My version of this, and I bet I’m not alone here is more like

Windows -> Linux Mint -> Debian

[ Picture of grumpy yet somehow friendly old graybeard with one foot into his “goose farmer retirement” equivalent ]

Same here. Specifically, I do still love technology and all sorts of STEM subjects, but I have no excitement for tech products.

I could see them doing fine losing those features if it meant the hardware was compact, light, and cheap. But doing it on giant $1000 phones is not going to do them any favors with the lemmy crowd like I said.

My main original Skyrim play through on desktop was 100 hours.

My Skyrim VR play through was 200 hours. I think in 2019. So fun.

Yeah now it’s “will it speedrun DOOM?”

I recently had a similar experience. I used Linux Mint for the longest time, which is ubuntu based. And I tried LMDE for a little bit recently.

But then I decided to try straight Debian 13 w/ KDE Plasma. I absolutely love it, and I’m old enough that seeing

starting Debian GNU/Linux

just feels cozy and correct. Plus like you said the speed and stability are somehow even better, but that I had issues before.

I thought with them it was more about the entire device than just the OS. People might say they love their mac but nobody is telling friends & family to just install macOS on that old PC that’s losing Microsoft support.

100% agreed. I agreed more with each paragraph.

Your last sentence hit on what I think is a contributing if not primary driving factor in the health crisis you described.

It’s like the goal of modern society is to insulate us from the natural world and from learning subjects or doing tasks that we don’t absolutely have to.

But we are critters that evolved on this planet just like the others. You can’t just live a commoditized life that consists of work, car, screen, sleep, repeat and get the same fulfillment out of life as if you found the unique path that’s optimized for your unique brain.

Not acknowledging that everything jacks with your head to SOME degree only prevents you from trying to defend yourself as best you can!

Over the past several years I have gone through a transition from living life the way I was supposed to, or that I thought I wanted to, to living according to what produces the best outputs from my brain. Once I have the lived experience of an undeniable improvement from some change, it might actually become a habit.

It isn’t necessarily a linear correlation where you can pick the cutoff that best suits your personality and politics.

The technology and the act of surveillance don’t just slide you up the safety/privacy slope. They carry their own risks that can REDUCE safety while still paying the privacy trade off. And it is not predictable.

And that (plus caring about people) is why I don’t support the Leopards Eating Faces coalition even though I’m an old white educated native-born male USian.

I personally might not use a headphone jack or SD card slot very much, but for the market that a GrapheneOS phone would be targeting they seem like OBVIOUS things to include.

The crowd getting excited about this partnership is pretty much the same crowd that complains about features like those going away.

Then make the machine try to keep people talking for as long as possible…

That’s probably a huge part of it. How many billions of dollars have been spent engineering content on a screen to get its tendrils into people’s minds and attention and not let go?

EnGaGeMent!!!

Bold move to combine their names and then give it those damn “we’ve forced AI into this” sparkles, lol.

I like your kart…

~ Peach

Ohh noooo!

Now my backlog of games that should be shrinking is only going to grow by 10% next year instead of 12% like it could have!

The tech companies haven’t driven me to the point of utter contempt for consoles like they have for phones, but at the same time I have multiple PCs and more games than I will ever play.

Each one of those F-22s cost as much as a Level 1 trauma center hospital, and it’s specialty is filling up entire hospitals in the other side of the world!

My Windows partition at work went unused for several months before I wiped it.

At home it took about two weeks before I reclaimed that space!

My employer has the usual setup of M365 enterprise shit running on Dell laptops.

Fortunately we devs are able to “dual boot” to run Linux on our machines, since our product is an embedded Linux system. (has anybody seen my Windows partition btw? I can’t even find anything NTFS formatted, whoopsie!)

All that background info is just so I can pay Microsoft a compliment, even if it has asterisks all over it:

The entire Microsoft suite works just fine in a browser, and in LibreWolf too! I do typically add some permissions for those sites for convenience, since librewolf is privacy/tracking hardened (firefox fork) out of the box. I use Teams and Outlook every day, and occasionally will drop a file into OneDrive or edit something in MS Office. I don’t write many office-format documents though, so I’m more likely to be in LibreOffice or a PDF viewer just reading a doc.

You know how in media streaming and gaming there’s that balance of whether it is more convenient to be a paying customer versus pirate everything?

Microsoft’s stuff is literally better to use in Linux. Even if I need to test the Windows build of something, a VM is SO much more convenient. And I’m not even logged into the microsoft shit on that. If I need something from OneDrive, I go to the browser there too.

Except if THAT is a 12 o’clock flasher, in which case it is correct about 30 times each day.

That’s an angle that more people should talk about, honestly.

The mistreatment of the American populace isn’t just to keep a steady supply of cheap labor for the rich people’s investments, it’s to keep a steady supply of cheap lives for the government to do their dirty work.

My generation’s dead and disabled veterans fell in service to that sweet Iraqi oil. Oh and the Saddam hidden underground meme, can’t forget that one!

But, the Null Hypothesis generally IS that X does not exist until you receive evidence otherwise.

That’s pretty much how we all work, we just have very different sources and standards when it comes to which evidence is taken seriously.