No need to tell me all this; I’ve been using Linux for more than 15 years and I don’t freakin’ care what’s happening to Windows.

Now either you haven’t read properly what I said, or my wording was not clear - apologies in the latter case. Either way, I’ll try to explain what I meant.

1. It’s pointless for Microsoft to make Recall (or anything) unremovable, since someone will find a solution to it pretty quickly. So those who use Windows, most likely will still have the option to continue to use it without Recall, in my opinion.
2. I also highly recommend everyone to just use a usable operating system instead.
3. Telling the average user to use a better operating system is one thing. That’s fairly doable nowadays, I don’t see basically any obstacle to that, and I wouldn’t even mention it, because you just tell them the facts, and the smarter ones will listen and think it through, the rest of them will do whatever they want, it’s their problem. What I find very problematic, is industrial environments. There are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of workstations, terminal computers, controllers in companies of varying sizes, where it’s absolutely not cost efficient to switch from Windows to something else (well, at least not until they get into their first data breach attributed to Recall or other shady Microsoft services). They have highly specialized tools complete with documentation and support and everything made for the one specific platform they are operating on, and it’s certainly not easy to change that, especially without halting production. If there’s one IT advice I could give to those companies, it would be to start creating a strategic plan to drop their Microsoft dependencies, and then execute their plan. It would take probably years, but they gotta start doing it like ASAP. And along the way, while porting their toolchains, they could as well do it the smart way: make it highly portable, so whatever platform they switch to, wouldn’t be the only option. Should that platform go south just like Windows did, they’d have the option to switch again to something else, just much easier this time.
4. According to my experience, customization tools to remove bloat (including Recall) are not permissible in work environments, and spyware (such as Recall) are not (supposed to be) tolerated either. If this doesn’t make them switch to a better platform, nothing will.

Just because Microsoft makes Recall “unremovable”, doesn’t mean anything to me. We’ve seen debloater tools, alternate start menus, someone even ported explorer from Windows 7 to Windows 10/11.

I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be a solution for this in no time.

That being said, just use a better OS ffs. I get it, some companies cannot easily switch from Windows because of tools specifically built for Windows, or due to strict policies or regulations or software support, but damnit, somewhere you have to draw a line and start a migration process to an alternative system. And maybe learn from this, and make your tools portable next time.

Having spyware on your system is certainly a big no-no at companies, and probably the aforementioned debloater/customization solutions as well.

The amount of people not knowing what a “web app” is, is seriously concerning.

Anyway, I tried “old” and Alexandrite, but I just ended up sticking with the default. I find “old” ugly, and on Alexandrite, I couldn’t find my saved posts. Maybe it has been fixed since, but the default one works for me best.

I’ve switched to Gboard on Android back in the days, when it was the only one with proper multilingual features, and been using it ever since.

I’ve experienced the opposite: I actually found it rather more helpful than not, despite the occasional errors like you mentioned. But nowadays it’s quite rare that it “mispredicts” a word. And what I’ve found extremely helpful is, that nowadays it doesn’t only correct individual words, but it picks up other grammatical errors as well in the sentence. So it’s working for me.

Luckily I’m not involved in this smart-TV saga in any way, as I haven’t been watching TV since my childhood (there were no smart-TVs back then, but TV shows in my country were shit).

Now my biggest fear is, if enough people realize that smart-TVs are shit, then desktop monitors will start to become “smart” too. My life will be doomed if that happens.

Hmm that’s unfortunate. Wherever I worked so far, ThinkPads didn’t break, even after the warranty expired.

Well, I wish you better luck with your Framework laptop(s) then.

Check again.

At least the T580 I worked on was the best quality laptop I’ve laid my hands on. My current M1 MacBook Pro is close, to some extent. It’s a great machine too, and obviously better in performance as it’s newer, but in laptop keyboards, ThinkPad’s is still no.1, not to talk about the track point that, to this day, no other manufacturer could properly reproduce. I worked with a Dell Latitude (a couple of years ago they were great), but the track point is shit on it.

Regarding maintenance, Lenovo provides detailed disassembly and repair guides, plus you can get replacement parts anytime.

Of course there are shit decisions on the ThinkPad line as well, but I still only can recommend them.

Well, I guess it depends on the use case. For me, mine was a damn good investment for sure.

I know. Still, that’s the best hardware out there for laptops. I have to add though, only the T and P series are worth buying, the rest are trash.

Buying HP products is bad investment.

I only had the chance to two of their inkjet printers and one of their office laser printers, plus an elitebook laptop. In short, all of them suck.

Much better (to me, the best) alternatives, that I can safely say are good investments: Canon for inkjet printers, ThinkPad T and P series for laptops. Those are quality products. Unfortunately I don’t have any experience with other office laser printers, so I cannot recommend one.

Edit: specified which series of ThankPads are still good.

Just as a mildly interesting story, I thought I’d share:

The best self checkout experience I had so far, was at a Japanese clothing store in Germany. There was a box at the checkout station, and each clothing item had an RFID in their labels. You just toss all your items in the box, it detects which exact products you’re gonna buy, and if the list of items shown is correct, you just pay and go.

A few years ago I heard of a similar concept for groceries, but that one was experimental and I don’t think they’ve implemented it ever since. But this one at the clothing store was not a test, and it worked flawlessly.

Oh. Someone at the EU Commission started to use websites? 🤔

Wait, the keyboard layout standardization has been done by Microsoft?!

Well, I tested both modules, and one of them turned out to be faulty. The other stick works, I can use my PC with it for now. And Corsair’s customer support turns out to be really handy; they can send a replacement first for a deposit, and after I receive it, I can send the faulty one back. And once they receive it, I can get the deposit back.

So it’s all (kinda) good now, regarding my PC.

I’m pretty freakin far from okay.

My girlfriend has been mad at me for almost a week now; who knows if she ever even wants to talk to me. She hates me at this point.

And this is my first day of vacation, I have more than 10 days off. I decided to work on one of my hobby projects, and sometimes take a break for gaming. Guess what! My PC broke, Memtest shows more than 3000 RAM errors, so at the moment I’m sitting here testing each module in every slot.

And then once I figure it out whether I have to send the RAM or the motherboard back, I’ll have no PC for at least a month (I expect longer than that). So I cannot make any progress with anything, now that I have some free time.

I’m especially pissed off, because it was quite an expensive build, specifically for reliability.

How is it different from PeerTube?

More like undergoing the humiliation of what it comes with.

Other than that… yeah, I don’t have many friends, so not many favors to take care of.

Once a friend asked me to buy him cigarettes while I went into the store to buy some food for myself and he was waiting outside. I did it, but I hated every single second of it. The fact that the cashier, and anyone around me could potentially think I was a smoker… utterly terrifying. The humiliation was even greater when the cashier asked for my ID (I was around 20 that time, I looked young enough for them to assume I was underage). Disgusting, horrible experience. Never again.

There was another case, where my best friend actually didn’t really ask for help, but it was a really serious case. Her mom got into jail as a victim of someone else’s attempt to clear himself in a corruption case. I helped her with my savings (a thousand dollars or so) to get her out of jail. Well, this was another horrible experience, but in a different way. I would do it again if such a situation arises, but luckily her and her entire family have managed to move to a better country since then.

I used it every day, when I had it. I would still use it every day if I had it. Sadly I don’t have it anymore.

You mean, MMCCCXIII people.