I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • I have MX Linux on a 14 year old Dell Laptop.

    Works great because it’s got a lightweight desktop, and it has a tool (a GUI tool even!) that seamlessly merges the last available Nvidia 340 drivers for my GPU into the latest kernel. Parked at the desktop with no desktop apps running, it uses about 800MB of ram, leaving 15 GB left for whatever I need to run. Which I have found is plenty for my use case, I’ve never seen swap in use.

    The MX tools are good, like everyone else has been saying here. They take away a lot of the fiddly business associated with the average “sysadmin” things that an end user needs to do.



  • Our monkey-brain has put millions of years of evolution into a vision system designed to pick up 3d cues from our environment so we can use our fine motor skills to manipulate small objects. It’s a fantastic piece of wetware that uses shading and colours to pick up 3d hints about the objects we deal with daily and - once you’re a few years old - it’s completely automatic and requires no effort to use.

    And then we remove all the 3D cues and skeuomorphic hints from our computer systems so that now the previously subconscious “monkey-click-button” process is now a foreground task where cognitive energy is burned up to identify the correct UI element to manipulate.

    I should be able to shift the mouse pointer and click a UI element out of the corner of my eye. I shouldn’t be required to look at and then parse a ‘flat’ UI to determine if this element is a button or just a panel with text. GUI elements should map to recognisable physical objects wherever possible, and where they are more abstract (eg wifi icons) they should be clearly distinguishable from others in the icon set. You’re burning up cognitive energy needlessly otherwise, and that’s why I dislike the monochromatic new age UI/icon sets.





  • You still get all the same free stuff.
    They’re charging for some new additional features.

    This is standard enshittification.

    1. Introduce a new premium tier, with “cool shit”, whatever that might be. Free tier still allows you to do all the stuff you did before.

    2. Wait a period of time, about 6 to 12 months usually, to get the users used to the fact that the free tier is still the same as usual. Tinker with the premium tier a little to make it sound like awesome shit is happening there and everyone should get on it.

    3. Degrade the free tier, usually by adding “sponsored content” i.e. ads, or dropping features so that genuinely useful stuff only becomes available in premium tier. Pitch this as “maintaining quality for our increasing user base” or some bullshit.

    4. Ratchet up pricing for the premium tier, reduce/enshittify features in the free tier.

    5. Repeat from step 3 until your userbase migrates to the Next Hot Thing and your product sinks into irrelevancy.








  • Dave.@aussie.zonetoTechnology@lemmy.worldOur commitment to Windows quality
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    2 months ago

    Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you. We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of…

    Not introducing, RE - introducing, just like how you could before. Alllllll the way back to Windows95, UNTIL YOU MESSED WITH IT.

    Basically the whole post is “blah blah blah we screwed around with things so much blah blah blah we messed up file explorer blah blah blah we’re working at putting some minor things back and walking back forced updates a little and cramming AI into everything because that’s what we really want to do.”




  • Dave.@aussie.zonetoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    My department just gives them a PDF explaining with cool graphics how Linux can save more money, how more secure it is, how we can avoid the constant force fed bug filled updates that MSFT pushes, how we can customize it exactly to our and users needs, we can actually own our own keys… The goes on and on.

    No, because there is no simple point and click group policy/active directory equivalent in Linux that allows a group of 5 IT techs to manage 2000 desktops. And if you get your shit together and actually use the tools that Microsoft provides, you don’t get surprise updates, you can image PCs via a gui over network booting, you get bitlocker keys backed up in your domain etc etc etc etc etc.

    All the things that allow a business to manage hardware and software with the minimum amount of expensive employees, Microsoft provides it, for money of course. That money is offset by the reduction in IT guys needed to look after everything.

    It’s that simple. CorporateLand won’t touch Linux on the workstation until that’s possible.



  • Anyone completely switching off windows needs a bulletproof system

    A solid 90 percent of home users just need a browser, email, and access to some kind of app store or repository where they can click on the big colourful icon and get a program they want.

    Any modern distro can provide that, it doesn’t have to be the particular one that you’ve got an obsession about.