Seriously. I used Manjaro for a short period about 5 or 6 years ago but ran into so many issues with it. Vanilla Arch on the other hand is very forgiving in my experience. I have a second desktop PC with Arch installed and I only update that machine once every couple of months when I actually need to use it. In my four years of doing that I never had an update break my system.

The KDE desktop environment definitely plays a sound when you change the volume. I use my Logitech G Pro X wireless headset on Linux and Windows and just change the volume using the dial on the unit and it behaves the same way in both OS.

Though, to be fair, I do share some of the frustrations you mention. I’m mostly on Apple products apart from my two desktop PCs (one is Linux/Windows dual-boot, one is Linux only) which I own solely for gaming purposes and some hobbyist programming. I usually try to get non-Linux native applications running but if it proves to be too much of a hassle I simply boot into Windows or use my MacBook. I like to treat Linux as somewhat of a hobby and I totally understand that most people would rather have something that “just works”, especially when it comes to proprietary creative applications like the Adobe suite or DAWs. That being said, it’s extremely exciting to see the massive strides Linux on the desktop has made in the last couple of years. It has come a looooong way, honestly; especially for gaming. And I always support open-source projects/foundations - I’m donating to KDE/Arch/Wikipedia on a monthly basis - because I believe in the core values and advantages of FOSS and other community-driven foundations even though I’m far from a Richard Stallman.

My solution was to migrate to Windows 10/11 Enterprise. No ads, no nothing. The LTSC versions are even better but they’re a little too barebones for my use case. Keep in mind that those SKUs cannot be activated legally but as with anything: There are ways to circumvent that issue.

74% market share for desktop OS is actually a lot less than I thought. Guess macOS had a solid comeback

That’s why EULAs or other contracts are not necessarily legally binding if they contain specific parts that could be considered “unfair”; at least in the European Union.

In Germany, BMW and VW both offer subscriptions for functionality already built into the car. BMW is notorious for their heated seat subscription here and the Mk8 Golf I leased for a while had a bunch of minor stuff pay-walled like automatic high beams, changing color of the interior ambient lighting, etc.

You can still outright buy those features but it’s totally insane to pay for something that’s already physically inside the car. And it’s not like these are budget brands that need to upsell a bunch of stuff to be profitable. A base Golf starts at €31k…

Probably a gaming PC (as he mentioned Steam) without a display connected to it that’s used for game streaming using Parsec or other software like Sunshine. By the way, if you want to try that setup yourself make sure you get a dummy plug (HDMI or DisplayPort) for the GPU as Windows doesn’t really allow video capture if no display is detected.

Yeah, part of the reason cars back then were so serviceable was because they broke down all the time. A modern car with regular servicing can last very long mechanically. The amount of electronic creature comforts, safety devices etc. are often what drives up repair costs and lead to some cars becoming uneconomical to repair. Cracked windshield? That’ll be 1000 bucks because the rain sensor for your automatic wipers will have to be recalibrated. Dead headlight? $2000 because we can’t replace individual LEDs, have to take the front of the car of to replace the whole headlight assembly and calibrate the adaptive front lighting system so that it follows road curvature again.

Thanks, I appreciate your answer!

That’s still totally insane. I get the appeal of compiling everything from source but it ain’t for me. Btw, Firefox is on version 115 right now. Is there any particular reason you’re going for 102, if you don’t mind me asking?

I think, at least for non-savvy people, that buying individual stocks is not a great idea anyway. If you’re investing to have long term capital gains something like the MSCI World ETF would probably be the better choice. If you invested in that specific index fund in 2016 you’d have doubled your money by now, even during this economic downturn. Sure, you can make more money in a shorter time day trading but that shit is damn near a full time job and more risky unless you heavily diversify your portfolio (which you should do anyway).

Another poster mentioned stocks of the company he works for. My company for example distributes a good amount of their yearly profits to their employees. Meaning that once a year you can choose between a couple hundred bucks one-time payout or get a bunch of company stocks for a heavily discounted price, but they’re trade-locked for two years. At the beginning of 2020 I chose the stock option and the shares got bought right at the beginning of the covid dip. When 2022 rolled around I had essentially quintupled my initial investment in the discounted stocks. So that’s another great tip, provided you company offers similar plans.

Japanese society is very old-fashioned, male dominated, hierarchical and “I’m older than you so that means I’m right”. Japan’s cybersecurity minister admitted a couple of years ago that he had never used a computer in his life. While I understand the frustration it is (unfortunately) not surprising that these changes do not happen in a timely fashion.

My company mandates Windows laptops but I mostly work with Linux VMs hosted on our servers. WSL2 and Visual Studio Code (with Remote SSH and WSL2 plug-ins) are the best things that happened to Windows in years. Without these tools I would simply be unable to work.

It’s the trade off of having a mostly bleeding edge operating system. It’s part of the reason why I wouldn’t recommend Arch to beginners. While pretty rare, some update will eventually break part of your OS or cause other (often minor) issues and you should be knowledgeable enough/willing to look up the offending package and roll it back. It’s up to the user to decide whether Arch’s pros (massive software availability through official repos and the AUR, DIY approach, up-to-date packages) outweigh its cons.

As @[email protected] said (I can’t tell if jokingly or not - lol), it is somewhat expected that an Arch user checks the Latest News section on archlinux.org before updating their system. Though I might add, I usually don’t bother.