I’m still glad I paid for it when it was a good deal. It’s not like I was committed. The unsubscribe button is pretty easy, and I don’t need to play a lot of those singleplayer games anymore.
Does that include xbox gamepass core customers? Because that’s basically an entirely different service, and it’s also something you’d expect a very high adoption rate of among Xbox console owners, given the platform’s historical emphasis on multiplayer games. There’s also rather a lot of people who stacked many months of gamepass for quite cheap.
While the platform has certainly seen some success, it’s hardly in a dominant position, so making moves that make the value proposition of the service look worse is surprising.
I did no such thing lol. People had to be surprised by this turn of events based on the response to it in this very thread. Whether or not people are forced to continue paying for it has nothing to do with anything I said, speaking of straw men.
I got a ton of hate online when they announced the Activision deal and I said that though they’d get COD for “free” but they would almost immediately start hiking the price a lot. This has been obvious but some people refuse to think MS wasn’t going to try and recoup their $70B?
The steam deck is definitely my best purchase in a long time. So many games in my library that I can play now if I don’t want to sit at my PC after working on my PC.
Last day 1 game I tried to play on game pass was starfield, and the queue was so long everytime I tried to play I was unable to play for hours and stopping using the service all together which sucks because I have another year or more left.
Nah. I’m staying at my current stage, paying for Live and then doing the extra $5 for Game Pass…shit tier? Idk what it’s called now. I don’t need to play CoD on day 1.
Today, BBC News put out an investigation having spoke to 20 Palestinians living abroad who claim Microsoft has permanently banned them from their systems for calling relatives in Gaza.
Skype might have fallen out of favor for general messaging purposes over platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram, but it remains an affordable service for calling cell phones directly via the web.
Many of the users affected by the bans expressed that Microsoft may be falsely labelling them as Hamas, the terror group behind the notorious October 7 massacre that killed hundreds of concert goers near Re’im in Israel.
Microsoft declined to respond to the accusation, but claimed that it doesn’t block calls or ban users based on geographical location.
“Blocking in Skype can occur in response to suspected fraudulent activity,” a Microsoft spokesperson told the BBC — potentially implying there’s more to the story.
But given how much of our online life is basically handed over to big corporations like Microsoft, who are under no obligation to guarantee access to these services, it is alarming how they can just ban you with no real explanation or transparency.
The original article contains 647 words, the summary contains 186 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Yep. If you ever shared a political opinion, that could put you on someone’s naughty list. If that someone gets a position of power and decides they want to attack, well, you could be the next metaphorical Palestinian.
Man, messed up innit. & how could it be made private without enabling a whole different set of bad actors (astroturfers, marketers, political axe grinders)
I have always been pro-privacy, but in a kind of lukewarm, “I wish someone would do something about this” way.
What has finally pushed me to ditch services from large corporations over the past couple of years is not really a concern for privacy, its a drive for self-sufficiency.
As basically the last stepping stone, as of a couple of weeks ago, my email, calendar and contacts are self-hosted, and it’s just… So freeing.
<span style="color:#323232;">First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">—Martin Niemöller
</span>
This is what I fear the most with these platforms. They have these shitty automated moderation systems that can just decide to delete everything you have there on a whim. Already common on places like youtube and facebook, but it just keeps getting worse. Every site is pushing users into signing in with their google/microsoft/whatever accounts.
Remember the guy who lost access to his smart home when amazon banned him for no reason?
Not under their new owner, since he's the one that pushed for the definition change in the first place, among many other blatantly biased changes to the ADL in the past decade.
well it wasn’t for no reason, it was for stupid reason, which is different, but i agree with your sentiment.
if you are depending on a platform where you are the goods being sold, not the customer, you shouldn’t be surprised if you are taken of the shelf on a moment’s notice.
well it wasn’t for no reason, it was for stupid reason, which is different
Yeah, guess I ovesimplified a bit. For anyone not aware, it was one report of racism towards a delivery driver.
The accusation was completely false, and even if the guy actually were a racist pos, remotely disabling devices he paid for and owns is not a good road to go on.
Yeah, guess I ovesimplified a bit. For anyone not aware, it was one report of racism towards a delivery driver.
ok, that doesn’t even make sense, but it shows how wildly different and random the “reasons” can be.
i was thinking about the case where guy took a photo of some rash on his son’s penis to send it to a doctor and some automated system flagged it as child pornography.
while you are technically correct, i would refrain from disrespecting these poor people.
Facebook content moderators in Kenya call the work ‘torture.’ Their lawsuit may ripple worldwide
By EVELYNE MUSAMBI and CARA ANNA Published 9:52 AM GMT+2, June 29, 2023
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — On the verge of tears, Nathan Nkunzimana recalled watching a video of a child being molested and another of a woman being killed.
Eight hours a day, his job as a content moderator for a Facebook contractor required him to look at horrors so the world wouldn’t have to. Some overwhelmed colleagues would scream or cry, he said.
I remember that story. Thanks for that perspective - certainly, no disrespect is intended. In the context of people who should ever see your child in the nude, social media company employees are strangers which I used a synonym for. Strangers who aren’t paid enough for what they do. “Underpaid randos” sounds OK at the moment but I’ll sleep on it.
i didn’t mean to accuse of anything, it is just morbidly interesting how many layers there are to this modern dystopia we are being lured into right now.
before reading that story, i wouldn’t give content moderators second thought as well.
I use Gmail, and am concerned about the same thing. But of the alternatives I don’t know any that have wide support for social logins, which are damn convient.
i have my personal and important mails in my private mailbox, on my own domain. i use gmail as a backup and spam mail, i use it everywhere where i assume the mail can go to some spam database sooner or later.
so if i lost access to it one day, i would lose history of some confirmations from various eshops and shit like that, but nothing that would really cripple me.
i would definitely not put my family photos there and hope they stay there forever.
Yeah, see that is the issue. The social logins (though not for anything real money related) and the photo backups are so well integrated. Nothing really competes. My personal emails are even less of a concern to me than the rest.
Could it be that our ally is running an extermination campaign against a civilian population? No, that’s impossible. They all have to be terrorists, and contacting terrorists is against our terms of service.
Damn, they worked so hard to gain goodwill in the last few years and it seems they’ve set out to destroy it in record time.
WSL and WSL2, Android Apps, working with Qualcomm to get their ARM computers to a credible state, the new Powershell and the push to open source so many things…
And in the past 12-18 months they’ve been crashing and burning, either backtracking on those things or by starting new initiatives to become scummier and scummier. TPM, Copilot, the ad situation, abusing their position of power with office/teams, the giant safety holes in the Recall feature… But it seems every day there’s something new in the news. It’s never ending.
That’s a nice project, but the last update was from 2 years ago and it needs way too much work to be close to usable. Windows 11 might be getting ads but at least audio works…
To be Done:
<span style="color:#323232;">Support for Audio Subsystem #21
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Support for LTE/Modem #22
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Support for Webcams #23
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Support for External Display Ports #27
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Support for Suspend #29
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Support for TrEE Services #37
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Support for Sensors #38
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Support for GNSS/GPS #39
</span><span style="color:#323232;">UEFI ResetSystem() crashes #41
</span>
Various other issues can be expected, see the issue tracker for details.
The problem I have is that this covers a very niche use case for me. I want it to be a tablet - lightweight etc, but not be constrained by mobile apps. I don’t want iOS’ version of lightroom, I want to have Darktable and Rawtherapee and a full fledged Visual Studio code, and well, you get the picture.
I don’t need a laptop because I also have a MacBook Pro - I went this way because Apple’s processors are too far ahead to ignore. So I can take AMD but my opinion is that intel’s offerings are just not competitive and I’m not buying any of them.
This leaves me with very few options - I’d be keen on buying an AMD-powered Ubuntu tablet but they don’t seem to exist.
And also my surface works perfectly fine, so spending a non-trivial amount of money and ewaste just to change OS seems rather silly. I’m sticking to that one for now.
Getting it set up? Making sure all your drivers are working right? Troubleshooting issues? Finding alternatives to programs you need that don’t work on Linux? Especially for someone who has never used Linux before? That will take much longer.
The last time I used a Linux PC was around 2012 with something called “Egyptian Hax” that my sister set up because she wanted me to play NetHack, so a guide would be a great start. I’m aware that WINE has gone through some vast improvements, but beyond that I don’t really know where to start, what distro would be good for me, or anything else.
Edit: not getting mocked for admitting my ignorance would be a huge encouragement as well, tbh. It’s hard not to be resentful when a community is hostile to new members. Calling someone a slur for not already being a part of the in group is a great way to keep people from joining. 👍
Start with Linux Mint. It should be a very pleasant and straightforward experience right out of the box, and is just in general very beginner friendly. I recommend to create a live USB (basically, download the ISO from the Mint website, then use something like Balena Etcher to put it on a USB stick). You can then boot off that stick, and try Mint out to your heart’s content, without risking your Windows install or data at all.
Can I ask, what are the programs you wager you’ll have to emulate through wine?
I’m saving this so I can look at it again this weekend.
I’m not one for making bets unless I know something that I suspect someone else doesn’t, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the games I have on steam need wine to run on Linux. My understanding is that wine is a compatibility layer, hence the name, correct?
Ah, good news in regards to gaming, esp. Steam gaming!
Steam invested quite a bit of energy into “Proton”, essentially a new kind of compatibility layer. If you remember tinkering around with wine and winetricks from years ago, that’s basically gone nowadays.
For most games, just go into the Steam settings for that game, and under “Compatibility”, check the box.
Then click download, and play. That’s it for most games 🎉
Also check out protondb.com - it’s basically a community-sourced database cataloging how well Steam games work on Linux.
Good luck on your Linux journey, and feel free to ask questions if something comes up! :)
And if you’ve been letting Steam store your save data, you should find that your save files for most games will still be available in Linux! Mileage will vary per game of course, but jumping between OSes has been pretty seamless for me!
I’m also going to recommend Linux Mint, its a really friendly beginner distro. I’ll presonally recommend you do Linux Mint Debian instead of normal linux mint since regular linux mint is Ubuntu based and really loves snaps.
The default user env is cinnimon which is going to look a lot like Windows 10 making the transition easier. If you want to install steam its literally a command line away from installing and then its ready to go. That and Steam personally pushing for Linux as a viable gaming platform there are a lot more games now that work out of the box now on steam.
Don’t listen to people who mock you for asking a question. They are never the people whose advice is worth listening too. Start small. Get 8gb or bigger thumb drive. You can even use an external SSD. USB C would be the best. Follow the guide below or find a guide of your own. Start with Ubuntu. It isn’t perfect but it is the most popular distro out there. Be aware this installation is going to be laggy due to it being on a slower thumb drive. This will allow you to see that it just works. Games might be slower loading due to the thumb drive. I use steam daily and only have seen a few games I couldn’t play. Everyone was due to the ham-fisted drm the games had implemented.
Alternatively you can install a second hard drive in a PC and use both safely without fear of problems. I’ve been running linux as my daily driver for over ten years. I still have a windows installation that I can boot into if needed. Usually for firmware updates that only can be performed in windows. Currently I haven’t needed it in over a year.
I will probably get a lot of hate from this but Ubuntu is simply more mature than mint. I’ve used mint and it works. The main gripe with Ubuntu is its use of snaps for many applications. They are not ideal but they do work. The main problems you may run into with snaps is the same problems you will run into with flatpak, appimage or docker.
Its a little more complicated to get persistence but my current main boot flash drive I carry with me daily is a 128gb thumb drive running ventoy. Ventoy is great because all you need to add a iso to the thumb drive is simply copy the iso over to it. Getting persistence is a little more complicated but the ventoy installer has a web gui that makes it easier. The ventoy installer is available for windows and linux. www.ventoy.net/en/download.html
On my bootable flash drive I have Debian, Ubuntu, Mint , kali, tails and even a arch installation with persistence. I also have several other utility iso’s including hirens_PE. I have installers for windows as well. I mainly use the linux installations for rescue and diagnostics on windows PC’s. I have however ran machines with no hard drive at all for weeks at a time without any problems at all.
So using rufus to make a bootable thumb drive is okay for a single OS with persistence but you can use ventoy and test several distros to find what you prefer.
Snaps, flatpaks, docker etc… are small compressed applications that come with all the dependencies to run in a container. Their advantage is that they can run without installing all the extra dependencies on the host installation. They often suffer from random bugs such as permission errors. Along with many having questionable possibly malicious sources. The Ubuntu devs have went all in on them. Many people enable flatpak on mint to get some application that isn’t included by the package manager. What I was trying to convey is that these differences and the arguments they enable are kinda like watching two old farts at a coffee shop arguing over whether a Ford or a Chevy truck is better. In the end snaps and flatpak have some utility but are often a sore subject for some.
What matters is if you get what you want. For instance on Ubuntu you can install steam as a snap or install the actual application. Both work fairly well. You will be able to play most games by using steam and proton or by using other helper apps to install your games. The names of these are winetricks, lutris or playonlinux. Asking which one is best will often trigger arguments similar to asking what distro is the best.
I personally slowly eliminate snaps from my Ubuntu installations by compiling the applications myself. Not everyone enjoys doing that kind of thing. No matter what you choose you can usually get it working. With Ubuntu you will have quite a bit more support in the form of posted solutions and walk throughs but distros like mint are catching up a bit.
Write down a list of the software you use (e.g. web browser, office suite, notepad, image viewer, video player, … ). Download Linux Mint from here and use Balena Etcher to write it into a pen drive. Switch off your computer, plug in the pen drive and switch on. DON’T INSTALL YET. Run Linux ‘live’ for a couple of hours, see if everything (speaker, printer, webcam, all the software you listed above) is working correctly.
Once you have confirmed that all is well, copy your files into an external hard drive, confirm that everything important has been backed up, and then install Linux from the pen drive. (You can have both Windows and Linux on the same computer, but then Windows should not be given internet access or it will ‘update’ and mess up everything. This can be repaired using, for example, this software, but why bother?)
It’s not personal. I’ve just seen hundreds of people claim “that’s it, I’m installing Linux on my system tonight/this weekend!” In response to one of these articles. Very rarely do people seem to actually follow through.
If you do, great! Although already putting it off until your next system isn’t a good sign.
I’ve been vassilating on it for a couple years, actually. I was going to do it when I built a PC (I just had a laptop for college) but then my parents bought one for me while I was in the middle of figuring out what parts to get with my sister’s help. It’s probably my fault for telling them about it around my b.day, tbf. 😂 I used a partitioned system that she helped set up for me 10 years ago or something like that, but I wanted to make one that was just a Linux PC, and for the past few years the idea of installing Linux on my current computer just never occurred to me because my plan became obsolete. The brain is a funny thing.
Why do people keep recommending Mint as a starter distro? Maybe if your computer is a toaster, but it lacks tons of modern features. Seems like a one way track to people thinking Linux sucks. Fedora KDE edition is a way better beginner distro for a halfway decent PC.
It isn’t default or suggested. It says that it is the “most popular”, but my point is that if you’re making a beginner choose a desktop environment before they even install Linux, you’re setting them up to be overwhelmed.
who are these adult humans who can’t face choices? I don’t really understand how or why they even chose their PC in the first place.
It sounds like such people will be a lot better off with android or mac, or windows or chromebook. If they want to do games get a console.
It’s sort of like if a person has no enthusiasm for or interest in cars, they might be better off with a rental.
if you really want to make another version of something like chromeos for this audience, there is nothing stopping you. But the free/foss open source world is always going to have choices that bamboozle these people who can’t look at the mint website and pick one, or just resolve to test all three.
It’s not about being unable to face choices, it’s that if you make beginners make choices about things they don’t yet understand, they won’t be able to make an informed decision, and they will feel overwhelmed.
I don’t understand why people don’t just recommend vanilla Ubuntu. It’s popular, it’s easy, pretty much every Linux Desktop troubleshooting article is written in the Context of Ubuntu. There’s only one flavor of it, so you don’t even have to learn what a Desktop Environment is until you’re ready to get there.
If you want more Linux users, you need to lower the barriers to entry. If you gatekeep Linux by demanding that people already understand things like the differences between different DEs before they’ve even installed the OS for the first time, you can expect that people will keep using Windows.
Microsoft spends billions of marketing dollars pushing Windows. Linux doesn’t have a marketing department, that’s up to the community. We can’t be marketing Linux as harder to use while Microsoft markets Windows as easier to use, not unless our goal is to boost Microsoft’s profits.
KDE is closer to the modern Windows UI than Cinnamon. Cinnamon looks like Windows XP which nobody has used in like a decade. It’s not a familiar UI anymore.
I use Mint and I like it. It does everything I need it to do.
What keeps people away from Linux, or at least it helped keep me away, were people arguing with each other about distros like a mini-OS war within the OS wars and it makes the whole thing sound like it’s a lot more trouble than it’s worth.
Most people’s computers are “toasters” because most people’s computers are used for things like web browsing, word processing and maybe a few games. They don’t need the modern features, they need something that works better than a Chromebook and isn’t super bloated.
Do you know what also keeps people away from Linux? Being told that Linux Mint is a good distro for beginners, and then going to the Linux Mint website and finding that there are three different flavors, Cinnamon, XFCE, and MATE, and not knowing what any of that means because you’re a beginner. Beginners don’t benefit from incomplete information that requires prior knowledge, and every time I see “use Linux Mint” without any clarification on Desktop Environments, I see a jerk who doesn’t know what “beginner” means.
As someone who did exactly this, the differences are spelled out pretty clearly for “Linux beginners”. System reqs and included features all there to read…
The average person does not read or understands instructions of any kind related to PCs. This is something tech-savy people suck so hard at: having patience for those people. You expect them to be like you or a certain way that is not possible for them or simply won’t ever happen, and you get mad or blame them for it, instead of offering the solution they need, which is a more intuitive software design, be more direct with the information, explain things like they are beginners, not like they have used Linux before and know what even sudo is, stuff like that
I remember when I was first learning linux, I found this super evangelistic website explaining how totally easy it is to use linux nowadays (this was about 15 years ago, so that was a fucking lie).
They gave some basic task as the first example of something you might need to do, and they said, no shit, “It’s easy! Just open up the terminal and type…” and I closed the website.
Not because I couldn’t do that instruction, I was working in IT and I already maintained multiple linux servers, but because of how utterly unhinged that instruction was. I didn’t know if their information would be useful, but I did know that I couldn’t trust their judgement anymore. You cannot tell people an OS is “easy” and “for everyone” then transition straight into “open up the terminal” in the same goddamn breath. They didn’t even explain how to open up the terminal, because of course it’s different everywhere and they wanted universal instructions.
I really, really want to make linux work for me. I have four linux machines in my home, although three of them are raspberry pis, and i have tried it in laptops and on my main machine many times over the years, always finding it more trouble than it’s worth. But I have never seen any indication that the community has ever moved on from, “It’s easy! Just open up the terminal…”
You nailed it. We love to repeat that sentence, “it’s easy”, myself, wrongfully included. I do believe that lying to your brain that whatever you have to do is easy kind of makes you try harder and for longer, you break problems down and stuff, but not everyone is like this at all.
Whenever my dad calls me to ask about a problem in his PC, I always start energetic and happy to help him, with a good tone in my voice and everything. But I start losing my shit the longer the call lasts, because he doesn’t know anything, how to stop a process from the task manager, how to disable unnecessary startup programs, how to use a translator quickly in any website, etc. I become condescending because he likes to read me everything he sees on the screen first before clicking on the button I just told him to click on, everything, from top to bottom, every popup and warning. In windows. I always tell him that it’s easy, that it’d just take him maximum 1 week to learn, but still, he is always reluctant of it, he just wants to do his job, not learn about Windows or Linux at all
I’d lose my entire head if he tried Linux, because instead of buttons and intuitive icons it’d be a bunch of commands that even for me still look mayan most of the time. He’d easily fall for the sufo rm -r command if he followed a tutorial online, and that bothers me a lot. Linux is really not user-friendly as they think they are or claim to be yet, it seems like it’s getting closer, but the fact that a lot of it relies on using a terminal is already an instant-loss. I am sorry, but nobody wants to use the terminal, as cool as it might look while doing so or how gratifying it is to learn about it; the majority of people want speed without having to learn anything about how to achieve that speed
And before one of those deranged fools come here just to say “lol dude, your dad is just dumb” as a counter to all this, I’d say no dude, he is not, he is a goddamn fine architect, he just doesn’t need to learn the same crap that you and I have learned, we are a literal minority in this. He knows shit you don’t know, just as we know shit he doesn’t, and this applies to anyone of any age in this world, isn’t about age or whatever, it’s just about being interested in the topic, and not many are interested on a black box with weird-looking commands written in it, or how an OS works at all
Yeah, I think one of the issues is that a knowledge gap is a very hard thing to bridge. Part of that is the classic thing that “we don’t know how much we don’t know”. But there’s a similar thing with knowledge, where people don’t know how much they know.
Like with the terminal, once you get comfortable with it, it is really easy to get things done, but you really have to have a certain kind of disposition to get to that point, even with the right kind of help - like with your dad, if he’s not interested to learn you can’t make him. You have to already be deep into the ecosystem before you can say “it’s easy”, and by that point you are so far removed from the average user’s experience that you can’t understand why they can’t just do what you do. And unfortunately, the people most expert at using linux and therefore developing it are also the people deepest in the ecosystem.
There’s an empathy gap that’s hard to bridge, but it’s not impossible. Like if you’ve ever finished The Outer Wilds, it’s an incredible game that is only gated by your knowledge. It’s a unique experience that you can’t repeat. The only way to attempt to experience it again is to sit down and watch another person’s playthrough of it. I’ve done it multiple times, and each time is a unique and difficult experience, because you already know the answers, and they are so painfully simple once you know them. It’s a real struggle of empathy to actually be able to enjoy it.
You can do a similar thing with other freeform puzzle games like The Witness. It’s just that The Outer Wilds is unique in that it shows you in stark contrast how vast the gap is between knowing and not knowing, and you have to bridge that gap constantly in order to engage.
So that’s my ramble on that subject, but that’s what I think is happening. I think apart from people willing and able to bridge that gap, the solutions to this issue involve more resources dedicated to improving the ecosystem and making it friendlier, and also just more uptake making the system stronger and exposing its weak points as people learn it, making the empathy gap less of a problem. As we are, proprietary systems have sucked up all those resources and market share, which has starved open source. It’s a slow climb out of that hole but I have to believe that eventually there will be a critical tipping point.
I just switched one of my PCs to Linux mint. I am not that smart with computers. I have never used Linux before. I have no experience in changing operating systems. All I did was buy a flash drive stick and used my phone to go to Mints website and follow their directions. That was a month ago. It was a great decision. Mint is amazing and im glad I did it. I am currently getting ready to switch both my wife and my gaming computers over to Mint as well.
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