Suggestion if you’re still stuck on Windows (or use Steam on Linux).
Ooooh I didn’t know this is possible. Need to do it with EA as well
EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard…
Linux being better than ever couldn’t have come at a better time.
Apalling.
Microsoft will feel the wrat of Europe. Many people are switching to Linux. Even (local) governments with thousants of employees. This all together will have hudge implications in the next few years.
I mean no offense here. But Microsoft isn’t an OS company anymore they are an AI company. They have moved a lot of things to the web and they deal with orgs rather than end users.
PS. I want your statement to be true.
IBM had a role in the holocaust. Those numbers tattooed on everyone in the concentration camp? Those were IBM ID numbers for the punch cards.
If IBM staff protested about their role, it’s been lost to history. But it’s repeating today with Gaza and the staff who speak out are being demonized. Israel’s Lavender AI is being used to kill civilians. History will prove this woman and the other employees right in the end.
Ironic because Thinkpad T- and P-series laptops are some of the most robust machines you can get for a reasonable price these days.
Of course, the IBM that launched the Thinkpad line is a completely different company than the IBM that helped commit WWII atrocities… But it doesn’t matter anyway because they sold the entire PC division to Lenovo 20 years ago.
Ironic
Is it though?
No
IDK, we should ask Alanis Morisette
History will, but these people have made a stand, achieved nothing, lost their jobs and won’t be remembered.
Textbook retaliatory, I hope they have a nice retirement
Sue the company and bring the details in to a the court of law.
Washington is an at-will employment state. Businesses may fire any employee at any time, for any or no reason, as long as they are not violating any employee protection laws. Speech is not protected.
Retaliatory firing can still be sued, problem is proving it of course.
According to the state of WA dept of labor and industries these constitute retaliation:
Retaliation An employer cannot take adverse actions against an employee who exercises a protected right, files or intends to file a complaint, or who has discussed potential violations of their rights. Prohibited adverse actions may include:
- Terminating, suspending, demoting, or denying a promotion.
- Reducing hours or altering the employee’s work schedule.
- Reducing the employee’s rate of pay.
- Threatening to take, or taking action, based upon the immigration status of an employee or an employee’s family member.
- Subjecting the employee to discipline, including write-ups, verbal warnings, points, etc.
Everyone needs to learn about Open-Source, Community-Made stuff, & more useful terms to know
Hopefully they will find better jobs with better employers.
For everyone who uses Windows, try Linux. Don’t be scared to try something new, most things that are worthwhile come with some sacrifice. Sometimes, if we don’t leave our comfort zone, we miss out.
I will provide a small guide, but there are tons of resources on the internet.
See the ranking on the right hand side here: https://distrowatch.com/ You can pick something from there on the top of the list.
Watch YouTube to learn more about each Linux distro that you find interesting.
I personally would recommend Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based distros, as they have the widest support.
You don’t have to wipe your Windows-installation completely, instead you can dual-boot. This allows you to pick Windows or Linux when you start your computer. If you feel comfortable switching entirely, you can wipe out Windows and keep Linux exclusively.
Just be careful when you partition your drive, don’t accidentally overwrite your Windows installation (if that’s not what you want to do). Make a backup copy of your most important files on a separate external drive before the installation.
https://www.theverge.com/news/644769/microsoft-fires-employee-protestor-war-profiteer
" It is also concerning that you have not apologized to the company, and in fact you have shown no remorse for the effect that your actions have had and will have."
SAY YOU’RE SORRY OR THE COMPANY WILL BE SAD
It’s comically ironic that the author of that note thought the whistle-blower should apologize to the dirtbag for saying something.
If you don’t want people to be upset about your supporting genocide, then please consider not supporting genocide
It’s fucking wild how many people simply won’t consider not supporting genocide.
Look it isn’t that I won’t consider not supporting genocide, it is that your tone and the manner that you bring up the fact that I support the genocide makes me feel bad so out of spite I will continue to support the genocide, and now how do you feel?
This is all your fault.
/s
Have they said thank you once?
yelling and finger-pointing at the CEO before a live audience of thousands of attendees
oh nooo not finger pointing, thats so outrageous, unlike killing thousands of children
and making hostile, unprovoked, and highly inappropriate accusations against the CEO, the Company and Microsoft generally
the truth cant be hostile or inappropriate and the accusations were certainly not unprovoked
They want him to apologize for calling out Microsoft helping Israel murder children.
remorse for the effect that your actions have had
I think they were expressing remorse. Just, you know, remorse about the killing. Not the loss of face to the C-levels.
That is the real crime here …
Embarassing rich people or losing profits. Their lives are what really matter, wouldn’t want them to be inconvenienced in any way.
Soy Microsoft, tbh
you are Microsoft?
No, sorry there’s a meme going around online where the English term “soy” (as in soybeans; this term was likely derived from veganism where many vegans drink soy milk instead of cow milk) is being prefixed to nouns or people to denote weakness or just to snark at people, kinda like how people would use snowflake in the past.
I was calling Microsoft “soy” in this way
Do you know the origins of that meme? Are you sure you’re okay with repeating it yourself, even if it’s just meant as a joke?
Do you know the origins of that meme?
I thought I had already explained my idea of its origination, but according to Know Your Meme, the “soy” reference started around 2017 when information was hitting the mainstream about how soy contains phytoestrogens (isoflavones) [likely due to the rise in veganism at the time and people pushing for soy-based milk alternatives to cow milk and protein alternatives to meat] and people started to speculate (ignorantly) that consuming more soy makes people more feminine (but particularly less masculine). This may be true, but current it’s plausible due to a lack of sufficient evidence.
Know Your Meme then go on to explain how the term “soy” gets ascribed to a meme, “Soyjack”, and how his effeminate male persona gets compared to the ultimate masculine male persona “Chad”.
I take this meme to mostly refer to how some people in the world are changing their worldviews and behaviors to disform with the traditional patriarchy and order. People are upgrading their morality, whether that means abstaining or advocating for not consuming animals for food, or championing equity and minority rights like women’s, or touting the reality of the climate crisis and how we need to abandon fossil fuels in favor of clean energy.
This is in comparison to an older, narrower point of view that aims to regress worldviews and behaviors to a time when humanity dominated all other species on Earth (since we’re obviously better), neither women nor minorities had societal or individual powers or rights, or coal, natural gas, and oil are the best forms of energy because of how much they’ve contributed to humanity’s advancement.
People who subscribe to a worldview like the latter routinely would call people with the former worldview “soy”.
Are you sure you’re okay with repeating it yourself, even if it’s just meant as a joke?
I am fine using that term myself only towards regressives that abandon their worldviews or fail to practice their beliefs out of cowardice or a lack of conviction specifically because those people claim superiority over progressives. I’d use the term on people who would call others out for being more feminine (i.e. showing compassion, talking things out before forcing people to do things, etc.) but then show those same characteristics themselves, often without them recognizing their hypocrisy.
So, I called Microsoft soy in this case not because they enjoyed relatively progressive policies on human rights for example, but because they regressed on those beliefs by foresaking them and firing one of their employees who acted fully within the policy framework Microsoft themselves had created.
We should not settle with only one side of the societal spectrum name-calling and bullying the other for how they live. All ways of life are acceptable, so long as they don’t impede other’s. Tolerance is not a paradox. It is earned, in trust, as a social contract. If people prove to (routinely) breach that contract, then they deserve no respect in my eyes.
I have no issue with calling people or groups or companies or countries soy in that way.
I cannot recommend switching to Linux enough! Linux mint is a solid, stable OS with a thriving community and ample support for newcomers.
There are alternatives to nearly everything, yes YOU CAN absolutely live without microsoft or google tracking your every move, stealing your data, selling it and using that profit to fund unethical bullshit. Take back control, you will never regret it.
AutoHotKey on Wayland is my entry barrier. Not a fan of X11
Someone broke into my house on Tuesday and installed Linux Mint on my previously windows ThinkPad so I’m setting that up with all my productivity software today.
Fun fact I thought that my sound card was just gradually dying because I lost onboard speaker output 5 years ago, and lost any BT audio output last week, but it all came back after Mint was installed so I guess it was just windows being windows this whole time. I honestly just accepted that she would never speak again from her onboard speakers.
Someone broke into my house on Tuesday and installed Linux Mint on my previously windows ThinkPad
Now that’s my kind of mischief.
I installed pop os yesterday after repeatedly saying I hate Microsoft all week. Bye windows 11!
I used to be an avid Linux user a couple of years back – but had to move to macos due to work. I however soon have the freedom to move back soon. Just out of cursiosity, do you know why people are recommending Mint over Ubuntu now?
I have no horse in the race, i’m just curious what changed as when i used Linux last time you would be recommended Ubuntu 95% of the time.
Mint is Ubuntu with the icky proprietary Canonical stuff removed and with an extra layer of polish.
Mint Cinnamon even has a windows-like desktop/taskbar-like setup out of the box. I don’t know of any reason I might recommend somebody replace windows with Ubuntu rather than Mint.
Ubuntu is run by Canonical and people have mixed opinions about them. It mostly stems from their insistence on using snaps to run apps when other versions are supposedly faster (flatpack).
I think that’s the biggest issue otherwise Ubuntu is fine and I use it on all my VMs.
Ah okay, thanks for the answer.
There’s more. When you get away from Windows, you want to get away from ads. But Ubuntu is a commercial package that will remind you gently on occasion of this and include an ad for its own paid plan.
How hard is it to distro hop on your daily driver without losing your userdata/homefolder
syncthing is pretty great
Put it on a separate partition and you can easily keep it for each new install. I did that for quite a while.
Ventoy is entirely unrelated to preserving user data. It’s just a tool that lets you drag-and-drop multiple ISOs onto a flash drive without having to image it every time.
Mint for general use.
Nobara or PopOS for gaming.
Edit - you know what’s dumb about silent down votes? If you have an opinion, share it.
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While I wholeheartedly agree with her message, the reality is that any employee that interrupts a company event to criticize the company until they are escorted out of the room is gonna be fired regardless of the accuracy of their statements. We should be appalled at Microsoft’s complicity in Gaza, not that they fired an employee.
I applaud her for her stand, but she and everyone knew this would result in her termination.
Not wrong there, though I find it humorous they expected her to apologize in the dismissal letter
I don’t see the humor in it anymore. Whenever it comes to even admitting the crimes happening to/in Palestine, it’s always decent people getting the entire book thrown at them, while others who actually do something evil get off scott free.
You can’t just ask for accountability for crimes. You have to kiss the ring and you have to be made an example of. What we are seeing with the response to student action is actually unprecedented and it’s genuinely unhinged. And it’s not just the US, it’s most of Europe too.
It’s not enough that our brothers and sisters in Palestine are getting rounded up and massacred. You have to support it with every fiber of your being or you’re a terrorist. After planing my whole life to move to the West I’m now genuinely scared I’ll be jailed for thought crime if it keeps getting crazier.
I know that’s not the intention, but saying it like that slides into apology territory.
We should be absolutely appalled at the firing, maybe to a lesser extent, but there is no better time to point out this than during a big event.
It’s kinda like saying ‘protestors should not disrupt public spaces’, like they have done everything else, what else do people need to wake up and draw the line?
Yes, there is nothing surprising about this.
And we can be hopeful for companies to have solid principles where if they are accused of genocide that they reflect on their actions instead of firing, and hope for a future where that’s the expectation instead of apathy.
Don’t anthropomorphize companies. They don’t have principles. Companies are essentially nothing but incentive structures designed to maximize profits. You wouldn’t expect an algorithm or a machine to have principles so why would you expect that of a company?
Companies aren’t inanimate objects. They’re groups of people. They absolutely do have principles, it’s just for corporations those principles are usually “fuck everything besides money”.
Coops are companies that are worth championing in a capitalist setting, no? While money and capitalism is ever prevalent and seemingly necessary to interact with for survival, it’s good to have an option like a coop. Or actually an open source based coop.
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No. Absolutely fuck everything about your argument against the fired employee. We should be appalled at her termination as well as Microsoft’s atrocities.
Did you mean to say we shouldn’t be surprised that she got fired, or do you truly believe nobody should be appalled at Microsoft’s decision to fire her?
Civil disobedience involves the acceptance of consequences.
No. It may involve the expectation of consequences, for the sake of planning for retaliation, but anybody who condemns atrocities should also oppose retaliation against the condemnation.
Maybe some folks commit civil disobedience with the intention of voluntarily facing the consequences, but that’s entirely up to those individuals. Even in that case, they then depend on the broader society supporting their disobedience and demanding their retaliators back down.
Absolutely fuck everything about this “well they had it coming” apologia mindset.
Name a job where interrupting a CEO’s presentation in public wouldn’t be a terminable offense. What employee handbook says “If you’ve exhausted all other internal channels and are unhappy with the company’s direction, just call out the boss in front of thousands of people and there won’t be consequences.”
If your company is that evil and unsettling to change, you call them out and resign. Calling them out but still wanting to be paid is saying you’re okay with taking blood money as long as you’re saying it’s bad.
I don’t give a tenth of a rat’s shit. People gotta have a place to live, food to eat, and healthcare, and all of those require employment. Unless you can show me another employer in her field who isn’t committing or aiding atrocities, which I’m confident you cannot.
Linux time, nerds, who aren’t already using it.
I feel good about cancelling my 365 subscription, and I will continue to feel good about switching to Linux when windows 10 hits end of life. Not giving this company another dime.
I know this is unsolicited advice, so feel free to ignore me, but I am an expert on these things so here’s my take:
Before you switch to Linux, start switching your apps to ones that you know will work on Linux. It’ll make the process much easier for ya! :-)
The only hurdle here is design software. I use Affinity mostly and it’s great, but they don’t have Linux apps. I did manage to get Affinity Designer running with Wine at one point, but it wasn’t particularly stable.
For sure. Linux has a lot of great apps but there are times where it’ll become incredibly frustrating. For example, file explorers can be basic & frustrating… The best you’ll prob get is Dolphin.
Linux has the best file manager I’ve found on any platform: Krusader. It has twin panels, and a lot of the functionality is bound to FKeys: F2 Rename, F3 View, F4 Edit, F5 Copy, etc. F9 will open a terminal in the current directory. You can edit text files and uncompress zipped files from within Krusader. I’ve even done it on a remote filesystem over SSH.
I tried this, it’s nice indeed. The layout will require some getting used to for me, but I like how it lets me add my remote server as sftp bookmark and open files from there pretty seamlessly, even videos.
I’m have to give this a look!
Isn’t Windows File Explorer considered basic? It only just got tabs in 11 right? That and clicking on a disconnected network share would cause it to hang for a good few minutes.
It isn’t perfect by any means, but compared to Nautilus & many others, it still has a lot of benefits that make things quicker overall.
I’ve only used Nemo in Linux, but I can’t think of anything Windows file explorer can do that it can’t.
I still contend that the best file browser ever made is the macOS Finder. When someone makes something that good for Linux, I’ll be very happy
What. What?? Finder is the fucking worst. It doesn’t have a sensible tree view, does it?
seems sensible to me? its not amazing but i dont mind it … what doesnt work for you?
Sidebar defaults are bad. There’s no home directory. How do you get to your home directory? Cmd+shift+H, but can you get there without that special shortcut? You can’t see the file system’s structure in Finder. The GUI doesn’t have a way to go “up” in the directory structure. I don’t think you can do it in the GUI alone.
It won’t let you see stuff in like \tmp\ without a fight, too. I don’t know how to open stuff in places like that without
cd’ing to the location in the terminal, and doingopen .in the desired directory.The list view is the least bad, but it gets unwieldy if your directories are deeply nested. It’s also bad if you started in the middle of the tree and want to go up. Gallery and column view are really bad for anything non trivial.
I often want to see the entire file path, and it really doesn’t want to cooperate. If I do find the file I’m looking for, and want the full path, it doesn’t want to give it. I don’t even know if there is a way to get it. Other than like cmd+clicking -> “new iterm2 tab here” ->
pwd, which is not really that helpful of Finder.Contrast with windows’ default explorer. It’s not perfect and I think windows11 made it worse, but still. Open it up, there’s the “my pc”, click through to my user directory, music, some album, then i can click the top thing and get the path. I can also see the whole tree on the left.
Whatever I was using in Mint was similar to windows’ Explorer. Had no complaints about it.
I used treesize once to clean up my computer. That’s what a file system should be like.
Genuine question, is this trolling or do you seriously believe this?
I’ve been on Linux as my primary OS for around a year now. I’m still looking for a replacement for Lightroom and camera raw that doesn’t absolutely crush any image I’m working on.
Have you tried raw therapee? At least for what I do I find it to be an excellent Lightroom replacement.
ART, a fork of RawTherapee, is also very good.
Terrible name for SEO but sounds cool! 🤪
It sounds like it might be closer to a 1:1 replacement for Lightroom than Raw therapee. (I haven’t installed it, I’m just reading the description. https://art.pixls.us/)
I haven’t used Lightroom, so I can’t comment on how similar they are either. But there are enough good options that hopefully anyone switching can find one that meets their needs. :)
I have, but with terrible results. Can you recommend some tutorials? The behavior of various tools always surprises me, coming from Adobe raw and Lightroom.
For example, reducing contrast in Adobe tones down highlights and shadows while doing that in dark table and rawtherapee turns everything washed out and grey.
Hmm, unfortunately I don’t have any good recommendations. I’ve just tinkered with it until stuff I like happens, and it’s been so long since I used Lightroom I can’t speak to specific differences.
With the contrast example it sounds like maybe the RT/DT tools are more literal, and Lightroom is more “smart” perhaps? I usually use the curves panel for this sort of thing, like if I want to bring down some highlights, I’ll find whereabouts they are on the histogram and target that area specifically. If I want a lower-contrast image in general I may compensate for some dullness with the local contrast and saturation tools, or if it’s the common scenario of a washed out sky, I’ll probably use a graduated filter to darken the sky without messing with the foreground.
I’m just guessing though, so I don’t know if this is helpful at all.
I’m just guessing though, so I don’t know if this is helpful at all.
Any information is helpful and I truly appreciate you taking the time to summarize your workflow. I’ve actually never monitored the histogram outside of snapping the photo, so that alone is a great suggestion. I generally edit by eye and kinda feel my way through, but using a metric sounds like a great idea! It also makes a lot more sense if you’re right about RT/DT being more “literal.”
I know I haven’t given enough time to either piece of software, but I’ve been so shocked by how little of my process carried over, that I kinda ran away in fear almost immediately.
Well I’m glad that helps! I enjoy this stuff.
The histogram is neat, I used to just look for “lump in the middle = good exposure” but there are so many other way to make use of it.
There’s a panel that I think is present by default in RawTherapee, in the upper left corner, that shows a histogram, and when you hover your mouse over your photo, it has a sort of gauge across the bottom that marks where the pixel under your mouse is at. This can be helpful with determining which bit you want to target with adjustments.
There’s also a neat way I’ve found to get the most out of some images…in the curves panel, starting from the bottom/left/black, make the curve climb steeply where the histogram spikes, and then level off a bit (not totally level, but less steep) where the histogram dips. This seems to give more apparent contrast, without pushing the highlights or shadows too far apart. I hope that makes sense. It’ll take some trial and error but might give you something like what you were getting in Lightroom, with shadows and highlights both near “correct” exposure, but avoiding washed out and dull.
I’ve seen people on the internet suggesting Darktable as a solid Lightroom replacement… I don’t know anything about photo editing, but am curious - how bad is it?
From darktable’s FAQ:
Is darktable a free Lightroom alternative?
No. Other than both being raw editors with DAM features, and looking somewhat similar, they have very little in common. Darktable is a powerful and flexible raw processing toolbox, that leaves the user in charge of their workflow and provides a level of power and control that few others can match. This also means that the initial learning curve can be steep, since very little workflow and tool knowledge can be transferred from other programs.
https://www.darktable.org/about/faq/
In my personal experience it’s pretty good, but I’ve never used lightroom nor do I have nearly any idea what I’m doing with RAW processing, or photography in general, but I’ve been happy with the few photos I’ve put through it!
Yeah, so here’s my general process batch-editing photos in Adobe Camera Raw:
- Drop the contrast
- Drop the highlights
- Punch up the shadows
- Boost whites and blacks
- Adjust white balance
- Adjust exposure
When I’m done, I have a stark, professional looking photo to export. In darktable, trying this leaves me with a grey mess. I’ve also tried rawtherapee, but with even worse results. I’m 96% sure that the problem is me, though.
Since 2003 here.
Best of luck in that case!
I recommend you to do the switch now. Linux is more accessible than ever and there is no reason to give them any more of your data. Also it helps you to transition step by step where it might take a bit longer to get used to a different way of doing things.
I’ve been considering Linux for a while now, but I play games between 4 and 8 hours pr day. Is Linux and gaming still a problem or?
It depends on the game, although the overall situation has improved recently. Multiplayer games tend to have more issues due to their anti cheat software, which often doesn’t support Linux.
I recommend you check these pages for compatibility in your preferred games in case you want to try:
honestly, most of the games i wanna play are totally fine and might run even better on linux. what is something to keep in mind is anti linux anti cheat: https://areweanticheatyet.com/ besides, you can check https://www.protondb.com/ to get a rough overview of what you can play. out of all the games i’m playing only one isn’t working rn, cuz the screen ratio is messed up (it’s a small rather unknown game) but really many games are fine. i use steam and heroic games launcher, and they’re great. f nvidia tho. they can be a true pain in the butt (on windows too though…)
ngl, sometimes it is. it depends on the game. usually the problem is anti-cheat, but Valve has been working on improving that with many games working out of the box today. i’d say if you’re playing single player games, once you get Proton installed it’s virtually the same experience.
check out https://www.protondb.com/
if your games are gold or above on there, i’d go ahead and pull the trigger.
Nope, look into Bazzite for an easy Linux distro to set up
Most Indie games work fine. It is just the AAA crap that somehow can’t be bothered to make their stuff work on anything but Windows.
Depends on the game and your hardware. Most games runs just fine under proton. Valve have done a great job there.
Hardware has never been an issue for me but I read here somewhere that they had 10-15% less performance on Linux. ymmw.
Use SteamOS. Your use case requires it.
Does steam os have a regular desktop mode? I saw ETA prime install steamos on a mini gaming pc yesterday, but never mentioned using it with a mouse and keyboard.
Do not get steamos lol.
Any regular desktop distribution is fine (fedora, mint…), if you have new hardware you’ll want a recent kernel. Nvidia gpus can be problematic. You can always try the distro before installing.
Depends on the game really but sometimes you have to spend a lot of time & research on things to figure it out. Great that it is open source but companies like Microsoft also work to sabotage efforts at times. If it has multiplayer with anticheat, you’ll prob find a lot more instances where things don’t work or require more effort.
I actually do have Linux installed on a spare drive. I haven’t booted it up for a bit, but I’ve started getting used to how stuff works. I should boot it up again.
Switch to Linux. Don’t use Microsoft email. If possible don’t use MS Office and if you currently need it, encourage Libreoffice, OnlyOffice, etc
Regardless of current politics, this is great advice anyways for a lot of people. These alternatives are very user friendly now a days, including many Linux distros. They will do almost if not all what a user needs. Few exceptions.
For Europeans the illusion American reliability is rapidly fading as well. If BDS is not a good angle consider cybersecurity as well.
One small problem: some services won’t let me change my e-mail for dumb reasons, thus I’m struck with MS for now.
In the past when I’ve had to migrate emails I’ll set up automatic forwarding for anything important like that. Then switch the services you can. Idk if something like that could work for you and it is admittedly a bit of a pain to keep track of. Could limit MS influence on your stuff though
what else do you expect :D it’s always about the money, if not helping jews would be more profitable they would do that.
