Out of curiosity, what is it you use it for? I pretty much only use it for SMS, for which it is kinda janky and unstable. Doesn’t always get contact names, doesn’t load everything from conversations, misses messages that I sent or that were sent to me, crashes if I scroll too fast, etc. I have Connect installed just to use SMS (cause I hate typing on my phone keyboard), but I’m honestly not even sure what the base software does.

To be fair that was also my experience with PopOS which is designed to be user-friendly. The answer to questions like ‘how do I take a screenshot of a region and copy it to clipboard without spamming files’ or ‘how do I switch audio devices between speakers and headset’ just tends to be ‘run this long-ass command you would never have figured out on your own’ or ‘Write a shell script full of such commands to do it for you and call it with a shortcut key’. I think this is a linux problem, not a distro problem, because it was the same way when I was using redhat 15 years ago or slackware 30 years ago.

I just installed Nobara in a similar setup for similar reasons a few days ago after having several bad experiences with Pop, Ubuntu, and Mint. I wanted to move away from Ubuntu-based distros and Nobara seems like it’s focused on gaming (frequent updates, etc). It’s been… I dunno if great is the right word, but pretty good. I run into difficulties of some variety with almost everything I do (can’t install battle.net in lutris because it hangs at 45%, lutris can’t log into epic games store, etc), but I’ve also found solutions for them without too much trouble and the games that I have managed to install run great.

Do they need to? I don’t think they do. They exist to make money so I get that they want to, and they’re pretty good at it, but they could try not exploiting people for profit. But the idea that ‘it exists therefore anything is justified in order to make a profit’ is absurd.

I’ll give that a shot, thanks.

It was 5 different posts, but either way it was to make a point that repetition is dumb.

Why did you post the same thing to the same community 5 times?

Why did you post the same thing to the same community 5 times?

Why did you post the same thing to the same community 5 times?

Why did you post the same thing to the same community 5 times?

Why did you post the same thing to the same community 5 times?

That’s a pretty good question that I wish I had the answer to. I downloaded the latest Nobara 42 ISO off their website yesterday (Nobara-42-Official-NV-2025-05-13.iso), I didn’t see an option to choose between 32 and 64 bit, so I assumed it would detect and install the right stuff. I just did a regular install process, the only options I selected were stuff like language, keyboard layout, time zone, filesystem, etc, there was nothing about the bootloader in there so I don’t think I selected the wrong one or anything?

Nope, and not even because of the current administration: this country is by, for, and about rich people, and people are getting deliriously rich off of our data right now so there’s no political will to do anything about it.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you don’t give your data to companies: their executives and shareholders care more about their bottom line than your privacy.

I’m also not expecting people to be able to understand complex technical troubleshooting or anything either.

No, you’re just calling them stupid for not having spent the time to learn things you with your technical expertise and high comfort level with technical subjects think ought to be pretty simple. I agree that everyone could benefit from increasing their computer literacy, but I also understand that people prioritize the things they care about and that they’re not stupid for not caring to learn the stuff you think they ought to.

And the biggest hole in yours is that you can’t imagine that people have better shit to do than learn your job alongside their own just to make it a little easier on you. Call me when you’re spending hours every day studying up on medicine and law so that you can also find the answer to your simple medical/legal questions in 30 seconds online just like doctors and lawyers can.

What you have is a magical thing called ‘job security’ that others would kill for. You are needed to figure out complex technical computer shit because other people have other shit they want to be doing with their time. If they actually did as you suggested you wouldn’t have a job anymore. But instead of viewing that as a positive - instead of feeling needed and valued for something that you contribute to society - you choose to view it as a negative: any inconvenience exists solely to make your job harder, and how dare people not devote even more of their life to making yours a little easier? I know, I felt exactly the same way when I worked IT, and it’s a big part of why I left.

Yes, companies are simplifying and refining things, in some cases they do remove functionality, that’s just the way technology works. My dad called himself a shade-tree mechanic, but when I was growing up there was nothing on a car he couldn’t fix. Nowadays he takes it to the shop not because he’s prevented from fixing it but because cars have gotten vastly more complicated in the ensuing ~40 years and he - despite being a very capable and technically-minded person - just couldn’t keep up with it anymore because the business of doing his job and raising his family was more important.

If you want to be angry at companies for obfuscating or removing functionality then brother I’m right there with you. Just don’t be making assumptions about other peoples’ intelligence just because they don’t have the time or interest to sink countless hours into this just to make your life a little easier.

Huh, that’s unfortunate. I see a lot of recommendations for Fennec and Ironfox a fair amount and use regular firefox on desktop, maybe I should check those out. Is there one you recommend?

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo’s browser, it’s pretty alright.

It has not been my experience that MS removes or weakens tools like that. What they do is hide them, like what they did in the transition from the control panel to the modern settings interface in 10/11. It’s easier for people who don’t know what they’re doing to navigate (and harder for them to stumble into settings that could really mess things up), but it’s just slower to navigate and harder to find the shit you want when you’re not doing bog-standard end-user stuff. But also the control panel is still there and still works exactly how it used to, so you can just use it instead. If there’s a ‘watering down’ there it’s that the search function prefers to return results for for the settings menu rather than the control panel so you have to navigate to it by hand, but you can just pin that shit to your start menu like everything else and keep using it like it’s still 2005.

The entire design is focused around making things HARDER to use. Less reliance on a terminal, dynamic menus whose contents are clusterfucked into little panels instead of proper menus.

Only for people who are doing complex technical stuff and accessing features that aren’t commonly needed by the end-user. For everyone else not having 400 options that they don’t understand and will never use cluttering everything up makes it easier to use, not harder. Most end-users never want to see a terminal, and those clustered toolbars make it easier - when coming at it fresh without years or decades of expectations - not harder to find what what you’re looking for. Especially if you’re visually impaired like I am. This strikes me as just ‘the way I learned is faster’ without the awareness that it’s because you took the time to learn it and don’t want to have to learn something new. And I get it. I spent hours and hours learning all of the menu hotkey combinations for Lotus 1-2-3 in the late 80s, and I was fast as shit at plucking out those obscure features from 12 menus deep with a few keystrokes, so I was very salty when Excel came along and displaced it with its graphical menus and mouse pointer that was so much slower than the hotkeys I had learned. But also Excel was vastly more popular than Lotus 1-2-3 ever was because it was a lot easier for accountants to use, and Excel has (or had, I haven’t used it in a while) hotkeys for most of its menu items anyway (alt+key to pull down a menu, then each entry had a letter underlined so you could quickly pick that option, much like using /, (w)orksheet, ©olumn, (a)dd or whatever from Lotus 1-2-3.)

That’s not ‘watering down’, that’s improving: making things better for the vast majority of people, while requiring folks like us - whose entire job is to learn and understand computer shit - to bear the burden of having to relearn a few things. I guarantee you there were programmers out there complaining about the widespread adoption of early high-level languages because ‘by god the best way to code is to manually flip the bits in core memory with a magnet’ or whatever, but it’s no different than when new laws get passed or new diagnostic or treatment standards get approved. Technological progress and reinvention is just the nature of living in an industrial society. If you don’t want to keep up with it, pick another field like I did.

when I get a flu shot, I sit in a chair and somebody who knows how to administer the shot gives it to me. … Same with leases, I may sign one every few years at most, and if it’s for something serious then I would get a lawyer involved.

Exactly my point: you and an accountant both have a very shallow, straightforward experience with a complex technical subject because others have gone to considerable lengths to take care of the immense volume of technical details and obscure them from your view. I’m going to guess that you understand as much about how to safely store and administer vaccines or which of 12 related statutes applies to your particular case as he does about the SMTP protocol or Ethernet, so why do you expect him to not get a professional involved when he runs into ‘something serious’ just like you do? And keep in mind that what seems trivial to you or I can be quite serious and intractable to him.

I am at least competent enough to sit in the chair and get the shot without asking “what’s a chair? How do I sit? Where is my arm?” Likewise, I can read a lease and not have to ask “What is a lease? What is a signature? How do I sign this page?” I can’t say the same about people in 2025 who say “What’s the start button?” or have no idea that decades-old shortcuts like ctrl+c and ctrl+v are things.

This is a straw man. You are exaggerating the stupidity of others to create a false example against which you are arguing, and while a few of those people certainly exist (I had a guy tell me his computer wouldn’t turn on and then when I asked him to try his response was to loudly say ‘Computer, on! – see? Nothing happens’), most people can muddle through simple stuff like navigating menus even if they don’t know what they’re called.

I did tech support for a couple of years in the late 90s, I have walked people who have literally never touched a computer before through replacing their motherboard (CPU, RAM, cables, even DIP switches and jumpers.) It’s been my experience that there’s a kind of mental line that most people draw that separates technical stuff into two categories: ‘I can probably figure this out’, and ‘OMG this is way too much I don’t even know where to start.’ I have talked to many, many people on both sides of that line, and there seems to be no middle ground. People go from ‘I think I can swim?’ straight to ‘holy shit I’m drowning’. When they’ve assigned computer stuff to the far side of that line they actively reject thinking about it, especially when jargon is involved. If you ask them where their files are stored they might gesture vaguely at the box under their desk, but if you ask them what a hard drive is they will shrug and go ‘Iono man, must be some of that wacky technical shit I don’t understand’. They have some idea what a hard drive - or a start button - is, they use it every day, but if you put them on the spot while they’re in ‘I dunno anything’ mode they’re not even going to try to make the connection and ask ‘wait, is that the menu that all my programs are in?’, they’ll just go ‘Dunno man, that must be some of that technical shit that’s beyond me.’

And it works both ways. I have had certified network engineers tell me ‘Of course it’s plugged in, what kind of an idiot do you think I am?’ when it turned out not to be plugged in. There’s the stuff you know and the stuff you feel confident stretching for; everything else just doesn’t even get considered.

As for how to copy/paste on those older computers - I guess it depends on how you’re accessing them as to whether or not you even can copy/paste. But at the same time, I wouldn’t be nearly as frustrated if somebody wasn’t quite sure how to navigate through something that isn’t as commonplace as a Windows computer - you might as well say you’re “not very competent with pencils and paper”.

The point is that you don’t know because you don’t have to, you’ve never had to use them (and what’s ‘commonplace’ for you isn’t necessarily common at all for others.) The same is true for those people who have been working in banks for decades and haven’t seen anything more modern than an IBM PCjr. Your frustration that people don’t understand stuff that’s common to you is equivalent to their frustration that you don’t know how to write programs in RPG2 or Fortran. They probably don’t think you’re stupid for not knowing why certain kinds of RAM can cause ‘make world’ on BSD systems to fail halfway through, so why do you think they are for not knowing stuff that they may not have been exposed to very much?

I think your expectations might be rather skewed. For example, do you know how common it is to just not own a PC in the days of ubiquitous consoles and tablets and smartphones? I have 11 adult nieces and nephews, two of them own PCs, and only then because their mother wanted someone to play WoW with her when they were kids and they stuck with PC gaming. But every one of them has a phone, at least an xbox or playstation, most of them own a Switch or Steam deck or similar, etc. Meanwhile the last console I owned still had wood paneling on the front (Atari 2600.) Peoples’ experiences with technology are different, some are intrigued by it and drawn to learn more, some just see it as a tool that sits in a drawer until they need to turn some metaphorical bolts. It’s absurd to assume that everyone has the same experience and interest and understanding with a subject that you do.

What does ‘watering down’ even mean? Why is ‘user friendliness’ bad? Do you want computers that are harder to use for some reason? If that was the case why don’t you also give up your favorite OS or interface or language and go back to carting around stacks of punch-cards or flipping physical switches to set memory registers? Or are you just trying to make yourself feel superior as a technically-minded person?

Also, I dunno if you know this, but people interact with health and legal shit all the time, that’s why there are people who only do that job. Reading some email and punching some numbers into an excel sheet are about the equivalent of signing a lease or getting a flu shot. It’s not their job to know how things work behind the scenes, just like it’s not your job to know how to make vaccines or write legally binding contracts.

And finally, you’re forgetting two important facts.

1. Older people tend to have been in their jobs longer, and at higher levels where their computer expertise matters less and less
2. Companies, especially in certain industries, don’t update their hardware/software as often as IT would like them to

So that old guy you think ought to be able to know what a start button is might have never seen one because the only computers they use at work are old SPARCstations from the early 2000s, or might’ve worked in a bank for the last 50 years that is still using AS/400s from the late 80s or whatever; those machines can’t even run windows. You tell me, what are the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste on a DEC Alpha? Where’s the power button on an SGI Onyx? I worked IT in a hospital in the late 90s that was still using computers from the early 70s for shit, it happens way more often than you think.