What are your experience?

My last “real” Windows experience was with WinXP and every time I have to touch Windows at the PC of a customer, which happens sometimes when the stars align, I feel like the first human that ever walked the earth.

I have no idea how people get any work done on a system that is constantly nagging for attention, popups, restrictive Enterprise environment and non descriptive error messages. Nothing in this world seems to make sense or is presented in a unified way. Every dialogue or sub system seems to be it’s own isle stemming from another decade of tech. The experience for someone who is simply not used to Windows any more due to missing exposure is horrible.

Heck a Mac feels alien to me too but in the end that’s still a system I could deal with given some time.

Mebbe I’m spoiled by stuff like systemd, PipeWire, Wayland, btrfs and all that candy we get nowadays on a Linux desktop. I’m not even talking about privacy or FOSS principles at this point. Just the fact that the system doesn’t get in my face with ads or AI or “very important reboots” seems to be a revelation in 2024.

Sounds kinky.

for some reason they wanted me to have slack

I get similar requirements from school and kindergarten nowadays. They want me to install weird apps for communications. Last school had an online portal on the web and mail. That was a no brainer but these apps?

Hello Waydroid.

Not gonna taint my own phone with this stuff. That includes WhatsApp.

pvt NoPhone

Love this bit. Gonna steal it :D

Either this or there are defined “core hours” where everyone must be available.

We used to pipe all sorts of 💩 to /dev/dsp just to know how it would sound 🤓

Thanks to GitHub this wonderful article, that made me opt for another domain for my recent project a year ago, is now… drumroll under an .io domain too: https://tamouse.github.io/blog/politics/2019/10/02/why-is-the-io-domain-problematic.html

Irony much.

The situation is really bad for consumers. Even with a Pi-Hole and a dumb TV and something like a Fire TV stick (they tend to send lots of telemetry too and apps like Toggo will nag you to oblivion to consent to data mining - if an app asks at all that is).

I’m slowly building up a Jellyfin library and yeah I jumped the hoops to find a non-smart TV. Wrote about it at https://beko.famkos.net/2022/11/27/on-non-smart-tvs/ and settled with a https://www.homex.eu/u55nt1000.html that ticked all my boxes:

☑ cheap affordable ☑ 4k (UHD) ☑ dumb non-Smart ☑ HDMI ☑ 55″

No idea about it’s tuner though[1] alas it’s not really any longer available in any market space today and I hope it will not die on us any time soon or the quest to find a new one starts again 🤓

[1] We’ve a decent external receiver that does all the work and HDMI juggling but even that thing is on the WiFi for software updates and in-house streaming but from what I can tell it behaves at least, which is probably just because it’s old by now.

Doing this in reverse all the time. Stretching games on my triple head setup to full size. It’s the same principle. If the game doesn’t offer it kill it with gamescope, Wine virtual desktop or if nothing helps a completely virtual display that overlays your current:

https://beko.famkos.net/2021/05/31/extreme-multihead-for-gaming-on-linux-pc/

For some editing the config files directly works wonders. Looking at you Unity!