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.

I know of someone who wanted to dualboot for certain games and their windows did exactly that too. At one point their AMD driver managed to uninstall itself somehow. On Linux they never had any problem whatsoever.

Yes, modding games is illegal there. But it has something to do with the way their copyright works afaik. If a company lets you modify their IP, they effectively give up their ownership rights from what I understood.

I play FFXIV and there it is against TOS too (of course it being a MMO modding can have another context), but for quite a few QoL improvements that came out with more recent patches you can clearly see the inspiration.

It would be interesting to know if modding a game like Skyrim there would be forbidden too.

I am across the pond from you and as far as my knowledge goes laws are even more strict here.

I am not a medical professional, but I did accounting for a lot of them and from what I have seen them pay for the relevant authentication hardware and software it seems to be nightmarish to navigate.

While I am very pro data security and people being the owners of their own data, this goes the other way for me too. I own the data about my health, so I should be able to decide that I am fine with having it on my phone.

The medication rollback I mentioned would have been completely unnecessary if that option existed. It was Ibuprofen, which my SO shouldn’t due to an already stressed kidney. Now that I know that I can look out for it too, provided I am allowed to go with.

This sounds great in a bubble where it works.

Over here there is no standardised way of sharing such info between doctors/hospital/care givers. I have been through multiple GPs because some stopped working, some where to far away after a move and so on. I had to bring my data to them and good luck to me if I hadn’t gotten a copy of something when it happened. I had to stop medical personnel from giving me paracetamol (I have asthma and shouldn’t take any of that or anything like aspirin), the GP of my SO had to basically partly roll back a medication plan he had gotten from the hospital after being in the ER and those are mild cases where nothing did actually go horribly wrong. My SO got two incompatible medications about two years ago because the tool that crosschecks the database did not throw the relevant warning correctly. It messed with his brain chemistry a lot. His GP wrote the programs makers to have them remedy that asap, since it was pretty bad.

I actually use the health app medication reminder/tracking now and have seen that the app can theoretically store data from health professionals about me. It looks like it is completely unused in the country I am in and I can’t manually add in data at all. This would be super helpful in some cases where I could use it to quickly convey key points about my health, especially when I am not as present (high fever, accident or some such).

I know multiple people that do Skyrim on linux, at least one heavily modded. Outside of DyndoLOD not working right I can’t really remember any issues they had.