“High performers don’t waste their time arguing with the void on social media. Congrats, you just burned the only free hour you had after work.”

Bro, you’re literally just like those you despise. Talking of badges, don’t prick yourself with that “Sheriff of Linux” badge you made it out that bottle lid.

Edit: Sorry, where the hell did that link come from!? I swear it wasn’t there when I last looked!

Belt CVTs - I’m right there with you, but take a look into the more modern geared CVTs such as Toyota e-CVT in their hybrids - I think Honda have a similar tech. It’s a planetary gear system that provides infinite gears without the rubber band feel that plagued belt CVTs and hella-reliable.

https://youtu.be/vHc-_E8xWnM?si=tzCJWXHmC9T5GCpx

I’m a petrolhead at heart and would love more options for manuals but in lieu of that, a geared CVT is by far the next best transmission and 100x better than a traditional auto.

Even better, jump in one and take it for a drive - because there are gears, it feels more connected to the motor - almost manual-like response and no sluggish delay like a traditional auto.

You literally pick your revs by pushing the throttle more or less, they’re magic for hills or when the car is packed since you’re never waiting for revs to climb up into the power nor holding a speed because any faster and you have to change again which takes you out of the power again. If you want more power, you simply modulate that with the throttle and the revs rise instantly to accommodate.

They behave like this on the floor too!

Missed a massive opportunity: the grin reaper!

<click> what? <click>WHAT!? <click> STOP POKING ME!**

MS know who butters their bread. Businesses get given the tools to control windows properly. Even without needing to resort to LTSC versions, domain joined with group policy, you can manage all the shitty parts of windows to make it behave as you wish - even down to control over when you receive the updates

And a formatting-stripping tool

Lord of War: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0399295/

It seems to me that its the profits that cause the crisis

Serious Sam - almost any version!

He’s not been knighted - yet…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Johnson_(racing_driver)

Mate, ease up!

Add some lube and loosen your death grip and you’ll have a more pleasant experience

Phase one: force everyone’s data into their OneDrive account. OneDrive now at capacity, you must upgrade to ensure all your data is backed up and retained.

Phase two: MS secretly (or not so secretly) use all this data to train copilot.

Human generated content to feed into ai systems is the new good rush

Quite a few products allow for this home use. Aids with training, familiarisation and locking users into their ecosystem. I’ve been able to do this a few times to help learn complex programs.

Completely legit with Adobe as far as I’m aware - since there is only the one licence available via online check-in so can’t be used on more than one at a time.

Autodesk is similar - used to have an allowance for a training/home use licence (may have been extra), even the common Office 365 corp licence allows for up to 5 installations and doesn’t really care where you install it.

Corp data on a home device or using your own gear for WFH is another story though.

Got a well specced 4th Gen i7 that does everything I need so unless it blows up, I won’t be upgrading. Started working on the plan this week. Been using Mint on my secondary (non essential laptop) but never had the stones to take the plunge on my main rig.

Watching MS stepping into the enshittification trend and AI with Win11 means this is the last straw, particularly now I don’t need to rely on keeping up with windows for work. Currently bashing on Linux Mint DE in a VM to test what I need and have working to be happy:

Outlook/Office - Thunderbird is good but it’s been a while since I’ve used Libre Office but didn’t have much luck with it in the past - trashing the formatting when bouncing between LO & MSO. Hoping the more recent versions are better else office web will have to do for those documents that don’t play nice.

Steam - make sure I can get it going, several key games. This is the least of my worries after seeing what others have said. NVIDIA graphics may be a bit more painful.

RDP - I still have another headless win10 media box. VNC as backup. This box will be the next on the chopping block if all goes well.

Backup - this is the big one. Currently use Backblaze for unlimited backup and love the set & forget nature. No native Linux client so would require moving to their B2 platform with a third party interface - do-able, just need to get off my butt to work it out :p

File structure - always struggled with this in my playing with Linux, need to become more comfortable with where files live and general directory structure.

Will slowly pick those off over the next couple of weeks and then I should be good to go.

That is literally what the first Xbox was. It’s internals was a custom mboard running a Celeron 700 and 3.5" HDD (can’t remember what the graphics was based on, maybe a GeForce MX?) with a customised Win2k OS.

All approx. It’s early and I can’t be bothered confirming those specs are 100% accurate :p

Capped - gotta keep the connection usable and in my eyes availability > speed.

Very few things I need “right now” so I can be patient as not being able to find something can be much more frustrating.

Saying that, if you need to switch off, do so. If they really want it, they’ll leave it queued and it’s not on you to act as the entire distribution source (unless it’s your distro!)