Microsoft’s design philosophy in any of their products has gone from well organized menus to relying instead on a search bar. Copilot is a further addition to that design, with yet more pushes to never use a menu, but instead just tell it what you want and have it spit it back out. They want everything you make to go on OneDrive as well, so it can also be indexed this way. Teams works the same way. The big search bar at the top is unavoidable.

Windows search is complete garbage, which you might think is a counterpoint, but instead it’s just that they only put work into having it serve results for cloud-indexed items or web results.

The selling point for me right now with Plasma is how well rounded it is. It’s also currently the only desktop env offering HDR support, which means it’s basically a must for me.

That’s literally the whole point of GIMP 3

It is also worth considering that yes, MS and Google have definitely dominated the market through superior products, but the standards they’ve pushed for and established have also made it difficult for other players to enter. If we wanted to say that the federated nature of email is dead, I think that’s a fair argument still.

Hosting your own email server is quite difficult. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to land in anyone’s mailbox without assistance. If you want to make a mailing list, you basically need to use a mailing service, lest you get blacklisted by major systems owned by MS and Google. Much of this is a byproduct of spam, by which I don’t blame Google and MS for doing their best to protect against, but at the same time they have more or less neutered some core aspects of what made email accessible.

Ah, my bad. I think I misunderstood your point and took you to be gatekeeping rather than just attempting to defend against misinformation or poor comparisons.

You’re right, it’s not a Windows replacement. It shouldn’t be expected that it’s analogous to Windows. My previous statement was coming from the expectation that people moving from Windows to Linux as their primary OS of choice was that they were explicitly looking for the advantages offered by it, rather than simply expecting to get away from Microsoft while needing to adjust to nothing new.

This is…kind of stupid? There’s such a plethora of options in the Linux space for desktop environments, workflow customizations, configurability, etc. nothing is locked down by taking a Windows-style approach to a DE. Instead it follows a tried philosophy that’s only really been hampered by Microsoft’s decision to funnel users into an frustrating hole that removes the choice to disable or modify features you don’t like. KDE in particular has always been a Windows-style DE, and it’s currently one of the best options for modern features and extensive customizability. Hyprland is literally designed for linux enthusiasts. Gnome is the Mac analog, Xfce is your light-weight but functional, etc.

You’re upset because people are looking for more options? That’s bizarre. I came from Windows, but I guarantee my setup is different than someone else who comes from Windows because that’s the flexibility that’s offered. No one coming from Windows wants it to be exactly like Windows, they just want to be able to use their computer in a way that allows them to work, to play games, to watch media, etc. It’s a computer. It’s your computer. It should be able to do what you want.

Nah, this is just what it’s been like from the moment Lemmy got momentum. The fediverse is pretty fundamentally aligned with the goals and interests of the same people who are part of the FOSS and Linux philosophy. From where I joined more than a year ago, it’s been more or less the same.

Doesn’t seem to apply to Canada (yet)

I don’t know about the latter half of your statement, but my main reason for its use is pretty simply just that there’s more music available, and it doesn’t take all the time it normally would to get invited to a good music tracker. If anything, specialized Torrent trackers that could offer the same volume of music are a much bigger pain go deal with.

Yeah, I don’t think this one is a priority for the IDF boss.

Reader Rabbit

Soulseek is a P2P file sharing system centered around music in particular. It’s pretty direct. Unlike a torrent where you’ll have multiple seeds for a single source, you’re connecting directly to other individuals for the content. It generally operates under the expectation that you’re also sharing something, and some users may opt not to allow downloads to people who do not also allow downloads from themselves. The downside to this system is you may need to wait for that person to come online before you can start a download, while with a torrent, other seeders can fill that gap.

It’s survived as a pretty big platform for music hoarders to source hard to find material, but it’s so dead simple to use and it has a quick and reliable search. Nothing secretive about it, it’s basically just another P2P network that has more in common with Napster than the Pirate Bay

Can I introduce you to soulseek? I promise it’s going to serve way better than torrents for that kind of stuff.

Almost definitely. Between hunting rats in cow carcass pits, eating strange bushmeat on safaris and a lifelong habit of collecting more roadkill than he has room for, it’s almost certain he’s consumed something parasitic as a result

Probably because he helped get it off the road after she hit it. I don’t think he’s being sexist here, I think he quite likely did encounter a woman who had hit a bear. He apparently has a whole thing for roadkill meat, and is more than happy to make it his problem.

The guy is stranger than fiction.

I like CDs, but I guess I can’t really call myself a kid anynore though, being in my mid twenties. I typically use Spotify for discovery/casual listening but but an album on CD or digitally through Bandcamp when the option is presented to me. I went out of my way to buy a 25 disc CD changer.

Vinyl have definitely become way more popular for physical music purchases, but I like the smaller footprint of a CD.

I do think the vast majority of people use Youtube Music, Spotify or a similar service though. It’s inexpensive, has family plans and optical media players just aren’t common anymore.

I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time, and of course, the need for miners to exist to process these confirmations/transactions. The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.

It’s not really feasible on a broad scale. Bitcoin is a holding stock, not a valid currency. Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity. And as its scarcity increases, it naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit. You can argue for proof of stake to eliminate the need for mining, but then you open the doors to centralization more immediately.

What are you, an apostle? Lol. This issue affects Windows, but it’s not a Windows issue. It’s wholly on CrowdStrike for a malformed driver update. This could happen to Linux just as easily given how CS operates. I like Linux too, but this isn’t the battle.

Similarly, if you’re born at the tail end of Millenial/start of Gen Z, then you still grew up with a collage of 90s and 00s culture and inconography, offsetting the definitions the groups typically gain over time. Some Gen Z grew up into adolescence without really feeling the advent of the modern internet or social media. The end of that range never knew a world without it.

Generations are useful statistical groupings, but don’t represent individual experiences or influences, leading to disparity or outliers that feel excluded from their “peers” so to speak. I’d say I probably share more experiences with Gen Z, but a lot of the cultural aspects of my childhood are closely linked to later Millenial ones. There’s a gradient, not a cutoff.

With that in mind, a battery health tool is probably the fastest way to tell how old a phone is going to feel. Otherwise nothing else is going to suffer wear and tear. If the phone is in good shape, and the specs are agreeable, then it doesn’t matter how old it is.