I had a friend who was married to a veteranarian who worked with exotic animals. They were constantly fostering bird rescues. He told me once he fell asleep on the couch and woke up as a parrot was reaching for his glasses. He said he knew this bird wouldn’t intentionally hurt him but seeing a 4-year-old child with a can opener on its face reaching for him was pretty scary.

I had a coworker who would frequently say “Not to be pendantic…” and I honestly could not tell if he was just fucking with me.

We had a fundamental disagreement regarding the role of technology in business operations. In my view, technological change in an enterprise exists in tension between the business desiring a solution that perfectly fits their process and the flexibility of a technology package to approximate the business requirements in a cost-effective way. Ideally, technology should fade into the background so that you don’t even notice or think about it as it facilitates your work.

Microsoft seemingly disagrees.

My specialty is telephony, a space that Microsoft has only recently ventured into with a competitive and cost-effective, if feature-poor, offering in Teams. Telephony is a complex topic and the way telephones are used in business today is varied from people who barely use their phone (but want it when they need it), to people who depend on specific telephony functionality to do their work.

The meeting I had was in a beta-user group for new tech in that space, it was me and about 40 other admins from a variety of large businesses and a team-lead in Microsoft product house. Basically, it was a group of customers becoming increasingly exasperated at the arrogant ignorance of someone in charge of developing telephone technology at Microsoft who didn’t only have limited experience with enterprise-level telephony, but insisted that business units conform their processes to fit what Microsoft was willing to develop, and I want to emphasize here, that the audience was more than willing to meet the vendor halfway here, it was Microsoft insisting that people didn’t really need basic things like busy-indicators.

I spent about an hour getting more and more angry to the point where I just wanted to get rid of everything Microsoft, but I couldn’t torpedo Teams at work, so I went home and installed Mint on all my PCs (and later switched to Garuda).

I had a meeting at work with a product team lead at Microsoft. Went home and installed Linux that evening.

SMS/MMS and the PSTN are completely compromised by multiple governments. Not saying that makes smartphones any better, just be aware.

He really tries not to bother me, but the screaming gets my attention and when he’s about to physically destroy the computer I feel I have to step in and fix it. That being said, he is not comfortable installing it himself so I want something that provokes the minimal amount of hand-holding. Honestly, the biggest issue with me not putting Garuda on his system is that he needs Davinci Resolve for his work and it doesn’t install directly off the AUR, you have to download the application separately from Black Magic Design’s site and edit the build file. He is not going to understand how to do that.

I am very happy working in Linux as my daily driver, while my husband is bugging me to switch his desktop and laptop over since he is frustrated at how awful the UI in Windows 11 is. But I know he has a low tolerance for frustration and while he has decent technical skills, he tends to accumulate the absolutely most peculiar technical problems I’ve ever seen. I mean, I’m rather savvy with Windows and he comes up with problems that take me a long time to figure out - issues that would be difficult to cause even if you were intentionally trying to break Windows.

So I don’t really know what to do here. He likes my Garuda setup because I’ve shown him how customizable KDE Plasma is, but the amount of weird shit dealing with the AUR that I have run into, stuff that I can solve fairly easily but a layperson would likely not be able to handle, makes me want to put Mint on his system even if he’ll find it less suitable.

Definitely read the original SecureAnnex article as well. The behavior of this software and the people behind it are damning.

Me: I have been using Linux professionally for 20 years, I can edit fstab.

Also Me five minutes later: I am glad I have live boot stick handy.

At one of my prior positions they outsourced all the junior engineers to this firm that only had windows desktop support experience.

Actual escalation I got:

contractor: I am trying to remove this file that is filling the drive but it won’t let me

me: show me what you are doing.

contractor (screenshot): # rm -f /dev/hdc

another one did rm -rf /var to clear a stuck log file, which at least did solve the problem he was having.

After that I sent out an email stating that I would not help anyone who used he rm command unless they consulted with a senior first. I was later reprimanded for saying I wouldn’t help people.

My network guy yesterday: "I took down one of your gateways after fat-fingering a change that assigned it’s IP to another device "

Me: “Cool. Thanks for letting me know. Nobody complained. I’ll just resolve the alarms.”

I managed to get everything moved over except some google data, man they are bastards. I am happy to be a little more extracted from their ecosystem though.

Yeah, running /e/ on the new phone, so it isn’t an option.

Garuda Linux is a great job to help you get your business in the world marveled and followed

Just don’t ask for support for your dual boot not detecting Windows. God help you.

It starting 0.5 seconds slower than usual saved us all a bit of a headache as it turns out.