(and when things go bad…)

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Nevertheless, Valve’s work with proton has pretty much crushed the argument that Windows is needed for games. That use to be a major sticking point, preventing people from leaving Windows - but now not so much.

Well, if your GPU is NVIDIA, you will also need a bleeding edge rolling release distro for now. Other than that, anything that ships recent version of KDE Plasma or GNOME (the first one handles Xwayland with DPI scaling a bit better imo and is generally more functional)

I keep hearing people say this. But I’ve got an nvidia card, and I just went with the default Mint Cinnamon install and I’ve had no problems whatsoever. I guess maybe my card isn’t new enough to run into whatever problems other people are talking about.

… Actually, there is one minor annoyance. I get lots of nvidia flatpak updates; and they are large downloads. I’d prefer not to be downloading gigabytes of graphics card updates every week. But other flatpaks demand that I have the latest nvidia stuff, so … I guess that is an nvidia annoyance that I experience. I don’t expect that to be fixed by a bleeding edge distro though!

But we’re talking about proportions of Desktop operating systems. People using the desktop less might decrease (or slow the increase) of total desktop usage; but there would need to be more reason that just that for it to impact Windows disproportionately.

A typical ActivityPub+Lemmy post.

I’m sure Microsoft would be supportive of that point of view. And with their wealth and lobbying power … … Lets not mention it again, and hope for the best.

The issue with this stance is that it’s one of those all-or-nothing points of view.

Not it isn’t. Every single individual person who decides to live without a car is an improvement. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

Hey, no one is trying to stop you from doing that. I’m sure it is very convenient for you.

My point of view though is that automatically uploading my personal files to some corporation computer on the other side of the world should not be the default when I try to save something. Maybe sometimes I’ll want to use that feature, but there are a variety of reasons why I don’t want it most of the time. And I definitely don’t like having to jump through hoops just to avoid it.

To me it is weird that every day on lemmy I see new posts complaining about all tankies… but I never actually see any of the content they are complaining about. And outside of lemmy, I never see or hear the word ‘tankies’ used at all. I’ve asked a couple of people I know in real life if they ever seen discussions about it in their parts of the internet, and none of them people I’ve asked have ever heard the word before.

So… like I said, I find it weird. It’s like some kind of lemmy boogieman.

Forced accounts are evil - including Android. Here’s my Android story:

When I got my first Android phone, my intention was to not have an account - or at least have as much isolation between any account and my actual usage as possible. So I decline account creation when I first started using the phone, and told the phone to only store all contacts locally. That worked, and I was pretty happy with it. But later, I wanted to download a couple of basic apps from the app store - and that required an account. So I created a bogus account to download the apps. …

After creating the account to download stuff, I noticed that the contacts had automatically associated themselves with that new account had automatically uploaded all my contacts and personal info to google to sync with this account. This is precisely the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place. So, I immediately logged into that account via google’s website and told it to not store any contact info, and to delete all existing info. Which it did.

But then some time later… the account again decided to sync with my phone - this time to delete all the contacts from my phone (presumably because I’d deleted them from the online account). So although I’d gone to some deliberate lengths to tell my phone to only store data locally and to not upload it, what i ended up with was all personal data uploaded, and then purged from my phone. I had to try to restore my contacts from an ancient sim-card backup from my old phone.

Since then, I’ve decided that I will not use a google account for my phone for any reason, ever. I’ve use F-droid and the Aurora store instead. (But actually I very rarely use any apps anyway.)

Password managers are good; but keeping track of passwords is not the main problem with making online accounts for everything.

I think we can find better things to bitch about than the price of games.

I’m sure you’re right about that. But this topic isn’t about games being too expensive. It’s about ads being forced on people with no compensation. (Many people don’t want ads under any circumstances, while some people say they would accept ads if they get financially compensated.)

I’m sure you’ll be thinking about this conversation for longer than it took to make the original post.

I have shared a computer with people, but we definitely don’t want our stuff open at the same time. I would find that confusing and a bit of a violation of privacy. So that leaves me (and most people I assume) just trying to imagine what it is that you are not happy with. And I honestly don’t know what you are talking about when you say ‘regular shortcut’. As far as I know, there is only one kind of shortcut in windows. It’s a icon that runs a command of your choice, with an icon of your choice, placed in a location of your choice (any folder, any part of the start menu, or somewhere on the taskbar). So when you talk about shortcuts not being the regular one, I don’t know what you mean.

But look, if you say it’s bad for your use-case - I believe you. When I said that it was a stretch to blame Firefox, I didn’t mean it was a non-issue. What I had in mind was that your primary complaint seems to be about what Windows is doing rather than what Firefox is doing. In any case, like I said before: if it isn’t doing what you need then it makes sense to look elsewhere. Good luck to you.

I’m not really sure what you are asking for. From what I understand it sounds like you have multiple people using the same computer, and they all want their own Firefox profile open at the same time. You’ve got a shortcut for each profile; and it works… but you are unhappy with how the Windows taskbar looks when you have these multiple profiles open at once?

I feel like its a bit of a stretch to blame Firefox for what the Windows taskbar does while you have multiple people simultaneously trying to use the same web-browser. But sure, everyone has their own use-case. And if this isn’t doing what you need, then it makes sense to look elsewhere.

What’s wrong with profiles in Firefox? I have 3 different Firefox profiles that I use, just for myself. (1 for general usage, 1 for banking, and one for a particular email account.) From my point of view, the profile system works fine. I don’t know what else I’d even ask for to improve it.

And even still, I wouldn’t expect most people would even want multiple Firefox accounts for a single computer login anyway; which is why the Firefox profile selector is disabled by default. (Tab-containers are a bit different, but related. I can certainly imagine a lot of people befit from those.)

0.1% chance would be huge. That kind of probability is an unacceptable risk even just for a personal injury, let alone the destruction of all life on earth.

That just means it wasn’t there last time you saw this thread. New comments appear yellow on some lemmy interfaces.

Vote for the best option you have. Maybe you don’t feel like the current options are great; but just suppose you keep voting for the best of your options, and that best option keeps winning. The idea is that later someone will think “maybe I can win by being even better…”. That’s the theory of democracy anyway. If the best candidate keeps winning, then the competition improves to challenge them. But right now that doesn’t seem to be happening.

As long as someone like Trump can get even vaguely close to victory, that either means that a near-majority of Americans believe Trump is the better option, or that not enough people are voting. I think it’s probably the second one. The republican strategy has nothing to do with fielding the best candidate. Instead they rely on feeding voter apathy, anger, and doubt. They want anyone who isn’t a zealot to be uncertain about voting. That’s how they win. We’re not going to see the best candidates while that strategy is in play. And to beat the ‘don’t vote’ strategy… well, you just have to vote.

Look, I don’t know exactly. I don’t think it’s an easy problem.

But I think the first stages would try to help the aliens understand how we communicate with each other. If people are waving their limbs around and breathing and poking at devices, and making all sorts of noises, it may be unclear which of those actions is meant to be communication. So the first thing is to have very clear correlations and patterns that are easy to recognise. Bring in the white-board to write words is a decent idea; but writing the word ‘human’ and then just standing there doing nothing with no follow-up is pretty much useless. There needs to be a couple of different words shown with very concrete context. ‘Human’ is not terrible, but it isn’t a great choice because you can’t really draw attention to what a human is when there is literally always a human there while you are trying to communicate. So it might be a decent word if the aliens already have the concept of words - but as a starting point… not really. Better to just say nouns for concrete things and point while doing it; with repetition and clear patterns. Writing just a list of counting numbers wouldn’t be a bad idea either. If you write all the numbers up to 100 or so I think there would be a clear pattern, so that at least the aliens would know that you are trying to communicate by writing stuff.

Regarding my criticism of the movie, it’s not so much that the whiteboard idea is bad, or that their attempts were bad; but rather that these are supposedly the attempts of experts - after other experts have tried and failed; and then the meetings with the project coordinators have weird discussions like “this method will take too long.” - as if they think you can somehow side-step the need to establish a common language. And the description of the plan from the scientist talk about teaching the different meanings of the word ‘you’, and some grammar rules - as if that’s somehow a core priority. I just think it’s a really shallow level of discussion. Their strategy is super basic (but not unreasonable), and the criticism of it from the other characters is somehow even more shallow. They were even questioning why the scientist wanted to bring in the whiteboard. Like, isn’t that extremely obviously? Do you really need to have a discussion about that? I really just felt like it was not a convincing set of smart people talking about the problem.

When I said anyone off the street could do a better job, I guess what I had it mind is that people would typically just point to things and say what they pointing to. They could bring in props and talk about the props; and perhaps try to give something to the aliens to interact with - if possible. Just basic ideas like that would be a decent start. I reckon that would be better than just holding up a whiteboard with a single word on it then just standing around. Like, how are the aliens meant to even know that it is a word at all - let alone what it might mean?