also these idiots made onedrive folders mimic the original documents folder, also setting default to onedrive folder, so when i search for the downloaded content in my profile, documents i just WTF as its empty...
I hate this so much. I save as a new file for a new version. I expect it to go into the same folder by default like the file i currently opened and worked on. Nope, onedrive it is if you aren't careful.
Internet Archive is also being sued by the US book publishing and US recording industries associations, which are claiming copyright infringement and demanding combined damages of hundreds of millions of dollars and diminished services from all libraries.
“If our patrons around the globe think this latest situation is upsetting, then they should be very worried about what the publishing and recording industries have in mind,” added Kahle. “I think they are trying to destroy this library entirely and hobble all libraries everywhere. But just as we’re resisting the DDoS attack, we appreciate all the support in pushing back on this unjust litigation against our library and others.”
The problem is that the litigation was entirely "just", as far as the legal system goes. It's an open-and-shut case and everyone saw it coming. The Internet Archive basically stood in front of a train and dared it to turn, and now they're crying the victim. Doesn't exactly entice me to send them donations to cover their lawyers and executives right now.
They really need to admit "okay, so that was a dumb idea, and ultimately not related to archiving the Internet anyway. We're not going to do that again."
Note that I'm not saying the publishers are "good guys" here, I hate the existing copyright system and would love to see it contested. Just not by Internet Archive. Let someone else who's purpose is fighting those fights take it on and stick to preserving those precious archives out of harm's way.
They really need to admit “okay, so that was a dumb idea, and ultimately not related to archiving the Internet anyway. We’re not going to do that again.”
It literally archives internet pages and files. What do you think the internet archive does if it doesn't do that?
This has already been happening on the Web for quite some time. For example Microsoft Clarity records everything you do on those dodgy Web sites you visit. And they assign a universal identifier to you that can be correlated with the IDs Google and your device have already created and broadcast to profile you.
And you think “oh but I use x, y, and z to prevent tracking”. Guess what: They make your browser do nonsense tasks in the background to benchmark your hardware and then assign a UUID to you based on that.
The only thing that can help this situation is privacy legislation with real teeth.
This is far far worse of a potential risk than a tracking identifier. Bank passwords, balances, social media pages, full text chat Windows, everything you ever view all OCRed and put in a neat searchable database for a hacker.
I recently moved my media PC to Linux Mint. I had Bluetooth issues with windows despite my hardware not that old and 'Windows 11 ready'. Zero problems on Linux. I play the same games thanks to Steam Proton library. I use Mac for work. So I finally did it. No more Windows. I tried to switch 5 years ago. But today Linux is polished. And mostly works as expected. You still need to open terminal a few times to change some settings. I'm happy. Highly recommended.
I switched recently to Nobara after having a great experience with my steam deck. However, I'll probably add windows as a dual boot option since CS2 doesn't run properly (like 16fps..).
I dont have CS2 because, well, the obvious reasons. But I do have the original Skylines, and its linux version is also a festering pile of rancid dogshit.
Running the windows version via proton made it run smooth, stable (well, as stable as can be expected with a few hundred mods..lol), and without headache.
so yeah, install windows version and use proton. Overall better experience probably.
Honestly, i think thats my advice about gaming on linux in general, to generally avoid the native version. Personally, I've only run into two games that the native version wasnt shit, and that was Stardew Valley and Rimworld.
I tried to get nobara to run a few times but sth was always broken.
I'm now on Bazzite after testing Linux Mint a few months.
Bazzite seems to be the more polished fedora based gaming distro.
I'll have a look into that. For work I use Mint and really like it, however wanted to have a gaming distro that already delivers everything that I need and since I already used ProtonGE it was a natural choice for me. But i already had some issues with it probably due to NVidia drivers. Seems to be better now with the latest kernel
I think I get slightly better performance on Bazzite than on mint. Mint e.g. still has the 535 Nvidia drivers as recommended (we're at 550 now).
On Bazzite you'll probably have to enable x11 until the new update with explicit sync drops mid May. (At least I had a ton of flickering on Wayland with my rtx 3060)
Using Bazzite, myself. I have a weird issue with rebooting, though. Tends to freeze at the boot screen (grub doesn't show up at all) then the whole boot/login process becomes a slideshow. This doesn't happen if I manually turn my PC off and turn it on, though. Really odd problem that I haven't had on other distros.
Automatic screen lock and auto-sleep get disabled everytime I install a KDE DE. I could take a closer look at energy savings, but I don't think there's much else I can do there. I know it's not hardware-related, as this doesn't happen with any other distro. May be an issue with KDE 6, for all I know. Gonna have to look into it more when I get home from work.
I had a lot of crashes as soon as I installed it. Must have been some driver/hardware issues probably.
I'm not knowledgeable enough (and frankly had no energy to troubleshoot) I just installed mint which ran without (much) trouble.
I was interested in a more up to date system and KDE plasma as well as pipewire already integrated and looked at bazzite (after another unsuccessful try at nobara) - have been t running it for a few weeks now and I'm perfectly happy with it. CS 2 also runs without problems - but I mainly cast matches instead of playing myself.
I just got a steam deck, and needed to install FF14 (non steam) so I was mucking around in desktop mode… yeah. I’ll prob be getting a spare drive for my tower now to try out Linux. I’d love nothing more then to cut ties to windows.
I switched from Win10 to Arch and now I do have problems with bluetooth, because my mouse officially only supports Windows. Think I will just force my mouse to support Arch (or the other way around). Still way better and faster than Windows.
This one should work via bluetooth, some pages online indicate so, and it would be very rare that a bluetooth mouse does not work on linux.
And it should absolutely work via the little usb dongle that came with the mouse, as for example my logitech wireless mouse even works in my uefi/bios with the usb receiver.
I may yet try it in the next few years. I think one large frustration I anticipate (among others) is keyboard shortcuts. I've become very experienced with those on Windows, and my brief efforts at Linux (eg, on my Steam Deck's monitor hookup) have not come across enough matches for them.
I can absolutely see value in enduring the pain of a large switch though.
Linux mint keyboard shortcuts mimic those of windows tho, Linux mint is the best choice for windows refugees, this is one of the things majority of Linux community is agree about. Edit: in Linux mint you also can change keyboard shortcuts with gui tools already pre installed
Funny, one of my longstanding frustrations with windows was that I didn’t get a say in my keyboard shortcuts. Namely the fact that the shortcut to swap keyboard layouts has historically been very easy to accidentally hit.
As someone who uses all 3 (work-issue MBP, personal dev laptop on fedora 40, overbuilt gaming-oriented desktop on w10 with a dual boot Ubuntu partition I haven’t used in ages because WSL lets me do what I need to most of the time), it’s really not that bad. Then again, I’ve had a trifecta like that for well over a decade at this point, so maybe I’ve just fully acclimatized to switching machines and OSes for different primary activities all the time.
If you ever do switch I suggest something with KDE, I love keyboard shortcuts and I find anything other(Windows the most) extremely lacking in that field.
Yeah in college I tried to switch for nerd cred and it sucked, but over the past year I switched and while I’ve had some hiccups, I honestly think it’s more a result of me going with an arch based distro than a Debian one. I’m thinking I may hop soon, but I assume it’ll be a massive pain
Whenever I try switching to Linux, there is always something that doesn't work right and takes forever to finagle with to fix if it's even possible. I'm primarily a Linux Mint fan (daily drove it on my aging desktop until it died of old age a few years back), but I've also dabbled in a few other noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu (was really into it when everything was still orange and brown lol) and Pop OS.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love using Linux to breathe new life into older systems, but it just isn't a good option for me personally if my device hasn't gotten sluggish yet.
As an example, I have an aging laptop that started blue screening a bunch. It doesn't support the Win 11 upgrade due to it's processor not meeting minimum specs. So I thought it was finally time to see if Linux would improve it.
First of all, I had a hell of a time installing various distros without having them boot to a black screen after installation completes. Took absolutely forever to finally sus this out on the various distros I tried. Then I find that the couple extra buttons on my basic Logitech mouse don't work. These are essential buttons for me that I use constantly. I go through a million troubleshooting steps before finding out that it's a Wayland issue, so I switch back to Xorg and everything is cool. But then I start running into lag issues which never occurred on my Windows install. I also tried playing some games I had in my Epic Games library. I could not for the life of me get it to work, no matter which platform I tried. I get that Steam has better Linux compatibility, but not all of us have all of our games on Steam.
Finally got tired of the whole ordeal and switched back to Windows. Did a bit more troubleshooting and seemed to have resolved the blue screen issues and now it seems to work perfectly and much better out of the box than Linux. It's not an old enough device a Linux refresh to be worth it yet.
I get that Lemmings are die hard Linux fans, and I think Linux has some fantastic use cases...but for many users it actually isn't a good alternative. I find it works best when you want to breathe new life into older hardware or if you have every component specifically built to work for a particular Linux distro. But when basic features don't work properly without hours of troubleshooting (if you can ever get them to work at all), it's a little hard to just recommend it to your average Joe whose Windows/Mac computer works just fine.
This "everything just works" Linux experience a lot of people talk about on Lemmy/Reddit has absolutely never been my experience, even though I've been a casual Linux fan for over a decade now. Meanwhile, I've had the opposite experience with Windows (unless you're talking really old Windows versions like Win XP and older).
This. I have dabbled with various Linux distros over the past 15+ years out of curiosity. I have, without fail, had to spend days troubleshooting and fixing various problems of all kinds. Sometimes it was WiFi drivers, sometimes it was GPU drivers, sometimes it was power management issues, and most recently it's soundcard drivers and poor audio control/quality issues. I always installed Linux as dual-boot so I had my normal Windows install to fall back on but I just couldn't see myself able to fully switch primary OS over.
Nowadays I couldn't switch over even if I wanted to because numerous programs I use for my work are not supported properly or at all. Linux has indeed come a long way over the years in terms of UX and software compatibility, but not everyone uses their computer just for games. There is a lot of creative and productivity software (and devices!) that have limited or zero Linux support and many FOSS alternatives are not sufficient. I hate Adobe as much as the next person and Photoshop is a bloated pile of trash, but part of my soul dies whenever a Linux fan tells me I can just replace Photoshop with GIMP. GIMP is clownware.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I've had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I "should have known better" or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that "maybe Linux isn't for you".
You know what? Maybe it isn't. It sure isn't for most people and I can't see that changing soon.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I’ve had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I “should have known better” or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that “maybe Linux isn’t for you”.
I had almost exactly this same issue years ago when I tried Mint. I was trying to get something to work (I think install games on Steam? Something like that) and it would just do nothing, no message, etc. When I asked for help, I was told "This is super obvious" and after trying their suggestions and having them all fail, was told "just go back to windows."
Ok, done?
(It also doesn't help that there is a huge difference between 'you can use the terminal' and 'you have to use the terminal.' I'm an 80's kid, I grew up with DOS, so I understand how to navigate terminals, I just don't want to constantly.)
I've had similar experiences. Never posted questions myself, but I'll be Googling for help and find forum posts that are as toxic as you describe.
It's been bad enough that the Linux elitism on Lemmy leaves a bad taste, even if I haven't seen as much of the toxic parts here. I know I'm not the only person of my friends group that feels this way about Lemmy's Linux crowd.
I've been exclusively Linux for years, and all the crap now going on with AI and ads being shoved into literally everything makes me happier than ever with that decision.
But you're absolutely right. Linux is "it just works" in a relatively narrow use-case.
Just going on the internet to browse and play some Facebook games (my parents). It'll absolutely work out of the box.
Doing some light creative work (design, writing, etc...) No tinkering needed.
But from there it becomes a scale from "probably work fine" to "hours of work and extra repositories needed".
Video editing or 3D modelling with an NVIDIA card because CUDA, it SHOULD be easy to install, but there's a chance it won't be. You take your chances.
Gaming through proton? Single player games, yeah. I've literally had 95% work out of the box because Valve is awesome. But I don't play online multiplayer. If you need to play nice with anticheat software, good luck.
I too get frustrated with the fundamentalist Linux base who think its the right fit for everyone. Because it absolutely is not, and its okay to admit that because admitting that drives the motivation to improve it.
I don't think Linux is for aging hardware. It just depends of your needs. Linux support all mainstream hardware, I guess. Never had any problems with something not working on Linux. I remember many years ago I had a scanner, which used to work only with Win XP or Vista because of outdated drivers. Windows 7 was too modern for it. I tried it with Linux and it worked. Now I have some random-hardware PC, everything works. It's Intel Core 11400 hardware, AMD RX-GPU, quite modern. I think problems could be on laptops with display backlight, sleep mode or something else. Desktop PC's should be good. Even if you have last-gen hardware, just use the latest kernel. I haven't heard about Linux build hardware. It used to be a thing for Hackintosh builds.
My previous company HP laptop worked better on Linux, it wasn't that hot all the time. Because Linux was consuming less system resources. My work: Browser + IDE. I had dual-boot Win10 and Ubuntu. Ended up with Windows because of Pulse Secure crap and some specific network restrictions. It was years back.
I remember I gave up with Ubuntu 5 years ago at home because after system update It just failed to boot. I didn't touch anything. I don't know if it's possible today. And Proton wasn't here and I wanted to play games. I remember I was using Lightroom, but for my very basic photographer needs Darktable works perfectly. And it's free!
All you need is basic troubleshooting skills. You need to google sometimes. I know that it could be an issue. Linux not for everyone. And it's fine. It's good to have a chose. Linux gives that choice.
To comment on the first paragraph, that is just a skill issue. Before I switched to Linux I was pretty adept at Windows, but some things are hard to figure out because it's hidden behind layers of bullshit. Running commands that obscure what exactly they're doing, just because some guy on some forum said it worked for him, is how you get around on Windows and that knowledge is something you build over many years. Knowing where specific settings are or what values to use takes time. The same counts for Linux. If you stick to it, that knowledge will come with experience.
Just remember the dism and sfc scannows, registry hacks etc the average Joe doesn't know about. Your learnt it, you didn't start using Windows with that knowledge. The same will happen with Linux.
Windows just sucks at handling Bluetooth. It's ridiculous that you can't change audio codecs, or choose between handsfree and high quality audio. You have to let windows guess at both
This is the same kind of thing I'd expect when a once nice android app gets bought out by a company like tencent.
Bundle a battery manager and RAM optimizer bs in the file browser or something, fill it with ads, maybe they could have microtransactions for some of the "features".
When Oxygen Not Included was purchased by Tencent, they added some data-mining functionality (as far as I know, opt-in for in-game content, so not the worst, but still). I'd have been less-willing to buy a copy if I'd known that it'd wind up down the road having that happen to it.
I'm a little concerned about the broader prospect of software from one entity being sold to someone, then down the line, that entity going under, and in an always-online world, being a conduit for new updates with less-desirable software with the access granted the earlier one. This wasn't historically a problem when software was sold offline on physical media.
For Android, at least there's some level of app isolation, but on the PC, apps aren't isolated.
Yea, I'm still stuck on Windows at work for the foreseeable future as I don't control that too much.
Otherwise, for personal stuff that I do control, they really can get fucked.
My wife had never used any desktop OS other than Windows before, but I switched her to Pop!_OS and it's gone fine. Certainly not any worse than between 2 Windows versions, but at least now there's no bullshit and things are actually customizable. (Her words)
neowin.net
Active