You know, the answer to captions like that is to 99.9%:
Yes*
*Under laboratory conditions and for a very specific use case / a whole lot of money, once.
The reality is that billions are poured into developing faster computers and change is happening gradually, because low-hanging fruits are gathered even before they are ripe.
I think overall they are not better or worse than other tech giants. They try to be the platform for blank and thus to push competitors out of the marked, or lock it down so they can’t enter. They try to extract as much money from their customers as they can, even if it makes the user experience worse. They push the boundaries of what the can legally do. They charge you, but you don’t own anything.
What really grinds my gears is how they try to force stuff on me that I don’t fucking want. I feel like they are completely different in that regard than for example Google. I use Google Maps because I want to. I don’t use Chrome because I don’t want to. It’s that easy. They don’t ask me to reconsider, they don’t make it super complicated to switch, nothing. I can disable any Google App and forget about it.
To stick with the Google comparison, I also feel like Google informs me better and gives me more control regarding my data. This feels much more hidden on convoluted in MS products in general. For example I had no idea Office is basically spyware before reading about it elsewhere. In Google-land, they seem much more upfront about what they use and what I can opt out from (or in to).
Might be about time to try blendOS I guess. All that’s missing is Gentoo-like local compilation of packages to tick all the boxes of stuff Linux people get off on.
People try their hardest to make computers your friends. Don’t be afraid to talk to them 😊
You do need to authorize admin action on Windows and it causes severe security issues, because people do it without thinking all the time.
You can also configure Linux to have this behaviour, but for security reasons it works differently out of the box. Also, some programs, such as many terminal emulators, can cache you PW so you don’t have to enter it multiple times.
I use a U2F key for sudo and it’s just one touch. One touch you need to sit in front of my computer for.
I mean, a lot if people will have Nvidia hardware - which will limit your distro choices right from the start and if said green hardware is recent, well you’re fucked (for just a little while longer it seems).
I prefer Flatpaks, not only because I support the format, but also because of containerization and the ability to clean up an application completely.
I absolutely hate it when apps randomly place config files everywhere.
Is using btrfs an option? Offer transparent compression at FS level
I think TOML found a pleasant compromise there
For me it loads fine with uBlock, but they have started to implement some basic VPN-blocking apparently (or enabled whatever their CDN provider talked them into or whatever). A simple reconnect seems to do the trick with ProtonVPN however.
Firefox enhanced tracking protection is pretty based here if you ask me
KDE can display one taskbar on all displays? If so I would like to know how
Heh, we the best. Now excuse me while I use my amazing brainpower to watch questionable anime and get more depressed 🫥
I encode everything with AV1 and Opus, although, as others have pointed out, there is the disadvantage that older (as in “not new”) devices won’t have hardware acceleration for those. I don’t care about that tho, because 1080p runs just fine on decent CPUs and I want to encode for the future, not yesteryear.
For AV1 I use 10bit, VFR, RF25. If you want, you can play around with the performance profile to trade file size for encoding speed.
For Opus I use 320 kbit/s fixed Bitrate and 7.1 downmix. Note that when dealing with audio and subtitles, you absolutely should include tracks of ‘unknown’ language! Otherwise they are just thrown away. And of course you should include every other language you care about. You can also choose to pass through Opus encoded tracks automatically.
I prefer MKV as container format, because from all I hear it’s flexible and robust. Pretty much everything else is set to default. I’d advise to safe your settings to a preset and to briefly verify encoded videos actually work and contain the desired tracks.
Fasterfetch!
I auto-backup my entire /home, except for stuff I explicitly exclude and hidden files. I only explicitly include some of the latter, because I don’t want to back up all the stuff programs put there without my knowledge.
Config files outside of /home I copy semi-manually to and from a dedicated dir in which I replicate exactly where they go in my actual FS. I have written shell functions that easily allow me to backup and restore stuff from there and it’s synced to my cloud storage.
Is FastFetch not? I have used it for quite some time now and afaik it is being updated.
Tbf, Plasma 6.0.0 was not exactly bug free. Then again, Plasma 6.0.1 was the first release on Arch and for me, it didn’t break anything. Only some UI issues and occasional (although never fatal) crashes.
That’s something they didn’t handle all too well imo. They seem to be able to detect incompatible stuff, so it would have been quite easy to help you clean it up. Finding all the places things are stored after they just disappeared from Settings was a bit of a pain.
Is there no electron wrapper around ChatGPT yet? Jeez we better hurry, imagine having to use your browser like… For pretty much everything else.