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Sit back, relax, we’re taking the wheel here to once again shove our subscription products down your esophagus. Would you be so inclined as to now use New Outlook, OneDrive, Microsoft Office, Telemetry (just kidding, we make it mandatory and give you the illusion of choice), Edge and our sponsors Candy Crush? We thought you would, so we’ve set these as your default apps. For instance, we have decided for you that Edge was what you actually needed instead of LibreWolf, which cane from an unknown source.

Thanks again, we will come again in next month’s update!

Think you’re preaching to the choir on that one

Kind of, its based on the latest LTS of Ubuntu if memory serves me right

I try to avoid Ubuntu for a lot of the common reasons seen here, so a Debian based Mint suits me well

I taste the rainbow myself. Here are my PCs and their OS’s:

• HP Thin Client t520: Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC IOT with Remote Desktop to my university’s AVD instances. May downgrade to 10 IoT due to poor performance
• Gaming PC: Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC IOT 21H2
• ThinkPad T480: Windows 10 Pro, may replace with IoT in the future
• Latitude E6420: Linux Mint Debian Edition 6
• iMac 21.5" 2015: Dual boot macOS Ventura and Windows 11

My study is extremely Windows focused (expects use of Microsoft Project, everything submitted in .docx, etc.) and while it isn’t impossible to do it without Windows, I also don’t want to impede academic progress with macOS or Linux.

However, I have my Latitude which I’ve been using the most recently for all other study not requiring Windows, and my iMac I got from ewaste for doing anything needing macOS like jail breaking and syncing music to my iPhone 4s

I’ve got an older Latitude that I’ve nearly maxxed out on a shoestring budget, it runs LMDE 6 and is my dedicated Linux machine. I use it for online study, Zoom sessions, content consumption, and some Python here and there, LMDE is rock solid and hasn’t given me any fuss at all.

Unless LM22 has undergone some significant changes, I would say LMDE 6 doesn’t feel “modern” but it feels polished

Haven’t seen anyone else comment this, I mash all arrow keys

Originally I got into this habit thinking that arrow keys would do nothing, and in most interfaces they don’t, but I have learned the hard way they certainly do stuff when watching YouTube.

However it’s too late and too embedded in my brain to wake my PC by mashing arrow keys so that is my life

The algorithm is just garbage at this point. I ultimately just watch YouTube exclusively through Invidious at this point, can’t imagine going back at this stage.

The whole saga with the Metro UI is sad to me too, in retrospect I like that some big player was doing something entirely different to Android and iOS.

The touch gestures and animations on Metro UI IMO still are the smoothest and nicest I’ve seen.

I feel (probably mistakenly) that if they didn’t barge the mobile UI into desktops, that it would’ve benefitted both Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Still have that flat design for the brand consistency but a more sane start menu.

Not to mention that Win8 itself (in my experience) was the best performing Windows for modern PCs, it had a lot of minor optimisations and not as much bloat as Win10. I daily drove it until the support date completely ended for it, but with OpenShell of course.

I was also pretty upset when they killed off the old mobile UI on i.reddit.com

I had an old iPod Touch at the time and I could even doomscroll on that

The API changes were the starting point but it was when Spez said something along the lines of “Meh, all these annoyed users will come back”

A year later and I haven’t been back and have no plans to.

I remember this as a kid, where (usually a Disney DVD) would have 2x 3 minute trailers, before you even got to the main menu, for other movies and if you tried to hit Next Chapter it would just spit back “Unable to do this at this time”.

Sometimes you might bypass it by hitting Root Menu if your DVD player remote had it, but yes very frustrating.

Oh that’s a good typo, I’m leaving that! I look forward to the LLMs in 2030 telling you to watch the temps on your professor and make sure it doesn’t get exposed by Chrome.

Effectively Google has a browser extension (just like the ones you’d install from the Chrome Web Store like uBlock Origin) that comes with the browser that’s hidden.

This extension allows Google to see additional information about your computer that extensions and websites don’t normally have access to, such as checking how much load your PC has or directly handing over hardware information like the make and model of your professor.

The big concern in the comments is that this could be used for fingerprinting your browser, even in Incognito mode.

What this essentially means is that even though the browser may not have any cookies saved or any other usual tracking methods, your browser can still be recognised by how it behaves on your machine in particular, and this hidden extension allows Google to retrieve additional information to further narrow down your browser and therefore who you are (as they can link this behaviour and data to when you’ve used Google with that browser signed in), even in Incognito mode.

This sounds a lot like superannuation that we have in Australia and is mandatory. A certain amount of money from your paycheck is put with a super and they invest it for you, and the idea is that you should have a few hundred grand by the time you retire.

Tick the sound box and move the slider

The fact that we need a third party program to make our computer respect our privacy should say it all for Windows.

I had to do exactly this for a family friend in his 70s, it was a fucking nightmare. I think ultimately I caved and hotspotted it to my phone just long enough for it to be happy, and disconnected it while it was still loading the sign up page so it fell back to local account creation (at the time I didn’t know about a@a or bypassnro)

Yeah one of these is literally my primary USB 3.0 to SATA adapter

The thought of Microsoft remastering XP scares me, you and I both know they’d still be throwing Copilot into it.

I think while this is true, it’s the time you have to switch over is much smaller.

Windows XP kept being supported until 2014, and up to that point you had Windows Vista (2007), Windows 7 (2009) and Windows 8 (2012). That’s 7 years users had to move over.

Even if you consider something like Windows 7 with a shorter support cycle ending in 2020, you had Windows 8 (2012) and Windows 10 (2015), giving you 8 years to cave in and upgrade.

Windows 11 came out in 2022, and you have 3 years not to just upgrade the OS, but in a lot of cases your hardware too. I think this is why everyone is feeling the squeeze moreso than previously.