally pushed me over the hump and now I’m 100% sold to Linux. It has gotten so much more approachable than it used to be. Especially with Mint.

Microsoft is dead to me.

Maybe if after a disastrous enough reception of Windows 11 they might make a Windows 12 that actually cares about being more palatable to the users, like they did with Windows 7 following the disaster that was Vista.

But I think they’ll most probably only move to meet us halfway like they did with Windows 10 following the other disaster that was 8. Where they replaced a major irritant with another and then slowly stacked more and more irritants with updates thereafter. They are too addicted to the revenue from data harvesting to give it up.

I was hesitant for a long while and ended up installing Linux Mint on an old SSD I had laying around this way there was no commitment.

Now I’m realizing I haven’t booted up my regular windows 10 drive ever since and am considering getting rid of it altogether.

On a side note I created a virtual machine on the Linux side that runs Windows 10 LTSC on it for a few other programs I sometimes need that would be very difficult or impossible to make work on Linux like Inventor, Office and Photoshop. It lives trapped in the box and isn’t allowed to connect to the internet. If I need to download something for it I download it on Linux and drag and drop it into the box. It’s like having a little pet Windows that you keep locked in a pen, so it works for you and only for you and it can’t escape to go into your house to spy on you and shit bloatware all over your carpet.

• On Reddit: “Windows is being enshitified. How can we cope with it?”
• On Lemmy: “Windows is being enshitified. Good thing we’ve moved to Linux”

I think I see a pattern here.

This is the norm of what shareholder-driven companies in a situation of monopoly will tend to do. They try to see how much they can abuse their position of dominance on the market to maximize their profits. Microsoft’s primary goal isn’t to make a good user experience, or even a good OS. Their main goal is to milk as much money as possible from its assets for its shareholders. They’ve been playing that game for decades, only backtracking when the consumer backlash is strong enough to threaten their sales or when the government threatens to break them up.

On top of that, Microsoft has a long history of letting arrogant elements of top management take control of projects who will then force their “vision” down the throats of their customers who don’t want any of it. They will only backtrack once the sales numbers become disastrous enough. Then usually the control returns to more competent people and a decent product tends to result from it. Think how Windows Vista lead to Windows 7. And how Windows 8 lead to Windows 10. Or even how the XBox One was originally designed and marketed as some sort of stupid way to watch NFL games on your TV with Kinect controls until they realized they were losing the console war and then started treating it like a gaming console again.