The secret of Linux is, if all your hardware works, it’s actually easier to use for casual users. Most people nowadays use computers for web browsing and maybe playing media and light office tasks. A Linux Mint setup will have everything you need for that either preinstalled or ready to get fun the software store. If you don’t need anything else, then it gets it of your way and just works. No viruses, little danger of malware, no crud to uninstall, no Microsoft account, no nagging apps, no ads, no attempts to upsell to paid cloud services or Pro, and no AI.

The problem arises when you want to go beyond that, and there’s no obvious path ahead,v then people not used to the Linux way of doing things may run into trouble. But 90% of users, if someone sets it up for them, will do fine.

This poll is for the Mozilla Foundation. They don’t make the browser. The post should probably have made that clear.

I signed up for Loops the first day. I didn’t get an email confirmation until two days after, and I still haven’t been given a way to sign in.

Google constantly puts Youtube ads at the top of searches for information! Countless people put their information on Youtube in the form of videos! Tutorials get put on Youtube as a matter of course! There’s a trove of old media on Youtube that can’t be accessed any other way! Congratulations, you’ve won the award for the most thoughtlessly dismissive person on the internet today.

Even 20 minutes seems like too long, but that would still be wonderful.

They also hate the idea of phone trees. Companies don’t care unless we make them not care.

Warning: this is secretly a Nethack thread!

So, the model was playing on average 2,000 points worse because the player was luckier? The things about werewolves and dogs is a factor but is statistically insignificant.

Nethack has a couple of other gotchas like this. They should be grateful they weren’t playing on Friday the 13th…

The operator for ensuring something appeared in a search used to be “+”, but they stopped using that for some _?^??mYsTeRiOuS rEaSoN^?_??

What the heck is Dexerto?

Ed Zitron has a scathing piece about that (in the podcast version he’s seething) entitled “The Man Who Killed Google Search.” Worth checking out, it contains some quality righteous anger.

This isn’t the worst timeline. It was always destined to end up this way. Corporations consider themselves ethically mandated to squeeze as much profit out of customers as they can, to find the exactly monetary line where the number of customers they drive off is balanced by the money they can gain by the things that drove them off. They actually believe that, and that basically means any profit-seeking corporation is going to ruin their user experience in the long run.

Once, I was asked if I wanted a special offer on Microsoft Office on boot up. Explorer freezes so often for me when I right-click a file and select Open With that it’s made me twitchy. Frequently image icons stop displaying. For a long while, every time I’ve installed Windows on a computer, I’ve had to go through and disable all the awful misfeatures Windows tries to put in the taskbar. I also always have to set OneDrive so it doesn’t redirect folders like Desktop and Documents into its cloud storage area. Now Windows 11 is threatening to put CoPilot on my desktop, and I’ll have to disable it too.

I’m positively longing for Linux now.

It has. For the first time, it’s risen to over 4% of market share of desktops: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/linux-continues-growing-market-share-reaches-4-of-desktops/

Of course this doesn’t count Android or Chromebooks, both of which run Linux on some level.

I contribute $5 a month to Metafilter, and I use a paid VPN.

Note: article puts a rectangle in front of the article when you’ve read half of it.

Why is Microsoft even deciding what programs I can run on my computer in the first place? They’re not malware, they shouldn’t be doing this at all.

Yes, it’s worth noting that some companies will do A/B tests, where one user is offered one choice, and another gets a different one. It’s possible for the two of you to have had a different experience.

I unironically love that fmhy.net’s site would work well in Gopher.

I think we’re starting to see the beginning of the end of the Windows hegemony, for one reason: the success of the Steam Deck has made gaming on Linux mainstream. The two things that have always kept power users tied to Windows have been games and office, but GAMES were the big one. Suddenly, it starts to look like it might be possible to do without Windows for gaming, if not now, then soon.

Reddit is too big to die quickly (unless they suffer a catastrophic failure), but it’s easy to see that it was an inflection point for them, that it’s downhill from here. Remember: at one point, it looked like Yahoo Directory and Internet Explorer would be around forever too.