Wayyyyyy more than that is wasted.

OSHA probably cares.

The company should care, because if the workers are dropping off because of heat stroke, they’re not creating value for the shareholders.

Good point.

… Compared to what?

If you compare to MacOS, then yeah, maybe.

I use both, and I understand the whole TPM thing and why they’re requiring it…

I think this is very cringe.

Linux has its uses, and benefits. But I see a lot of Windows stuff through my work.

I’m not going to link shame.

You like what you like.

No, we can’t. Otherwise how would people like Elon and Bezos know that they’re better than us?

/s

I’ve been preaching about this for a while. Many modern systems are getting bitlocker turned on by default.

If your system gets messed up, or simply won’t start because of some security vendors bad update, goodbye data. You need the recovery key, and if you don’t have it, you’ll never see your bits the the correct order again.

It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.

To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.

When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.

I have two pieces of paper from my time in post-secondary education. One says information technology, the other says business. I’ve worked in an IT field for well over 10 years in a B2B capacity. I’ve had to handle cost/benefit and ROI arguments with customers, and justify having them spend incredible amounts for their own good.

Are we done dick measuring about what we think we know?

Listen, we’re not going to agree on this. I couldn’t give any fewer shits if you do or not. Bluntly, I’m unbothered.

Good day to you sir.

I have a very good knowledge of business operations.

They already offered Plex pass to earn their income. Plex is an extremely price elastic product, given that alternatives like jellyfin exist. They are taking features away, and charging people if they don’t want to lose those features. That’s a really good way to piss off your existing userbase (or customer base). Better would be to offer something new, and charge for that. Keep existing products at the same cost, but have “better” products at a premium. You won’t get a huge number of people buying the extended product, but it will likely be more new paying users than how many you would get with the crap they’re doing now, and they wouldn’t lose any customers in the process.

When you understand the social and economic factors here, this is a super idiotic move. When you’re only looking at how many dollars you can extract from the customer base, this is a golden idea… I mean, it will fail, but it looks golden if you’re only looking at the money numbers.

I would question whether you know how a business works (or whether Plex does, for that matter).

As far as I’m concerned, Plex failed to read the room. They were already walking a fine line with the people in a legal grey area, which comprised a good amount of their customer base (those that are sharing media at least). There’s a nontrivial number of people who share media that are rather paranoid with reason. Nobody wants the RIAA/MPAA to have any reason to investigate what you are doing on the Internet. We all know how well that goes from the whole Napster thing. So now than a few are almost tinfoil hat level of paranoid. Many have already jumped ship to jellyfin or something similar. The rest are either unconcerned, not paying attention, or simply don’t care. I would argue that the numbers of people who run servers currently that host content using Plex, that are not looking at alternatives because of this, is pretty damned low.

Plex alienated the group that brought everyone into their umbrella. When the people who host media entirely abandon their product because of this shit, their client base vaporizes.

Can’t have a product or company with no clients. At least, not for long.

I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that’s separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

I’ve been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It’s “server” software, sure, but it’s just a software package. What it does isn’t really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I’ve designated as capable of doing so.

The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

You can get a free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS… And honestly, brokering the connection isn’t dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

They’re offering shockingly little for what they’re asking, and the only thing that’s on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they’re doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

This is not a good look at all.

I have domain names coming out of my ears. I’m tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let’s encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don’t want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

I just don’t know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

The part I’d want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you’re hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that… Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.

Hey, get your Gentoo propaganda out of here.

Bitch please.

Just try to install a program that isn’t in the repo without dropping to the CLI.

I dare you, I double dare you.

I’m pretty sure they’re saying that customization, while present in Linux, is not accessible to most because of a lack of GUI options to configure a nontrivial number of the customization settings.

This is correct. I work with the “average user” of technology daily as IT support, and honestly, they don’t give any shits at all about why it’s messed up, or what needs to be done to correct the problem. Box broken, make fix.

The argument that I think the poster is trying to make is that, if a user needs to do any self troubleshooting, which is basically inevitable with technology at the moment, having to use a CLI to get things done is undesirable for the average person. They barely want to bother opening control panel in Windows (or the new “settings” app… Ugh.) nevermind understand any of it.

Box broken. Make fix.

IMO, this is a demonstration of the problem. You’re blaming the poster/their equipment. Rather than any real solution to the problem the defacto answer is “well, it works for me so what’s wrong with you?”

I’ve never heard this kind of toxicity from other communities (like the apple/Windows crowds). Often you’ll get useful answers indicating what to check or pointing to another resource. There’s always the chance that the hardware is busted, but let’s face it, in the modern era, that’s far less likely to happen now than it was even 10 years ago.

Immediately blaming the user for their issue isn’t going to solve the problem, nor does it endear any average user to the Linux community or the Linux OS. This attitude is not going to help adoption even if the posters concerns are invalidated by newer/better drivers/software, and all they need to do is update, and/or try again.

This kind of statement actively harms Linux adoption.

Exactly this. And pretty much everyone here is a techie in some way, shape, or form.

Why does anyone think that a non-tech would take the time to troubleshoot their system the way we do? A user would hit their first issue and in the process of trying to solve it, just go and buy a MacBook.

This isn’t going to endear people to Linux.

We will not win the majority of the market with Linux in it’s current form. We need better integration and package management. Self repairing subsystems. We need Linux to basically fix itself when these ridiculous issues come up that non techs simply can’t be arsed to try to fix.

There’s a long way to go before pushing Linux on anyone outside of tech circles. Unless you want to be the 24/7 free tech support, it’s easier just to throw a cheap Windows system or Mac at them and let them deal with it instead.

I hate the term “it just works” because it’s almost never true, but I can say that for non techs, Windows and Mac “just work” more often than Linux does.

I love Linux. I love everything about it. From the origin story, the ability to make your system lean and clean, running at optimal performance, and being able to adjust every knob and setting to my heart’s content. I love it. But I’m a realist. All the things I love about Linux, are largely reasons that non techs would hate Linux.

I can’t tell you how pissed I was when they did they. They invalidated so many links to solutions.

Granted, there was a lot of useless slop on there too, mostly from eol versions of Windows like 2000, millennium edition…

They threw all of it away, both good and bad, without warning. Without any opportunity for anyone to archive it. WTF Microsoft.

To their credit, their new documentation seems to be much better, they actually have useful help articles on not only how to do something, but also explaining the mechanisms, requirements and limitations of things. Not everything is in their new docs but I have to give credit where it’s due, the technical document writers are doing good work.

With all that being said, it doesn’t mean that Windows, or Microsoft are on a good trajectory.

Their new operating systems and updates are some of the worst updates and changes I’ve seen to their systems. Adding ads and basically spying on paying customers…

There are some controversial changes I’m in favor of, like the TPM requirement. A lot don’t realize it but Apple integrated a TPM in basically everything they make over the years. The migration was slow but it happened almost silently, without anyone really noticing. All major smartphones have some version of a TPM, so the last bastion of not having/needing one is the PC market.

The PC market has known they should include this stuff for years before Windows 11 was released. If you go and look at mid to high end motherboards, even for custom/retail units, there are at least TPM headers on most of them. OEMs knew this was coming and instead of just integrating it into their product, like everyone else did, they made it an optional feature. Since nobody knew what the fuck a TPM is, nobody bought into that option. Now millions of computers are destined for ewaste because manufacturers couldn’t be bothered to add a small IC to the system without being obligated to do so by someone like Microsoft. An entire industry of technology has this one thing that nobody even fucking knows exists, and they’re the hold out.

… And everyone is mad at Microsoft about it.

I’m not. TPM chips are a good addition to systems. It shouldn’t even be a debate. I blame OEMs for not bothering to add them when they could have/should have, and making it mandatory on all prebuilts, all retail motherboards, all boutique systems, all custom builds… Everything. The cost difference would have been into the tens of dollars at most. It would have barely made any difference at all.

Anyways. I’ll stop now.

This is the problem I see with most people adopting Linux.

It’s great when it works but when things go awry you end up sinking hours of time into an issue. Generally on Windows or Mac, the most you’ll have to do is remove it and re-add it.

If more is needed, the userbase is so large that there’s a high probability that someone has had your exact issue and posted a solution about it somewhere online, you just need to go and find it.

Linux is very hit and miss on a lot of these points. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it sucks.

Windows tends to suck all the time, but the vast majority of the time it only sucks a little bit, because it’s Windows… It works, but it’s not great.

I’m all for Linux, but as someone who is more interested in doing useful work on my computer, not troubleshooting my system to get it to operate at all, I’ve stuck to Windows for a while now. I support Linux and prefer it to alternatives when running any server-based service, but for my desktop? I can’t justify the time investment in getting it to the same operational level as my current Windows install.

This is the same reason I bought a Dell, knowing full well that I could get more performance and a better value by building my own system. I absolutely can build a system for myself, I choose not to because it’s simply more work that I don’t care to spend time on. To be fair, my system is a precision 2RU HEDT, but that’s another discussion entirely.

Please don’t take me wrong: Linux is great and should see more adoption. My argument is that there’s a nontrivial number of people who want a system that simply operates, not one that turns into a science project because of a borked update. Windows updates have caused problems, but usually not everything-is-broken type problems… More that printing doesn’t work or something like that…