You need hot water in Phoenix, don’t you?

The vast majority of users don’t care about these things, though

There is what used to be the “Mail App” that was introduced with Win10. That was renamed to Outlook. A new Outlook was then installed automatically that was called Outlook (new). At some point, Outlook was renamed "Outlook (classic) and Outlook (new) was renamed “Outlook”. On top of that there is the Outlook that is part of the MS Office suite, if you have that installed.

I’m not entirely sure how accurate my memory of this desaster is, though. I don’t use Windows on my personal machines, I noticed this on a friend’s computer I was fixing.

I believe there are three products called Outlook, actually

The German ID card has that functionality. Date of birth is saved on the chip card and you can identify yourself via NFC reader and the open source ID app. You can see what information is transmitted before sending it. In the case of age verification, it would only be “underage yes/no”. It’s not perfect but pretty good from a privacy standpoint.

Yes but there are public DNS servers that block blacklisted domains. I can set that as DNS in my router settings and it works the same as using pihole as a blacklisting DNS server, right?

Stupid question, but does pihole offer any substantial benefit over using a remote ad-blocking DNS like AdGuard or whatever?

Yeah NTFS is not a great experience indeed. You can only do so much without it being open source. But I also experienced issues with mounting ext4 or btrfs. It’s not a dealbreaker for me, but it tends to irritate new users while it seems easy to fix.

Absolutely! I’ve been on Linux since 2017 and KDE Plasma since 2019-ish. It outperforms Windows even in terms of usability/ease of use in most cases. My 70+ years old, tech-illiterate parents happily use it.

But things like mounting and partitioning make me scratch my head. KDEs partitioner requires sudo rights to even start and then formats partitions in a way that you need sudo rights to access it. It’s annoying and would be very easy to fix.

It’s absolutely bananas that internal drives are not mounted automatically by standard. It’s even more bananas that it’s not easily customizable via GUI. Gnomes partitioning app can somewhat do it I believe, in KDE’s partitioning app, it was completely broken last time I tried. Either way I lost two people back to Windows because of this

But you don’t really know. You can also explicitly tell it which coding standards to follow and it still won’t.

That’s the problem with LLMs in general, isn’t it? It may give you the perfect answer. It may also give you the perfect sounding answer while being terribly incorrect. Often, the only way to notice is if you knew the answer in the first place.

They can maybe be used to get a first draft for an E-Mail you don’t know how to start. Or to write a “funny” poem for the retirement party of Christine from Accounting that makes cringe to death on the spot. Yet people treat them like this hyper competent all-knowing assistant. It’s maddening.

Ugh, in the guitar community there’s this myth that the wood type, body shape etc. of an electric guitar influences the sound. If it does, it’s immeasurably small. It’s almost entirely about the pickup circuitry and string position relative to the pickups.

Kartoffeln is just short for Kartoffelnachtschattengewächs, so it doesn’t really count.

Fun fact: Einwohnermeldeamt is the shortest German word beside “Ja”, “Nein” and “Wadenbeinfraktur”

Our (privatized) mail service offers an identification process to third parties where you either walk into a post office with your physical ID card or you make a video call with a call center and show it to them. I don’t think they transmit any more data than “over 18 yes/no”. So while data hording might often be the reason, I don’t think it’s the only one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah that was the language barrier speaking. ID of course. You know you can get a new card at your local Einwohnermeldeamt (for a fee)?

It’s called AusweisApp:

https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp/

The German passport ID card (and I’m sure many others) has a NFC chip in it and you can use it with an open source app to securely prove your identity online. In cases like this, the only information pulled from your ID would be “over 18” or “not over 18”.

It’s one of the few things my government did right in the digital space. And yet almost nobody in the private sector uses this. I’m tired of being asked to upload a photo of my ID for age verification.

Yes I do. I want an actual smart TV with a practical, open source, TV-optimitzed Linux OS. It’s not that software on a TV is a bad idea in itself. It’s how it’s ruined by for-profit companies.

What do you not like about Kate? It’s very simple and minimal on the outside but has lots of cool features if you need them. (Just like KDE Plasma)