$300 for the most important piece of software on the hardware that you interact with every day, sometimes all day, for years? That’s a steal.

And again, as an OS, Windows just works and Linux doesn’t. Even if you wanted to set things manually in the registry to disable the bad consumer “features”, you’d still spend less time than configuring a standard Linux install and it would be more stable.

It’s like Apple fan bois nowadays. Ridiculous.

Or… Read what I said. Spend the $300 on the enterprise license. No ads. No forced notifications. A single computer with multiple users at one time in a home environment is not a use case that would get any thought. Those that want it, can do it. And it’s easy, and free. Hyper-V is free and the licenses for the virtual machines are free too because the container host is windows. Lock an instance per output and voila. Recall won’t be coming to enterprise or server and if it does, it will be disablable. Just like forced updates are disabled in enterprise. Forced reboots disabled. Etc.

If you want that experience you buy that experience.

I’m sure if you edit the registry inside emacs from a live iso boot from 6 burned CDs, it will unlock all the golden rainbow features you require.

Yes exactly. I love Linux. I build embedded systems devices with it. I run it on some of my rack appliances. But I’m also not a blind fan boi.

Windows made leaps and bounds into stability with XP. And since then it’s been a slow cog into being an excellent enterprise grade OS even with users bashing it all sorts of ways.

Most (all) of the complaints except price focus on money grabs and features for the docile masses. Forced updates, reboots, integrations, etc. My 80 year old relatives can use it and you know what it works great when they type into the “computer question box”. Click start menu and type. It brings up their files, folders, apps, answers to web questions, etc. That makes sense to someone who doesn’t understand a computer. It’s not pandering to the IT folk, it’s pandering to Karen.

If you’re IT folk, you can just spend a little more money on the proper license and all that goes away. Or you spend some time hacking the registry and get it for free usually.

The only BSODs I have had in the last decade are graphics driver related usually when pushing beta drivers hard. My Linux OS’s have had way more stability issues with less interaction.

It 100% is in a desktop environment used by users.

In an embedded locked system not in space, it’s the same.

No. It really isn’t.

Windows with the proper license and configuration is more stable, more productive, and that configuration takes less than an hour once for the life of the machine.

In 2024 if you’re still bashing Windows for BSODs, stability, updates, etc, you’re doing it wrong. You can bash all day long for privacy violations and corporate greed but both of those are fixed with the proper version like Windows Enterprise. Costs more, but you are less of the product.

I don’t disagree but don’t let perfection get in the way of good enough. SMS and standard email etc are all unencrypted. WhatsApp is encrypted end to end. You may not trust meta, or like them. But that’s millions time better than SMS or email.

Getting your parents on WhatsApp is a huge awesome step. Getting them to telegram or Signal or whatever else is a minor step comparatively.

I’m currently in a former USSR country on holiday and everything is WhatsApp and Telegram. Delivery drivers to government services.

Japan is still on floppy disks attached to carrier pigeons.

China is WhatsApp for every non Chinese even with the ban. Wechat for everything else but you need a Chinese mobile.

Korea surprisingly is using WhatsApp more than even prepandemic. Almost all my Korean friends are now WhatsApp versus like 1 just 5 years ago. Telegram is also popping up there.

But point taken. A few bubbles of differences but WhatsApp really does rule supreme.

Pretty much the entire world, except the US and Canada, is WhatsApp based. Every job chat, every message you send, it’s all WhatsApp. Heck to pay for parking or to get immigration visa services from the government, it’s mostly WhatsApp. And yes you can send stickers.

Sometimes Lemmy loses perspective that the way 300ish million people do something is not that relevant to the other 7500 million.

The US has the same rules, and are a driving force for this. They will enforce the rules the same as they do now for 10k payments. If you want clean money in a bank or if you want to travel with the money, or if you’re just randomly stopped and have the money on you, you will be forced to prove its provenance or it will be seized.

This is already how it works in the EU, UK, Canada, and of course the USA.

The cash itself isn’t the problem, it’s getting that cash into a “clean” system where it can be used to buy anything that isn’t cash. And with everything being non-cash on purpose because of these Nazi laws, you essentially have worthless paper you can’t do anything with.

You cannot stop the collection. It ALWAYS collects. It may not transmit, even if connected. For example the black box in many cars is really an assortment of ECUs that contain fine grained historical data. It does eventually roll over and get replaced but the data is there.

For example there are public cases you can find where the police, not even needing a warrant, were allowed to dump this data off of a rental vehicle that a suspect, not convicted just suspected, was thought to have been in. Of course the copaganda story showed that they the used this data which was mostly location by gps and speed by the wheel sensors and gps to get a track of everywhere that vehicle had been in the last 6 months. Every person who rented it and drove it somewhere had their privacy violated. But I guess that’s normal now.

The infotainment systems are the biggest jerks for data storage as they’re just mini generic computers today with lots of storage.

To stop wireless transmission you can remove the sim card from the modem. Many vehicles won’t work or even start if the modem is disconnected (unplugged or unfused). A Nissan for example will drain its 12v battery overnight trying to find the modem if it is unplugged. But if the sim is bad or disabled, it will try and fail to communicate, then retry later which won’t kill the battery.

You lose a lot of convenience and the data is still there. So the answer is basically you can’t drive a new vehicle without it violating your privacy with collection. You can only make the wireless transmission more private or disabled. I suppose you could buy a scanner yourself and before you leave the vehicle, factory wipe all ECUs. But even then you’ll need to enable them for emissions testing and such if that’s in your area.