I'm gonna sound argumentative, but what happen if you lose access to computers in general? The thumb drive or hard disk or whatever will just become a magical rock you cannot communicate with.
Honestly, given... recent world developments, I'm starting to doubt the robustness of digital media.
Archive.org has already been under constant assault by copyright holders. Who's to say there won't be something much more authoritarian coming over dealing the final blow?
Bittorrent-like distributed content sharing all have publicly traceable traffic afaik (only exception I'm aware of is torrenting over I2P). Therefore, again, something authoritarian can just walk in and ruin the party.
As for thumbdrives sharing, what if government signed and approved OSes start doing content scanning and DRM enforcement (or whatever excuses) on the OS level? We might be able to just install Linux or whatever now, but what if PCs in the future start doing bootloader locking like smartphones do nowadays? Given the recent age verification political theatre around the world, and whatever super duper secure guard Google is pulling right now on Android, this seems like a much more likely direction the world is heading than I would like to admit. Oh, and AI driving consumer hardware prices way up doesn't help.
Total war nuking us back to pre-computer age... yeah I don't wanna get into this one.
Books don't have this accessibility problem. Granted, preservation and sharing wise, they have their own very real challenges. But as long as you have one on your hand, you can just read it.
I guess companies saw SKG being effectively thrown out by the EU, got bold enough and decided to normalize this practice to the rest of the digital medium.
I've always had a soft spot for the plan of repopulating the Great Plains with modern versions of all the extinct megafauna. We used to have camels and cheetahs and lions and more. We could import half of the African large mammals and they would have had near species analogs in the relatively recent past, geologically speaking.
4. cron job clean up photos in the syncthing folder that are older than a year to free up space for our phones (~1TB total. Yes we have problem)
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That said, congrat on the 3.0 release. Although I'm slightly bumped out because I literally just discovered this program a month ago and stabilized my self-host set up just one week ago.
> The move made him a mint — and Sam was soon raking in thousands of dollars a month.
> “I was spending maybe 30 to 50 minutes of my day, and I was making good money for a medical student,” he recalled.
> He said he also attempted to make a liberal counterpart for Hart on Instagram, but “Democrats know that it’s AI slop, so they don’t engage as much,” he said.
The effort-to-profit ratio is so insane that you almost can't blame them for turning the internet into such toxic wasteland.
There's also the fact that the media and a large cadre of activists in the targeted countries already provide the 'democrat' standpoint which makes an AI simulacrum less noticeable as well as less appealing. I'd say that is a far more likely explanation than 'democrats know it is AI slop' which sounds a lot like wishful thinking by 'democrats'.
This is worrying on many levels. So Microsoft force you to create an account to use Windows and then they reserve the right to block you from your own account, thereby potentially making you lose access to all your OWN data. This is crazy and yet another reason to stop using Windows as soon as possible.
I know it's not what people want to hear but my response to a lot of the comments here is just a general, I agree, it's time to stop using Windows.
They won't let you secure your drive the way you want. They won't let you secure your network the way you want (per the top-level comment about Wireguard). In so doing they are demonstrating not just that they can stop you from running these particular programs but that they are very likely going to exert this control on the entire product category going forward, and I see little reason to believe they will stop there. These are not minor issues; these are fundamental to the safety, security, and functionality of your machine. This indicates that Microsoft will continue to compromise the safety, security, and functionality of your machine going forward to their benefit as they see fit. This is intolerable for many, many use cases.
I think it is becoming clear that Microsoft no longer considers Windows users to be their customers any more. Despite the fact that people do in fact pay for Windows, Microsoft has shifted from largely supporting their customers to out-and-out exploiting their customers. (Granted a certain amount of exploitation has been around for a long time, but things like the best backwards compatibility in the industry showed their support, as well.)
I suspect this is the result of a lot of internal changes (not one big one) but I also see no particular reason at the moment to expect this to change. To my eyes both the first and second derivative is heading in the direction of more exploitation. More treating users like a cattle field and less like customers. When new features or work is being proposed at Microsoft, it is clear that it is being analyzed entirely in terms of how it can benefit Microsoft and users are not at the table.
No amount of wishing this wasn't so is going to change anything. No amount of complaining about how hard it is to get off of Windows is going to change anything; indeed at this point you're just signalling to Microsoft that they are correct and they can treat you this way and there's nothing you will do about it for a long time.
Open source developers are doing Microsoft a big favor when they support Windows and publish Windows builds and installers. It's a substantial effort, and apparently that effort isn't appreciated.
If all open source software dropped support for Windows, it wouldn't really affect the open source community that much. It would definitely cause headaches for Microsoft however.
I agree that supporting Windows helps its ecosystem.
But also open source software on Windows is an important gateway to the free world. When you are already used to Firefox, LibreOffice and VLC, you might as well switch to Linux painlessly, but if those didn't run on Windows, switching to Linux would require relearning everything.
Irrelevant. If it's time to stop using windows, all those windows users will have to relearn everything either way. Whether they do it in a windows environment or a linux one doesn't really change the equation.
A sudden lack of software on windows will increase user migration. If we all keep publishing for windows, users will just stay there because their needs are already met.
> If it's time to stop using windows, all those windows users will have to relearn everything either way.
No, that's the thing; they ideally would only need to replace the OS. Many long years ago, when I switched from Windows to Ubuntu (this was back when it was good), part of why it was so easy is because I mostly kept the same applications. If you use eg. Firefox, VLC, open/libreoffice, audacity, etc., then you can install a new OS, reinstall the same applications, and barely have to change anything. That's huge.
I agree to some extend but we (or at least I) publish open source software (amongst other reasons) because I like helping others and it so happens that most users that could benefit are still using Windows so it doesn't feel right to stop doing that as long as the effort is reasonable (which it is, unlike for macOS).
Nah, it's simpler. Microsoft just lost sense of UX and touch with the reality to their own internal management vibes.
Look at the Windows start menu. It used to be trivial to switch users. Two clicks, one to open the user list, another to switch - done. Now it's four: user panel, three-dots, switch user, pick user.
Look at the login sequence. They want their Windows Hello and they don't care if it works well or not - no way to get a pin or password prompt instantly, you gotta click three times (one to show a method picker, another to pick PIN entry, and lastly one to focus the goddamn field) despite no reasons to hide this UI.
It's not like they're trying to scam or sell user into something. It looks like some internal decision-makers that don't ever dogfood their decisions losing touch with the common sense.
Apple has that too, and this rot spreads elsewhere. But it's not intently malicious, a lot of things simply don't make sense - just total lack of self-reflection capabilities at the corporate level.
> I think it is becoming clear that Microsoft no longer considers Windows users to be their customers any more.
Quite obviously. Look at the out of box new user experience on a Windows 11 Home installation. What you get when you open a new $600 laptop from Best Buy for the first time. The entire thing is designed to drive users towards perpetual monthly recurring subscription billing for various MS services for life (OneDrive, Office, Xbox Live, Xbox game store purchased games, etc). It's a platform which is built atop a rent seeking cloud services ideology that shows no sign of ever letting up.
I think they've been heading that way for a while, and it's only getting clearer.
I've been thinking, and said before, 90s Microsoft was far from perfect, but they at least seemed to care a lot about the quality of Windows. 2020s Microsoft seems to see Windows users as a captive audience they can exploit for whatever the corporate executives fancy at the moment. It seems more like a gradual transition.
In any case, it seems to be getting more clear that Linux is destined to be the best OS for power-users.
Google and Apple have been doing this for a long time, and Microsoft clearly got jealous.
Their first big win was when they banned the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court from accessing any of the court's documents, then deleted all of those documents. Now they're going after slightly less important enemies of the state. That bar will continue to drop as long as it's allowed to. And let's not kid ourselves: if you develop or use encryption software that Mossad can't break, you are an enemy of the state.
That probably had nothing to do with LibreOffice. Lots of people have had their MS accounts locked for no reason. I guess the automatic abuse detection system just sucks.
My advice is don't use a MS account if you can, at least not for anything critical. You don't need it for development, you can use 3rd party CAs for signatures.
Can you provide actual statistic to support this claim instead of just saying hip anti-America rhetoric to sound cool?
There are a lot of legitimate criticisms regarding the US infrastructure. I'd even agree with a "most WEIRD countries in the world beat America..." take. But to omit the numerous less privileged countries, or even the less privileged majority part of supposedly powerful countries in order to clown on the US does not sit right with me.
North Korea is absolutely not one of them and you would know if you read even a slight bit about the stories from the defectors, or corroborate their stories with stories from Chinese merchants shipping supplies to North Korea and their interactions with North Korean soldiers.
When the check and balance got tipped over, all this promised "security" will only surface when it benefits the regime.
I'm still amused by a certain ccp propaganda video my parents consumed that boast about how quickly the cctv networks helped catch a thief who stole a foreign tourist's phone, yet those cameras would also conveniently stop working at a specific day whenever a highschooler went missing in the campus.
All the prerequisite for a similar dystopia is already in place in the US and there is may be one more chance to fix it, although I wouldn't hold my breathe.
I'm gonna sound argumentative, but what happen if you lose access to computers in general? The thumb drive or hard disk or whatever will just become a magical rock you cannot communicate with.
Honestly, given... recent world developments, I'm starting to doubt the robustness of digital media.
Archive.org has already been under constant assault by copyright holders. Who's to say there won't be something much more authoritarian coming over dealing the final blow?
Bittorrent-like distributed content sharing all have publicly traceable traffic afaik (only exception I'm aware of is torrenting over I2P). Therefore, again, something authoritarian can just walk in and ruin the party.
As for thumbdrives sharing, what if government signed and approved OSes start doing content scanning and DRM enforcement (or whatever excuses) on the OS level? We might be able to just install Linux or whatever now, but what if PCs in the future start doing bootloader locking like smartphones do nowadays? Given the recent age verification political theatre around the world, and whatever super duper secure guard Google is pulling right now on Android, this seems like a much more likely direction the world is heading than I would like to admit. Oh, and AI driving consumer hardware prices way up doesn't help.
Total war nuking us back to pre-computer age... yeah I don't wanna get into this one.
Books don't have this accessibility problem. Granted, preservation and sharing wise, they have their own very real challenges. But as long as you have one on your hand, you can just read it.
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