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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • I guess it just boils down to how much you accept a company to push you around. For me, the writing was on the wall with Windows Vista, even though I did have a Windows 7 machine/ partition later that actually worked well.

    I also gave Windows 8 a chance when it came preinstalled on the notebook I bought, but I hated it. So I finally fully switched there, and no Windows since then (excluding the machines my employers provide, IDGAF about them since I get paid to use them and don’t have to administrate those). There is way less need for Windows nowadays, back in the Windows 7 days, you could basically only play Linux native and OpenGL titles, PulseAudio was iffy, Vulkan and by extension DXVK didn’t exist, AMD drivers weren’t great (AMD had just begun releasing documentation late 2007 and fglrx was a pain), so there were a lot of things that just wouldn’t work, and yet switching was possible.

    As the author notes, there are way fewer blockers nowadays, and most people are just looking to excuse their complacency. And I think it’s fine to be ok with Windows, but then you shouldn’t complain too much. Microsoft under Nadella only cares about numbers.











  • Well, you don’t need to learn nix as a programming language for a simple installation, you can use it like a slightly different json, which the configuration.nix part was about. You can get the reproducibility aspect from just that, so I wouldn’t say you get no benefits at all without learning the language.

    There are more disadvantages (like time required to rebuild because you added a single package), so Arch is the better choice depending on preferences. Arch is a very good traditional distribution in my opinion, can’t go wrong with it









  • unless you’re running one of the Enterprise/IoT SKUs…

    That is the whole point. They’re squeezing the users they don’t give a shit about. But personal users almost never buy Windows licenses from Microsoft I’d bet. So what if they switch away? And how are they or their kids going to play Fortnite or League after switching?

    The money for Windows non-Enterprise is made with OEM deals. They probably wouldn’t even notice if nobody bought personal licenses anymore. Might as well make actual money from selling data about them.

    Enterprise is a different story, once you squeeze too hard, companies will find ways to replace you; they are somewhat resilient to pain, but it does have limits.