BearOfaTime

When permitting security failures costs more than preventing, then companies will do something.

And environmentally way better than Li-Ion.

Because it's awful to use, counter-intuitive, and fucking breaks network connectivity all the time by switching private networks to public on a whim.

Fuck that piece of shit for that reason alone. I've seen it fuck domain controllers doing this, when "supposedly" it can't do this on a DC. Know what happens then? I can't RDP to the server from it's own local network.

This is such a problem we run a powershell script on a schedule to ensure the connections remain private.

Because spending years setting up a system using nothing but open source from the start, you'd still not approach what windows can do out the box with far less effort.

I'm also not spending my time teaching old dogs new tricks, nor spending my time solving problems for them which just shouldn't exist (e.g. The stupid print monitor mentioned below).

I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it's still no competition to Windows, even with the dumb shit MS does.

As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I'd stuck with Cobol).

I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won't even boot. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery (even then, to really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero).

There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.

There are many reasons why Linux doesn't compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.

Now let's look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that's just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. No, I'm not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That's just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn't realistically shareable with other people.

Now there's that print monitor that's on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?

Networking... Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn't say "save creds"? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.

Someone else said it better than me:

Every time I've installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it's gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn't look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works.... only it doesn't save my preferences.

So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically.. but that doesn't work, so now I can't boot.. so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that... then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution... wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it's been four hours, it's 3:00am and I'm like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.

And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren't supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can't wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?

I just can't do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I've loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.

I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.

Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM's on Linux (Proxmox) because that's better than running Linux VM's on a Windows server.

Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment, or for people who are already well versed with windows.

Linux doesn't even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it's own way), and that's a massive barrier for users. The Mint shell doesn't use right-click... Really?

If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would've had a chance to beat MS, even then it would've required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.

These are what MS did in the 1980's to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.

All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).

Por que no los dos?

I can see both sides:

Super humbling because nature's complexity can provide data storage and retrieval capacity several orders or magnitude greater than the best we can do right now.

Also super exciting because look at what every brain on the planet is composed of, and how it functions, in a freakin' square millimeter!

Crazy stuff. Wild.

Fair words make me look to my purse (English proverb).

I've read the US has more trees today than 200 years ago.

Sorry, no source, it's been probably 20 years since I read it in a science mag.

Just looking at pics from the US west back then vs today is pretty staggering.

And the forest service has prevented fires from containing forests for going on 100 years... A problem in its own right (is a major cause of the larger wildfires we see today, which they we warned about in the 80's by one of their lead researchers).

Yep, Ghost Profiles.

Though I'd love to see what they think they have on me.

I'm old enough to well pre-date digital cameras, and of the photos I know I'm in, those people are unlikely to have uploaded pics (very few of those photos are with phones, and those people don't share online with others much anyway).

Genuinely very curious, since I'm such an outlier - it would be really insightful as to how effective FB is at piecing together disparate and tiny elements, including the tracking pixels, etc.

I've never intentionally even been to the FB website - the first time a college kid in the family talked about it, I knew it was bad news, but couldn't convince them.

Maybe I'll spin up a Linux machine off of usb, fire up a VPN, hit FB and see what I can find. I'm kind of curious now.

Where are they blocking them from?

If it's university machines and networks, I have no issue with that. Smart companies do the same.

But... They need to block all such services, not just arbitrary ones they "dislike".

I'm surprised the huge companies I've worked for don't block more.

This comment says everying, about you:

Strawman in the first and second sentence - no one made the statements you're claiming they've made.

Get down off the cross - no one here is persecuting you, you're just making that stuff up.

And don't try your standard aggressive "you're being abusive" bullshit with me. You're using sophistry in every post and comment you make.

You're either full of it, or need professional help. I can't tell which.

"Flapmice" hahaha, I'll be stealing that!

It's a way to filter out people, for good or ill.

Depending on the group/team/organization, physical presence makes a huge difference.

Even though I can work from home at will, I still go to the office a lot, about 60%-70% of my time is there. Physical presence just makes a lot of things easier, and it makes teams more cohesive. I can't imagine spending less time at the office - those random hallway conversations make a world of difference. If you're not there for the convo, they'll tap someone else, not by design or intention, just by that person being in front of them.

Now a call center? Maybe not so much, though I was once on a call center team and the ability to tap a teammate on the shoulder was a big help. Much better than using chat tools. So it really depends on the organization.

And then there's management that need you there to justify their role. That's just a poorly managed company, when senior management permits that (though some of them need their own staff count to justify their roles).