Technology

I will continue to enjoy my incredibly straightforward and to the point Linux desktop that’s somehow gained a new AI-free feature by doing nothing.

Have Win 10 and was a Windows die hard since I was a kid.

Been running Linux on another drive as my default boot for a year and a half in anticipation of this horseshit and was only hesitant to delete Win because my Fanatec sim racing hardware wasn't supported on Linux.

Welp, turns out hid-fanatecff is a thing. Installed the kernel driver and boom, working Fanatec peripherals. Even my Moza shifter is plug-and-play.

Bye bye Microsoft.

Ok, guys. I'm reading some of these replies which are saying the amount of outrage is out of proportion. I have to disagree with that. I don't want an AI running on my PC that is monitoring and learning about my shit. I didn't want that data saved even locally, let alone the monetization of that data. I don't want to be paying for power of a device that is turning me into someone else's paycheck.

Can you turn it off? I believe you can. But I also believe that doing it manually would be incredibly annoying since that does go with a lot of past practice. I also get it would reactivate itself after major updates, like how Edge keeps reinstalling.

Are there other solutions to my Microsoft issues, yes. Chris Titus Tech comes to mind.

But overall, the Windows ecosystem does not feel right to me anymore. Could other people still use it, yes. Am I going to stop them, not intentionally. But my Arch gaming PC runs games better than the same machine running Windows. I've always entertained the idea of a full switch, still have a Windows 11 dual boot and haven't officially done it yet, but with this the moment feels right. At least for me, hopefully you can understand that.

I work in IT and far be it for me to tell you what OS to use on your own computer.

The only thing I want to die right now, is the AI bubble. Just pop already. Holy fuck what a worthless endeavor this has been.

The logic behind the voice controls sounds pretty questionable, but it’s supposedly backed by data showing that users spend billions of minutes talking in Microsoft Team meetings, according to Mehdi — so they’re already used to talking on the computer, right?

Do they really reason like this? Oh my. That's stupid. And here I was thinking Microsoft employs clever people.

Finally got my last PC switched off Windows. It feels good.

Four Horsemen of Apocalypse

1. The country where a lot of tech countries are headquartered in, elects a wanna-be dictator
2. Android restricts "sideloading" (aka: non-approved install)
3. Windows has mandatory AI
4. Mandatory ID Verification

Don’t downgrade to Windows 11, update to Linux

I’m dangerously close to moving my gaming pc to Linux. What’s the consensus for the best distro for gaming?

I’m comfortable enough with *nix, as my daily is MacOS and I have a home lab/server.

It's insane how much extra time, effort and sanity you can retain simply by switching to Linux. I initially switched a few years ago, then fully shortly after. Using my PCs has never been better and I had no issues with gaming. The only games that don't work are some of the live service ones I'll never be interested in.

One of the best decisions in my life, right up there with deleting all social media. Life keeps getting better, relatively speaking, but of course rich pedophiles just can't tolerate us having a good time.

Microsoft literally wanted me to convert my desktop to e-waste as it lacks the magical TPM chip that Win11 demands.

I said "fuck that" and pulled the Boot SSD, kept the existing non-boot drives for data, and put in a brand new SSD, encrypted it and installed Pop OS in one shot.

Not only was it easy, I lost literally zero critical functionality vs. what I had with Win 10. There is a Linux app equivalent for everything I had before. I had a few driver issues but most were auto-discovered including obscure ancient printers and scanners on my network.

yay! hi mint!

I moved to pop!_os on the 14th and I am not looking back

Windows is becoming so trash that a bunch of my not-that-tech-savvy friends have been hitting me up asking about gaming on various Linux distros. (Just a few years ago it was all “Linux? Haha nerd”.) And the non gamers are switching to Mac at a remarkable rate.

And things have progressed so well that even for the non-technical crew, after installing Mint and showing them how to use ProtonPlus to install and select Proton-GE, they’re pretty much off to the races without much further hand holding.

Linux is the only viable solution to this mess. And no it is not as scary as it seema

What is this AI everywhere concept actually supposed to accomplish for the end user? Maybe I'm just behind on the vision but I can't grasp the point. I have a feeling it's not really about what the users want but I'd love to here a genuinely good use case.

Crazy to me that windows is finally worse than MacOS

Windows is still a fixture in my life due to work, but I’ve ditched Windows at home for years and won’t ever go back.

yeah, I updated one machine that was running Win10, it's now running LinuxMint

Shock! No, but seriously. This is not a surprise.

Once I finish college I'm nuking my Windows partition. Won't even boot into it on any future laptop, will just nuke it fully. I'm just waiting now cause I don't wanna have to fight with teachers over online test software and shit, I like being able to do easy at home exams.

But I will relish the day I walk across the stage. It'll be gone that night.

I hate this world. Linux it is then.

I upgraded to Windows 11 last week after my laptop initially came with it 2 years ago, but was so bloated and slow I installed Windows 10 from USB.

With the EoL I reluctantly upgraded due to company policy, and it was running surprisingly smooth. Really thought they'd fixed it. Only that two days later when I booted the system, I had a blue screen - the first one I have seen since Windows XP.

Page fault in non-page area 0x50 - google suggests reboots, or if they don't bring any progress, boot into safe mode and update all drivers. Only that I couldn't boot into safe mode, the BSOD locked me out.

Second suggestion was faulty RAM. Did a memtest from boot stick, no fault.

Third suggestion was to run checkdisk and scm or whatever it was called (some system file integrity check). All good.

Fourth suggestion was to boot into recovery mode, roll back into the system image the Windows 11 installer created, and redo the upgrade. Only to find out that the system restore point had not been created, despite the info box during the installation that this was happening.

Last suggestion was to reinstall Windows 11 from the repair mode, and select the "keep files" option. The offline installer crashed at 25% repeatedly, the online installer moved to 92% and stopped there. Repeatedly, again (tried 3x, and it takes about 1h to get there).

After all that frustration I had enough of that shit and installed Windows 10 IoT LTSC with updates until 2032. When the time comes I'll either have a new job where I can use Xubuntu, or Microsoft installed on a chip in my brain. Let's see.