Windows 11 has round corners.

I find I no longer integrate new apps/technology flows into my life because they either won't be supported or will be enshitified/weaponized against me. The future kind of sucks. My smart home is barely hanging on to turning my lights on at dusk (something photo-sensors for lights just did without issue from the 90s on). Android just broke my phone, I can no longer just say 'hey android, play the news' and have it play headlines from real new organization that I specify. Instead it grabs news from I don't know where and gives me Google Gemini approved summaries (that Google states may or may not be accurate).

I have done this, and in many ways it has been one of the best parenting decisions I've made. My oldest is a better CLI user now than most engineers I work with, and it came almost entirely from him exploring the system and getting excited about all the cool things he can do. It also made it super easy for me to teach him more self-service things, everything from looking at system logs to see why the xbox controller or even the USB keyboard isn't working, to learning how the software stack is assembled.

For my other kids that don't care about that sort of stuff, even they have become very capable computer users. It's been easy for them to learn Windows and ChromeOS at school. I already see the same pattern of diving deeper developing with my youngest too.

One of the most rewarding things I've experienced as a parent is seeing the hacker spirit still very much alive.

Make sure they have at least a passing familiarity with Windows and it's apps because like it or not Windows is still the default in the school and working world so they'll have to work with that stuff to some degree. Otherwise go for it.

Side note how's open office compatibility these days? Last time I tried it yeeears ago there were still compatibility problems that would have made group projects hard.

Simply put the economics are behind a locked down click and drool style operating system with a manufacture controlled store that takes 30% of all gross.

The faster we can kill the Apple and Google store monopolies the faster we'll go back to having operating systems/phones that we can at least do something with.

We still have Linux for now, but as we know signed bootloaders present a very large risk.

I completely agree with your latter point after being a windows dev on and off since windows 3.0. It’s been one hell of a rollercoaster.

Interesting. It prompted me to install the microsoft store version which, when launched manually is identical to the web version. As the keyboard key brought up a web window telling me to install it, I assumed it just launched that.

I got an email from a client about a meeting at 2PM on Gmail. Their AI automatically added an 2AM slot to my calendar and it cannot even be removed

Do you have any other small examples of stuff I could try out to test-drive the Gemini integration for Google Sheets? My colleague tried it out to get it to make a chart, but it ended up failing at the task. It was hard for me to evaluate it though because it seems like when you use Gemini inside of Sheets, there's no way to share the conversation. That's horrifying, especially if it is responding back with delusions of grandeur.

> it started telling me it was a "goddess of light" blabla

The dimensional merge is real! Did it also start talking about how it's a Hyperdimension Neptunia CPU?

I saw someone on here the other day honestly insisting that people just don't know what they want and need to be shown the new options.

No product in our entire history has been so aggressively pushed into everyone's face. If there's a person alive in modern society who hasn't had 4000 AI apps blasted at them... where are they and how do I achieve this nirvana?

Nothing says "this product is useful and people want it" quite like having to force it onto users' computers.

Just constantly repeat 'in-demand' until the dumbest executive at every major company is forcing some LLM product into every part of the operation in order to 'remain competitive'. I've seen first hand how useful AR can be for actually real world work by enhancing a flesh and blood human being's ability to do their job and the best device on the market is still the 6 year old Hololens 2. Microsoft just completely abandoned it in favor of something that most of the time says you the trouble of having to type something into a search bar.

And how are these companies measuring engagement? If they make it easy to accidentally click one of their "AI" buttons, does that count? Like in Clickup they put AI features on basically every single view they could and its incredibly easy to click one of them as their UI slowly loads from all the other third party junk they've added in.

It should be a huge red flag if companies have to force stuff on users.

lol you must be new here. To me this rhymes with web3 (kodak coin), web2 (google circle), and also web1 (pets.com). There will be a lot of failures, but the companies that get established in the space will be eeconomic goliaths.

The point is still perfectly valid. What's the use in being pedantic and rude?

Microsoft is constantly trying to push the envelope to see what they can get away with. Anyone defending this kind of crap hasn't been paying attention for the last 20 friggin years

It's "your computer" but it's "their OS". Go ahead and switch to Linux but the "systemd / snap packages / telementry etc. is being forced on my distro" complaints is exactly the same "adversarial relationship with my computer"(sic).

If you want things exactly your way, there's the Gentoo route if you don't mind supporting it yourself.

It's only "your" computer insofar that you're the only person using it.

> I would swear I removed copilot from a Dell laptop I just purchased for my father, and it came back after a major update. I could be wrong.

I've had feature-update crapware get reinstalled twice, some reinsallations happen only after a reboot and/or 5-10min delay. So upgrade, clean. Reboot, clean again. Reboot, wait 10 min, clean again.

This during the last year and for dozens of machines.

You may benefit from a non-socialist economy. I pay my best engineer 60k€, so 39.9 after tax, total cost 90k€ for me, and he couldn’t find an MD (the dedicated family doctor - so he has to pay any doctor with a 15€ surplus).

In exchange, we go to the Theater (classic, not movies) for 30€ and we don’t have Copilot on our computer. We don’t have the translation on Airpods, and we have to click all cookie banners.

If I had a visa for the USA, I’d be there.

If, in MacOS, I can drag a file onto a taskbar icon to open the file in whatever program I dropped it on...

MacOS already does that. You're not going to drag a video file to the spreadsheet app icon with much success, but if the app knows how to handle it then it will work. I can't imagine using an OS these days that doesn't have that functionality.

Yep you can drag a file onto the doc on an app icon to have the app in question open the file (assuming it was meant to run that file).

I gotta say, I'm not a Windows user anymore, but it would drive me nuts if I couldn't do that.

Finder (the MacOS version of File Explorer on Windows) is an app you commonly interact with every day for several minutes. If it doesn't work well that's hours of your life you spend fighting the system instead of getting things done.

Those are the kinds of things that made me move away from Windows 10 years ago.

Sure, maybe, but Anthropic and OpenAI are selling theirs.

If you want a more curated experience that takes a lot of the rough edges off Linux: https://bazzite.gg

Bazzite isn't going to be as flexible as some other distros, but it's goal is to make the Linux transition as easy as possible. It's aimed primarily at gamers but you'll get a full OS that you can do all the normal stuff on

Debian works fine with Proton for me. I think it is not very picky.

I just run Debian Trixie with almost no problems. I build the kernels I use off the upstream release cycle (so, 6.17-rc6 right now). I build with LLVM Full LTO, not because it's necessarily faster, but because I want to find bugs in it :)

For some reason the video acceleration in Steam itself will break running games if you alt-tab back and forth. But it can be disabled in the menus, and I haven't missed it at all.

SteamOS is arch based so some variant of that makes a lot of sense if you're not going for steamos directly

Kubuntu works fine for me. Got cyberpunk to run on it very well, i havent had a game not work so far, but i don't play online shooters.

Kubuntu is Debian but i don't think that has caused any issues.

Since i got the deck i don't really use the PC for gaming much though.

This is all purely my anecdotal opinion.

Thankfully I don't want and will never want any games that infect my systems with "anti-cheat" malware so I see the lack of support for it as a feature.

I tend to play indie games, but I've never had anti-cheat problems. Everything happily runs on 6.17-rc5 right now.

Microsoft needs to provide their own anti-cheat hooks and block any kernel-level mods entirely.

AAA games are overproduced crap that compensate with aggressive marketing.

Why would you willingly install games with invasive kernel anti-cheat? That's unacceptable both on Linux or Windows.

playing any game with an invasive kernel anti-cheat is a non-starter on its own.

no game is worth that.

I once wrote a blog post called “Never update anything” about how updates suck, but even so I would just deal with it, because you probably want the security fixes.

About 30 critical RCEs since oct 24, botnet operators adore you