My current internal struggle is which is the better trade off. Fight ads on Windows 11 or fight getting games to work on my Linux Distro of choice. I should just dual boot and fight both battles at the same time.
Microsoft kills products this way. In Win 8 they killed OneNote which was a pretty good product by pinning 3 icons for it in the task bar. And putting it in all kinds of context menus, and putting it in as a printer, and trying to stuff it up your nose. It had a decent XML file format that I could extract content from but what really killed it for me was when it went cloud only and those files went away.
Then there is the strange case of SkyDrive, that they failed to run a trademark search on before launching, so they had to rename it to OneDrive. They set the default for Office to save to OneDrive. Well once I forgot to save elsewhere and OneDrive wasn’t working so I couldn’t save. And this is a product that is always harassing me about some document I didn’t save 5 years ago. That’s not how you kill a product, that is how you kill it, kill it again and kill it once more.
Recently I tried enabling "Syncing to OneDrive", to see what would happen. Documents, Desktop, and Pictures were moved up a level into "OneDrive - LongCompanyName.com" folder, those have become the preferred file save destination, and the original folders emptied out.
A lot of time is spent synching to the cloud. Also, "Date modified" metadata was all reset at the time of transition, so distinguishing "pre-OneDrive" files by date is not a thing anymore.
The software problem is still a thing. Games and many commercial software packages that people need to get work done. Adobe Suite, AutoDesk, Microsoft Office and I'm sure there are more. Things are tons better now than they were even 2-4 years ago, but it's still a thorn in the side of Linux (due to the fault of the software vendors) that keeps people on Windows.
Two other things that irk me with Linux is Remote Desktop and internal drives. Remote desktop on Windows has been solved at the basic+ level for years (RDP, Terminal Services). VNC on Linux is often barely useable or a lag filled struggle, even on LAN. I know there are 3rd party solutions, but none are cheap (TV, AnyDesk, etc) or as elegant (NoMachine, etc) out of the box as RDP. I should be able to turn on a toggle "Enable Remote Desktop" and connect from a client machine. I guess that's why Gnome is moving that way? I don't know.
The next is on Windows I typically have a plethora of random internal drives I use for storage, scratch disks for downloads or video encoding, temp storage, etc. These just format and assign a drive letter and done. Maybe I haven't done it enough but it always requires a guide, editing fstab, getting permissions right, mounting it as a folder or other witchcraft. Again this is probably me, but it's harder than it needs to be, IMHO.
Back on gaming, Steam really doesn't get enough credit. They have pushed developers to consider Linux for the first time in history. They have helped create the tools and the store front. The steam deck is a good PoC. And now that game engines are allowing cross platform type tools, it's never been easier.
Time will tell, but just like Firefox, I hope Linux on the desktop sticks around.
This software is great, and I love the 3 levels of defaults that you can choose from. Also creating a restore point automatically is nice.
I've used other O&O software (backup) and found it to be pretty solid, so when they first released this tool back for Windows 10 I was surprised to see it free.
I was in the same boat. I switched to linux on my main dev machine (linux lite), and it works for everything except certain games (a racing sim is the main one I care about). Various compatibility versions of proton got closer, but I couldn't do a full race. I ended up doing bootcamp on my mac (also for dev but less frequently used) and only booting into it for games. All my productivity and daily driving is on linux.
The struggle is becoming easier over time. Windows 11 ads are getting more and more prevalent while I've personally had less and less issues playing Linux games, to the point where I haven't had to really even think about it lately.
Yeah, consoles are even worse. You are not only paying 400-500 dollareuropounds for the console itself, you pay for the multiplayer, and another huge markup for the games and/or the game pass.
And you can only game on it, you can't do anything else with it. In 2 years you easily spend up to 1000 dollars on it, which in comparison could get you the most expensive GPUs other than the 4090.
The allure of a PC is (was?) to buy one machine that can do it all. I guess doing it all now includes having ads shoved into your face from every software vendor around. I don't know what the landscape for ads on consoles are, but I can't imagine it's much better.
The worst I've seen was power at my work would shut off for a second or two and come on, but it did it every 8-15 min. Meanwhile at my home, 15 min drive, it never shut off.
These articles come across like they're hoping it will happen. :/
It's funny you say that because I remember their add. I made a jab at the company and - 2 rep.. If they knew the company they would have +2 rep me haha
I'm not surprised with that company actually, hostgator is a joke and the employees in Austin, Texas are too. I think the one thing that bothers me how did he get the SSH key? The fact that he had it tells me that someone higher up dropped the ball somewhere.
I've been trying this on UnSense 2.1 and 3.0 for the Thunderbolt. The APK doesn't seem to do much even after enabled and applied on boot. The zip seems to work once flashed in 4ext but then again it could also be the placibo effect. I don't know if it's a all around improvement or if it's just the Windows XP effect. "Show the desktop before windows is finished loading to give the illusion of a faster boot time".
