WinGet, choco, scoop, &c, they all have strengths and weaknesses, which is why I had to write this: https://github.com/brianary/scripts/blob/main/Update-Everything.ps1

It’s also why I use Linux at home.

I really like the tiling window support in Pop_OS!'s Cosmos desktop.

It’s the same argument I’ve heard about the “complexity” of Mastodon: too many choices, which is I guess why people largely stopped going to websites outside the major social networks. Monopoly over competition, it’s like everyone is pining for a monarchy.

As I’ve said elsewhere: I wonder what controls Mozilla has in place to prevent gradual takeover of their board by those with an interest in removing Firefox as a competitor. We’ve watched the sleeper cell in the Supreme Court transform that body into an illegitimate partisan puppet. Mozilla’s actions over the last few years would make much more sense if it were being manipulated into self destruction.

19½ months. That’s how long Mozilla was prepared to listen to a small, unfiltered subset of their users, for a laughably meager maintenance cost.

Yep, which further highlights the problem: @mozilla@mozilla.social 🔗 https://mozilla.social/users/mozilla/statuses/113153943609185249

We’ve made the hard decision to end our experiment with Mozilla.social and will shut down the Mastodon instance on December 17, 2024. Thank you for being part of the Mozilla.social community and providing feedback during our closed beta. You can continue to use Mozilla.social until December 17. Before that date, you can download your data here (https://mozilla.social/settings/export), and migrate your account to another instance following these instructions (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/mozilla-social-faq).

This was also my recent experience on PopOs!

There’s a little historical baggage, but look at Windows: multiple letters for drives, and all of the paths can be modified, so you have to ask Windows where any important directory is physically mapped (like SystemRoot or Documents or Temp or Roaming AppData or many others), because it doesn’t have this nice consistent structure like Linux. Linux presents a logical layer and manages the physical location automatically. Windows makes you do the logical lookup yourself, but doesn’t enforce it, so inexperienced programmers make assumptions and put stuff where the path usually is.

That’s part of why logging in to Windows over a slow connection can take forever if you have a bunch of Electron apps installed: they’ve mismapped their temp/cache directory under the Roaming AppData, so it gets synched at every login, often GiB of data, and they refuse to fix it.

There’s a whole book about this: # Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly “unskilled,” that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/nickel-and-dimed-20th-anniversary-edition-on-not-getting-by-in-america-barbara-ehrenreich/9836607?ean=9781250808318

Gross. I haven’t run into that.

USB-A requires three attempts to connect, C only one.

Windows 10 keeps turning that stupid news feed back on on my taskbar, too.

I work in finance, and the only time I use office is when my coworkers infrequently send me something locked in an Office document. Plenty of non-technical coworkers are addicted to it, but there’s no need, because it’s awful.

The Office programs are an ancient, bloated mess with an impossibly convoluted UI that to one uses more than a small share of.

The styles in Word and PowerPoint are never consistent: the bullets in lists never really match, fonts change randomly without reason, &c. These are intelligent people who have used this garbage for actual decades, and the WYSIWYG lie just results in a sloppy mess.

Even Microsoft wants everyone to stop using the desktop versions, and rent it from the cloud, which can be done from any OS.

For years, there was progress in moving governments away from implicitly endorsing Microsoft, and toward the simpler (but often still overcomplicated) OpenOffice/LibreOffice formats, and Microsoft engaged in some pretty shady behavior to stop it.

Markdown is better for documents, or maybe HTML, or LaTeX via LyX or something. Databases and legitimate file formats are better for data, with scripts for formulas. There are many simple alternatives around, but the addiction is so automatic and insidious, I can’t tell you how often over twenty years I’ve gotten screenshots pasted into an empty Word document rather than just sending the image.

Zero is freezing

10 is not

20 is pleasing

30 is hot

40 frying

50 dying

Adtech has been controlling the Overton Window too long. That’s what fueled the rise of (actual) fake news, as originally observed coming from Estonia, radicalizing dumb Americans.

https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/774-the-ad-money-fuelling-fake-news/

He took a series of very shallow breaths, and then said as quickly and as quietly as he could, ‘Door, if you can hear me, say so very, very quietly.’

Very, very quietly, the door murmured, ‘I can hear you.’

‘Good. Now, in a moment, I’m going to ask you to open. When you open do not want you to say that you enjoyed it, OK?’

‘ΟΚ.’

‘And I don’t want you to say to me that I have made a simple door very happy, or that it is your pleasure to open for me and your satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done, OK?’

‘ΟΚ.’

'And do not want you to ask me to have a nice day, understand?"

‘I understand.’

‘OK,’ said Zaphod, tensing himself, ‘open now.’

The door slid open quietly. Zaphod slipped quietly through. The door closed quietly behind him.

‘Is that the way you like it, Mr Beeblebrox?’ said the door out loud.

— Life, the Universe, and Everything

I guess you’re completely right if you just assume your own conclusion.

So do feature testing, not user-agent sniffing! For Pete’s sake, it’s 2024! That’s been the best practice for decades!

Annie Linux, but sadly it doesn’t exist yet.