My bank does not have physical representation anywhere, since it is a digital bank. When I joined them they had a sheet of TAN numbers for us to use, but that is long since gone. And seeing how few and far between other banks are with theirs nowadays it would become extremely impractical to do physical banking only.

Over here, banks aren’t allowed to do SMS codes anymore period. So tell me how I should solve the second factor required by law when all „dumb tech“ alternatives aren’t available anymore due to laws and regulations?

That’s part of what I meant with less proprietary requirements. I can’t speak from a current point of view, I just know I loved mine back in the day but it was also a pain to set up because it wasn’t company issued and thus not connected to a big server that handles some things. Not sure if they still need that, back then they did.

So you want a modern Blackberry? With less proprietary requirements attached?

Does BattleEye in general just work or does it require fiddling? One of my main games uses it, so that is a big factor in me not having made the jump yet. (The others are an NVidia GPU and my absolute dread to have to get around to actually clean up my files)

The last month I have played Brighter Shores for something more relaxed (some would say brain dead when it comes to levelling skills) and
a game beta under NDA for harder stuff.

In the recent steam sale I grabbed a bunch of games, the last few days I have been sinking time into Shapez and Shapez 2. Building and optimising without cost or survival is my jam, even more than I thought.

This Friday Path of Exile 2 goes into early access and I will take at least a look at it, though likely start on Saturday.

Currently there are three things that stop me from going Linux and two of those are purely software related (the third is that I don’t want to hate my work software anymore than I currently do). Is it vital software in the sense of it allowing me to work or bring me income? No. Is it something I wish to just use without fiddling after every update because I use them for fun? Absolutely yes.

I am a 90s child, so I don’t completely fit your timespan, but I remember the first PC with SuSe Linux that I built with my father from old server hardware he got from his job.

Back then his job used unix and it was pretty common in his field of work. So Linux was the natural choice for a home pc. SuSe was popular back then, I think mainly because it came on CDs and had books available.

One of the main things I remember is the hassle with network drivers, having to download them on a working pc first.

When I started my apprenticeship as assistant tax adviser in 2016, I used the fax regularly to send stuff to the IRS equivalent. I was also in charge of printing certain thing because the setup for those to come out right was unholy. In the company I am in now, we are pushing for digital solutions but still have a lot of clients with a listed fax number. One of our digital partners had fax: we don’t do that here written in their signature.

It is a thing still sadly.

I haven’t used Linux in a decade and half (I know myself and I wouldn’t reboot once done gaming and I have one game that is not just wine or whatever and done and it’s my main one) and I still miss things from it. The first few PCs I used were Linux. It just sticks with you.

If you have to go back and forth with PSDs, GIMP falls of with layers and such. I had it happen that it basically rolls which ones to open every time on a layer heavy PSD.

While it might not be as much, it still will be something.

I work in a purely windows environment because our main software does not really exist outside of it. The hours of IT troubleshooting for the most inane things I see happening is a pretty penny as well. The newest curiosity is Teams killing my RDP session once it loads in the GUI and the IT team is utterly clueless why. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t happen to anyone else and the only way to stop it is to kill the process via taskmanager.

And while a government might not be able to go FOSS, there are tools for communication that aren’t built like Teams.

My SO is in a government job and most of their software is some adaption on SAP or similar. They don’t have any chat apps. They use mails or telephone. They do have Skype, but that thing is a performance nightmare in their environment so they only use it if they absolutely have to.

Same goes for stuff like OneDrive. Even if you could wrangle it enough that it fits data security laws, it isn’t something they use in their daily work.

I only ever really browsed Reddit with Apollo and I monitored the situation somewhat. I feel like the subs that could migrate easier (more techy, more text than pictures) stayed closed the longest or permanently. The ones that can’t really (like those more picture streamy ones as the sfw porn network) were open again fastest from what I remember.

So depending on interest it could have felt way shorter or longer.

I am still missing some of the subs I liked, but I don’t expect some of them to actually pop up here.

For digital goods you would be right about sellers profits (to a degree, discarding the minuscule amount of interest the money of your purchase could accrue), for physical the use does degrade the worth faster so the seller would loose out.

Largely owned by tencent afaik, putting things that are QoL and somewhat accessibility behind paywalls (like themes are a nitro only thing), do nothing against the spam bot malware thing (and they can scan the messages, since you can set the nsfw filter on them), not searchable outside of the app so things can get lost easily, their audio function is somewhat known to be problematic (for me it „catches“ the full audio out without software in between, so game sound or Netflix or whatever gets cut off completely). Those are what I can think of quickly. I am also not knowledgeable enough to accurately judge their software in terms of performance, but it feels very bad to me.

I also unticked the two things below, which told me I can’t get experimental features if I do so. Who knows how they label stuff internally, maybe they have something new in regards to contact scanning and we got „volunteered for testing“?

Am also with you in the situation that discord isn’t my first choice, but one big community I engage in is there.

Thanks for this. It was on for me and I am the same as you with regards to apps getting to read my contacts.

For context I am in the EU and am using an iPhone.

While it isn’t a lot more in general it is still about three times of Spotify. It also takes into consideration which artists you actually stream afaik, so that your money goes more towards those.

They say on their website that as soon as you use it for commercial projects, you need to get a paid plan. Their own sync is only availble on a paid plan iirc, so you should be fine.

Windows being „helpful“ is the worst. I can’t remember an instance were it actually was helpful. Just some were it managed to break things.