I grew up with DOS and used Windows 1 (barely, DOS was better), 3.1, 95, 98, etc… But curiosity made me try a bunch of OS in the beginning of the 2000s, like BeOS, QNX, and Linux (Kheops, Mandrake, SuSE). I dual booted for many years, keeping Linux as my main OS but having to boot Windows for games. I preferred Linux but I was pretty much OS agnostic for a while. I even worked as level 1 tech support for many years, helping people with Windows and Office products.

But then came Windows 8, 10, and now 11, + Office 365 + OneDrive. It’s very difficult to stand any of those new versions, with the ads, the constant peddling for Microsoft products, the “forced” login with a Microsoft account, the updates whenever they feel like it if you don’t pay enough for Windows, if the updates are not breaking something. A few years ago I was helping a friend and discovered a version of Windows 7 where you can’t even change the wallpaper.

TBF, I knew it was coming. Anyone in IT knew for years that Microsoft planned of having everything subscription based. To me, every new versions of Windows or Office, or Teams, is now more intolerable than the previous one.

Anyway, at some point I stopped gaming/dual booting and pretty much kept exclusively on Linux. My workplace used Windows, and I use Linux at home. I’ve been using Debian for 15 years now and despite minor issues with sound recently, since pipewire, every time I use Windows, I’m reminded of how much worse it could be.

Recently I quit my job as a level 1 tech. I can’t help people with Microsoft products anymore. Having calls from people telling me they cannot delete files from their OneDrive when it tells them it’s full, then discover it’s a bug and users with their drives full cannot delete anything, is just disconcerting. Before all that, I could at least see/understand the reason why things were working like they did; I could help and explain it to the users. Now, I’m as frustrated as they are when I use Microsoft products.

I had the same experience as OP when I tried Matrix a few years ago. No hate on it but it was not easy and I gave up because I already had a simple IRC setup that’s working for me and my friends.

Some IRC clients are now web based and it’s been enough to keep a few of my friends there instead of Discord. We use The Lounge. It can keep a history, display images, videos, play mp3s, and show previews of most URLs. Like, we can simply copy/paste images into a channel and they are uploaded on the server and displayed in the chat. There’s also push notifications and it’s mobile friendly.

Convos also does something like this. Apparently it can also do video chat but I’ve never got it to work.

I’ve recently been thinking about giving Matrix another try but I’m pretty sure my friends are going to stay on “modern” IRC anyway.

Email and IRC push notifications through The Lounge. The rest is disabled. Even amber alerts, because my government uses them for everything. It’s “illegal” to disable them here but with a few commands on adb its possible to disable the service and never have to hear that end of the world alarm for an elderly person missing 200 km away from me.

Raccoons.

The tourists visiting Mount Royal park in Montréal are often charmed by the raccoons. Enough so that they feed them and some even let the raccoons climb on them. The city tries to warn people but they obviously ignore the signs. So now we have gangs of raccoons begging for food near the two most popular view points.

I go camping in provincial parks and the same seems to happen there. It’s obviously also locals doing this but, people feed the raccoons, they come back, they harass you for food, they can carry rabies, and it’s annoying as hell. I watch people hiking and camping in other countries, like the UK, and I’m constantly jealous that they can keep their food and cook near their tents. Doing this here will result in frequent annoying visits from raccoons (if not bigger animals).

Is someone forcing them to do that job?

A decade ago I was whining to my friends that I didn’t like Steam because I was using Linux and Steam was really shitty on that OS at some point. I remember not being able to get the correct keyboard layout in chats, and tons of little annoyances, like not being able to choose where you install games. It was disappointing.

As someone that loves FOSS, I never really liked the model of “not owning my games” but I must admit that it works for most people that don’t care about such things. Valve made huge progress with Steam for Linux over the years, and Proton was indeed a game changer.

I have to tip my hat to them.

The English speaking world should be isolated. Rupert Murdoch made it sick.

I think you may indeed miss something. It’s not the “people on Lemmy”. A few YouTubers on the left have noticed and made videos about TYT’s downfall. They now have ex employees like Hasan Piker and Francesca Fiorentini openly talking about how people are treated at TYT.

There’s also the whole thing about Ana getting “agitated” about some non-issues like “birth giving person” or some bullshit like that, and saying that she is done with the Democrats.

Another point that comes up often about them is how much they are willing to be friends with people of the right. They go on right wing shows to criticize the left. They also attack other YouTubers on the left like The Majority Report.

Beyond their sometimes seemingly balanced speeches, they are rapidly shifting on the right. They are becoming grifters.

I don’t want to link to a bunch of AI articles and/or long YouTube videos but this contains a bit of juice: https://novapsyche.substack.com/p/the-young-turks-daniel-penny-and

Seeing TYT “left-leaning” saddens me. If they were left-leaning, they are not anymore.

Sadly, it’s been a good part of IBM’s business model for years. They call it Capacity on Demand.

Inactive processor cores and inactive memory units are resources that are included with your server, but are not available for use until you activate them.

I learned this when I moved into a corporate IT environment with Power servers. I couldn’t believe that some companies would pay a quarter of a million for a server that is intentionally stunted/limited unless you pay even more.

But cars are computers now. “Everything’s computer!”. So they will follow that subscription model.

Why is it a bad thing?

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I kind of understand where you’re coming from, but you are delusional if you think Canadians and Europeans don’t already have extreme right groups growing within their borders. We don’t need to allow Americans in to have their propaganda spread through different countries. It does via cultural hegemony.

At one point my very Québecois friend was listening to Joe Rogan podcasts and parroting his anti woke crap. When I go see my family in the countryside, I often feel like I’m talking to deep south rednecks. They say they hate Trump but they hate the person, not the politics, because it’s the same anti immigration and anti woke rhetoric.

And I’m not an expert about Europe as a whole but I know a bit about Germany and AFAIK, the AfD is making gains there. Is it because of americans and/or latinos going there?

If Bill Gates is involved we can be sure it’s to help humanity, and not to help capitalists and rich people to get richer.

He has a very good PR team because this man was also backing the former Monsanto company, with proprietary grains, supposed to help solve famine in the world, but causing poor farmers to be sued into bankruptcy and commit suicide. Oh and the grains also commit ‘suicide’ so if you are not sued because the wind flew proprietary grains to your field, you better have enough money to buy new grains from corporations every year.

So I’m sure anything he does can’t be bad. It’s all altruistic and for the good of humanity. Surely nothing proprietary there. All open source. For humanity.

Fuck Bill Gates.

I don’t know. I’m not sure if the refrigeration cycle is neutral. Even if we ignore the energy source, creating cold also creates heat, so that ice might just about counteract the heat generated to create it.

Are trophies gifts from his good friend Epstein?

Deliciously ironic that we are warming the environment by making those blocks of ice.

We don’t need leaks to know that. Just look at the Israelis deliberately stopping aid and food trucks going into Gaza. It’s not just Bibi. Most of the Israelis seem very okay with this, and some even participate into blocking food and aid. So, no surprise there.

EDIT: Oh and let’s not forget the Israelis that are organizing BBQs on the side of the border. I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding.

Wololo.

It depends if an ouverture counts, and how popular of a song.

Bad Religion has Ouverture before Sinister Rouge. They are different tracks but they merge together.

Also, one could argue that most of the songs on the album American Idiot by Green Day, are a prequel to the next one. The songs can be separated but they are parts of a story.