I’m under no illusion Ubuntu is perfect. But I PAID for my Windows licenses. And if I paid, I don’t want to see ads. I don’t care about Win 8’s penetrative pricing model or the $25 coupon. I don’t care that I paid for my licenses 10+ years ago. Don’t sell me ads on a product I paid for. And Windows serves up ads all the god damned time now. If there’s anything good to be said about Windows 8, it’s that it didn’t take every opportunity to sell me an Office 365 subscription ever second breath I took. I don’t actually remember the last time I saw an ad in Ubuntu, and I’ve been using it to varying degrees since 2011. I think we can at least agree Canonical is better than Microsoft, yeah?
All that said, I’ve had thoughts of switching to plain old Debian, especially now that I’d consider myself much more experienced and comfortable in Linux. But if I were recommending a distro to a new user, I am one million percent telling them Ubuntu or Mint, depending on how they feel about the Windows UI.
I’ve used Linux on every PC except my gaming PC for years. This year I made the final leap because of decisions like this from Microsoft.
Very few games have failed to work, the ones that have are all from Epic and they fail because of their shitty anticheat software. The only other things I feel the lack of are paint.net and the Affinity apps.
5 in use. Main Gaming PC, Laptop, Game server pc, media server PC, and another for testing things out. Whenever a family member upgrades I get the old one so most of these are pretty old.
I have gimp and other graphics tools, I also have a LOT of hours of use in the ones I mentioned so there are things I know how to do quickly in those programs but not in their counterparts.
EAC is now largely compatible with Linux, but devs have to enable support per game.
I recommend browsing protondb to see how (if) people have made games with anticheat work, you might need to change proton versions, add launch options etc.
Pinta is a fork of an older version of paint.net: www.pinta-project.com I have no idea if it is any good. I just thought that this might solve your problem.
I have Pinta, it’s ok but lacks a lot of the plugins I used and hasn’t been too stable. The graphics editing thing is something that will,just take time for me to rework my workflows. Gimp is great, I’m just not used to it.
So Microsoft is one of the most valuable companies in the entire world. They have a stranglehold on corporate America, power a huge the cloud infrastructure, hold one of the largest sources of telemetry/user data, and are the defacto standard of PC environments worldwide.
Why in the fuck do they need to pivot to ads? I’m genuinely curious. Even if they lost 50% of their entire business they would still be one of the most profitable companies in the world.
@SuperSynthia@dvdnet62 Because for capitalism, profit is not the end, only a means to the end. The end is to accumulate sufficient capital to absorb all competitors and achieve total control of markets.
Yea but like, their competitors, when it comes to operating systems are Apple, which isn’t anywhere near small enough to be obtainable by anyone and Linux and Linux-Derivatives, which are also unobtainable due to their open source nature.
Not every larger company is automatically evil, just because they exist within a capitalist market. A lot of them are, sure. At least to some extent. But there still are privately owned enterprises that do have a conscience.
Also, calling them “capitalist” enterprises seems redundant.
@accideath I'm calling them capitalist enterprises to emphasize that they are capitalist enterprises. They accumulate capital. That is what they are and defines what they do.
A capitalist enterprise does not decide it has enough and can retire and take up gardening. It is not a person. It does not have a conscience.
A privately owned enterprise can. Publicly traded ones can’t. A privately owned enterprise also doesn’t need to make more money, if the owner doesn’t want that. A publicly traded company that has to answer to its shareholders has to make more money and to keep growing to appease said shareholders. If you don’t have shareholders you don’t have to do anything like that. That doesn’t mean, of course, that any privately owned company is automatically good – many aren’t – but it does mean that they have the capability to not be evil.
@accideath We started by talking about Microsoft, and I was explaining that there's no such thing as "enough" profit for a capitalist enterprise.
There are many organizations that are not capitalist enterprises. There are small businesses and cooperatives where the owners deliberately keep profits low. The small business doesn't have a conscience; the owners may. And it leaves them vulnerable. Small businesses destroyed or absorbed by larger ones is the third oldest story in capitalism.
As long as we‘re in a capitalist market, which we are and probably will be for a while, any for-profit company, however small or big it is or however private or public it is, is a capitalist company. You have to be in order to make profit. At all. And yes, usually, the bigger they are, the worse they are. But not every for-profit company is evil, thus not every capitalist company is evil.
And businesses do have a conscience. It’s the sum of their owners‘ consciences.
And also, you do not need to be evil to be successful although it is probably easier.
@accideath No, an organization does not have a conscience. It is not the sum total of the consciences of its owners. It is not a collective person. It is an engine.
One of the reasons to be clear about this is that you can quite easily find people who believe that Microsoft, for instance, is doing good in the world. I used to work for Microsoft and met career Microsoft people who obviously sincerely believed in it.
You have to first understand how the engine actually works.
That would suggest even more, that the conscience of a company is the sum of the conscience of every decision making individual affiliated with the company. Companies can have values (and I‘m not talking about the “we‘re family here” values from the company handbook but the values that are actually enforced and acted upon. Those translate into the conscience
I think it’s the same reason games offer a cash shop for things you can get in-game. Sure they’re making billions but why not billions plus ad revenue? I don’t agree with the practice but the answer always comes back to money.
Because when you have shareholders, there’s no such thing as “we’re profitable enough”. Shareholders always demand more. Ads means more profit, at least in the short term. Next quarter profits are all that matter to public companies.
It doesn’t have to be, of course. Taking a look at the long, sordid history of how the privilege of incorporation has been perverted in this way, it becomes clear what needs to be done to fix it.
Basically, abolish corporate personhood by overturning the sequence of court decisions cited in the article that got us to this point. Or, as the last sentence in the article hyperlinks to, pass these Constitutional Amendments.
It’s not just that they demand more, they demand more/faster growth all the time. It doesn’t matter that the economy has slowed down to borderline recession, it doesn’t matter that they pretty much captured all the market they can, they still need to make more and more money every quarter otherwise they’re considered a failure even if they are one of the biggest companies in the world.
the shareholders don’t get that. the top managers, CEOs etc. get it. some of them may be shareholders as well, but that’s not how they fill their pockets.
Isn’t it obvious? Start Menu is being used by every windows user but is not generating any revenue Serving ads will enable them to better support the platform and provide more advanced features. Ad supported version is better than making it a subscription like some third party apps have done. Start8 I think, basic copy of Microsoft’s Start Menu but paid.
I’d believe Google has a larger data collection as it’s includes both google hardware and software products.
Google can also connnect the dots between an extreme amount of user data and services.
Although not the same, this has been going on for about two years now. Jensen Harris, a former MS engineer, criticized the ads as well as the design of the new Start Menu, over here: threadreaderapp.com/…/1564399431545667585.html
This is why Linux rules tbh, little to no rules what so ever in terms of customizing your desktop whilst also not having shit like this too like having so much bloat and constant ads, like telling you to install edge everytime whilst protecting your privacy too.
More seriously, I was thinking more of foss desktop environments and user programs (which are basically the same all over) than about the actual os - thanks for correcting me
Overall, it’s not quite as elegant, as AutoHotKey, but it’s ultimately a more powerful, since there’s so much else I can also do from the same Python script.
Edit: Most notably, I don’t recall AutoHotKey having any nice way to tell which apps are open, and Python can quickly call out to ps. It’s been on my to-do list to leverage this to let me map keybindings according to what is open (i.e. a favorite game, or a move player.)
It looks much better actually, with the fancy blur and transparency effects. Not to say it works better than Linux, and I’m sure it must be possible to customise KDE to look better.
Yeah there are plenty of kwin effect you can install that would make it as pretty as windows 11 if that’s important to you. Just like there are plenty of themes you can install if you want a macOS experience instead
@tsonfeir But Linux does not have AutoHotkey. This is the biggest deal-breaker for me by far. AutoKey seems be the closest thing, but it's such a massive pain to even try to use by comparison.
I doesn’t have auto hotkey because for the most part, you can control Linux from the command-line without someone having to invent a new scripting language from scratch to control it.
I heavily recommend you familiarize yourself with bash and the system commands you’ll need to send key presses, move windows, spawn and kill programs, etc.
Apparently, xdotool can! I guess the next thing would be generating GUIs. I think the final issue is that this would cause quite the fragmentation given how I use the same scripts on my Windows-only work laptop... but I'll think about this more...
An alternative is python, it can do GUIs easily, and it does have mouse-control facilités as well and it is cross plaform. That being said generally on Linux you don’t even need to automate mouse click, as almost all of it can be controllers with straight up commands.
Do you have any as-convenient alternative? It's way easier to use than Python or anything else, and it's sped up some of my work procedures by, like, 7x. I use it for dozens of text expansion strings, autocorrect, address typers, mouse-clickers, etc.
Never mind, I've since stumbled across xdotool! I suppose this may be doable after all...
Interesting, thanks. I think ultimately, seeing this port's adherence to AHK v1 syntax, I'd just have to bite the bullet and learn Python or something, though...
Also good, it does almost the same, but I think, for what I’ve seen, that the Optimizer is way more easy and intuitive to use and has some more features.
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