I might have the exception to this. I’m able to dual boot my work laptop, as can the other engineers in my department. So it’s effectively a Linux machine under my exclusive administration. The only request from my IT department was how to format the host name.

I’m still not taking chances with that thing though, even when on my home network. The rules exist even if there’s a 99.99% chance they won’t be enforced. I have nothing to gain from doing nefarious shit on it just to prove a point, lol.

Can’t take calls? Don’t threaten ME with a good time!

This comment inspired me to go turn off microphone, camera, Bluetooth, and local network access for every app. I’ll reenable as necessary.

Yeah it’s right up there on the list of what shareholders need to survive:

Water

Food

Solid CAGR of investment portfolio

Shelter

Human contact

Etc

(CAGR being Compound Annual Growth Rate)

That’s a good point. AIs/LLMs will exist and will necessarily learn from copyrighted materials without traceability back to the copyright owners to compensate them.

Sounds to me like AIs/LLMs can’t and shouldn’t be proprietary systems owned by private entities for profit, then.

They have LMDE that they maintain so that Mint can continue if Ubuntu ever goes away. And of course, some people choose to just run LMDE now.

Mint is great.

I use Linux Mint cinnamon on a daily basis, typically with one or two command line terminals open at all times (one normal and one in a docker container), and with some kind of code always open too. I use 4 monitors as well, which the same machine can’t handle when I boot into windows.

No apologies and no regrets. Being user friendly doesn’t mean it’s limited. It uses Ubuntu and Debian stuff after all, just with the controversial Ubuntu stuff removed.

The size of Twitter’s user base and its ubiquitous use by celebrities and the media gave the platform an air of legitimacy that is what Musk vaporized his billions to get. He obviously didn’t value the brand or the workforce.

We need that false sense of legitimacy to keep getting chipped away in the eyes of mainstream society.

And WSL is pretty good according to one of the other guys in my department that’s been using it.

The problem for Microsoft is that my entire user experience is better when I boot straight into Linux and use all their software (except vscode) in browser tabs.

If you have a USB stick handy, you could probably be dual booting into Linux Mint within an hour.

No need to fully learn Linux before moving to that. You can do your research using Firefox on your Linux desktop. And by “research” I mean googling/DDGing things as you need to know how to do them. It starts to stick.

Yeah, honestly it’s worked fine without any fiddling around. If it makes a difference, I tend to do things like let mint use non-free components if necessary, and I know I do have the “play drm stuff” option turned on I’m Firefox, even though the privacy and security stuff is all strict.

It’s just a Dell laptop with a discrete nvidia gpu in addition to the embedded Intel one. I think it works fine though with either the open drivers or the closed nvidia ones, but I don’t know if it touches that gpu.

I get to dual boot at work (I run mint btw) and the only reason I ever boot into windows every week or three is to make sure it doesn’t get so out of date that it gets booted from the network.

I guess it’s time to stop that shit! Having windows available is not worth the risk of messing up my work machine. Hell I’m tempted to nuke that windows partition and double the size of my /home partition!

Though I will give Microsoft credit that m365 stuff, including video calls in Teams, work great using the web versions in Firefox. That’s even with the security and privacy stuff cranked up. I only white listed those sites for cookies and local storage for convenience.

Perfectly put. The product is great and I love how it democratizes “being on TV” and lets some people make a living doing their own thing.

But I do not like where YouTube’s cut of that ad/sub money goes, and the enshittification pushed into it.

Unfortunately, YouTube is not unique in that regard. It’s a sucky fact of life that just about any complex product you spend money on will benefit a collection of rich sociopaths skimming as much as possible from the incomes of the people actually making the thing. Gotta vote with your wallet where you can, and vote the traditional way for the systemic issues.

I’m getting vibes of “Yet you participate in society. Curious!”

Can’t disagree there. It’s not like Google is trustworthy or resists the govt/CIA. But I do still think the official change in ownership would hit people differently.

Unfortunately one of the big ideas republicans have conditioned half our population into believing is that government itself is basically a flawed idea and that our government will not ever be able to do anything right. So it would be a tough sell to say the least.

And also as an American, I imagine many people around the world would not be thrilled with the prospect of the US government owning the web browser they use.

This needs an extra top panel with the dude just chilling with no makeup, maybe reading a “clown makeup for dummies” book. The caption is “my last Windows machines are barely working but they know what happens if I have to ‘fix’ anything.”

That’s where I’m living right now. The PC I use all day is already Linux.

I’m gonna say an Aliexpress Trump.

Tony Stark is known for both competence and self sacrifice.

I’ve been eyeing up librewolf, having made the switch to Firefox on all machines a while back.

If I’m using DDG for search, uBlock Origin, bitwarden, strict tracking protection, disabled data collection and ad measurements, and then have https-only in all windows and max protection dns over https, will I see any practical difference?

In this case I do prefer functionality over 100% perfect privacy and anti-advertising. I’m fortunate to be able to run Linux on my work machine (I use mint, btw) and so I use the browser versions of M365 including Teams video conferencing.

Is a rectenna like that thing Cartman got one time?