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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

    My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

    Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

    After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

    No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.


  • Yeah, for sure. SCSI died when SAS emerged, and that’s been basically 20 years now.

    Any SCSI stuff left laying around is going to be literally a decade+ old and yeah, unless you have a VERY specific need that requires it (which really is just trying to get another few years out of already installed gear), it’s effectively dead and shouldn’t be bought for anything other than paperweights or for a coffee table.


  • nothing of value will be lost

    I’d argue the opposite: there’s actually a lot of stuff out there that’s actually interesting: old-school lets-players who’d have done actual informative playthroughs of games. It’s kind of a dying art, but it’s also exactly the kind of content that’s going to get purged by this kind of action.

    It’s interesting to spend, say, 10 hours watching some guy play Sierra games and actually talk through shit about the game and whatnot, and it’d be a shame to have that vanish.

    But not entirely unexpected since that’s not profitable content in the way that the current morons babbling about bullshit reaction videos, totally-not-camgirls totally not showing their tits, and whatever other brainrot nonsense most of twitch is. (Also alt-right propaganda, but eh.)




  • Universiality, basically: almost everyone, everywhere has an email account, or can find one for free. As well as every OS and every device has a giant pile of mail clients for you to chose from.

    And I mean, email is a simple tech stack and well understood and reliable: I host an internal mail server for notifications and updates and shit, and it’s rapid, fast, and works perfectly.

    It’s only when you suddenly need to email someone OTHER than your local shit that it turns to complete shit.









  • Debian stable is great: it’s, well, stable. It’s well supported, has an extremely long support window, and the distro has a pretty stellar track record of not doing anything stupid.

    It’s very much in the install-once-and-forget-it category, just gotta do updates.

    I run everything in containers for management (but I’m also running something like 90 containers, so a little more complex than your setup) and am firmly of the opinion that, unless you have a compelling reason to NOT run something in a container, just use the containerized version.


  • I’m the same way. If it’s split license, then it’s a matter of when and not if it’s going to have some MBA come along and enshittify it.

    There’s just way, way too much prior experience where that’s what eventually will happen for me to be willing to trust any project that’s doing that, since the split means they’re going to monetize it, and then have all the incentive in the world to shit all over the “free” userbase to try to get them to convert.



  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.businesstoLinux@lemmy.mlWinapps for work stuff
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    18 days ago

    completely disable Windows Update

    Since this is a work thing, I’d maybe check with whomever is in charge of your shit that you’re not violating any compliance shit by turning updates off.

    If you’re not, cool, then whatever, but compliance bullshit is awful and sucks and it’s better if you’re not the reason you fail an audit.

    Edit: for the OP, not you.



  • See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially.

    Right-ish, but I’d say there was actually a simpler problem than the one you laid out.

    The immediate and obvious thing that killed OS/2 wasn’t the compatibility layer, it was driven by IBM not having any drivers for any hardware that was not sold by IBM, and Windows having (relatively) broad support for everything anyone was likely to actually have.

    Worse, IBM pushed for support for features that IBM hardware support didn’t support to be killed, so you ended up with a Windows that supported your hardware, the features you wanted, and ran on cheaper hardware fighting it out with an OS/2 that did none of that.

    IBM essentially decided to, well, be IBM and committed suicide in the market, and didn’t really address a lot of the stupid crap until Warp 3, at which point it didn’t matter and was years too late, and Windows 95 came swooping in shortly thereafter and that was the end of any real competition on the desktop OS scene for quite a while.