A typical ActivityPub+Lemmy post.

I’m sure Microsoft would be supportive of that point of view. And with their wealth and lobbying power … … Lets not mention it again, and hope for the best.

Hey, no one is trying to stop you from doing that. I’m sure it is very convenient for you.

My point of view though is that automatically uploading my personal files to some corporation computer on the other side of the world should not be the default when I try to save something. Maybe sometimes I’ll want to use that feature, but there are a variety of reasons why I don’t want it most of the time. And I definitely don’t like having to jump through hoops just to avoid it.

What’s X? Is that the older version of Wayland or something?

The “and more” is the worrying part. They’re telling us that some of the things they are adding are not ‘features’. So then what are they?

Ads, probably. That’s the trend these days. More and more ads, in everything, everywhere - just really probing the limits of tolerability.

Forced accounts are evil - including Android. Here’s my Android story:

When I got my first Android phone, my intention was to not have an account - or at least have as much isolation between any account and my actual usage as possible. So I decline account creation when I first started using the phone, and told the phone to only store all contacts locally. That worked, and I was pretty happy with it. But later, I wanted to download a couple of basic apps from the app store - and that required an account. So I created a bogus account to download the apps. …

After creating the account to download stuff, I noticed that the contacts had automatically associated themselves with that new account had automatically uploaded all my contacts and personal info to google to sync with this account. This is precisely the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place. So, I immediately logged into that account via google’s website and told it to not store any contact info, and to delete all existing info. Which it did.

But then some time later… the account again decided to sync with my phone - this time to delete all the contacts from my phone (presumably because I’d deleted them from the online account). So although I’d gone to some deliberate lengths to tell my phone to only store data locally and to not upload it, what i ended up with was all personal data uploaded, and then purged from my phone. I had to try to restore my contacts from an ancient sim-card backup from my old phone.

Since then, I’ve decided that I will not use a google account for my phone for any reason, ever. I’ve use F-droid and the Aurora store instead. (But actually I very rarely use any apps anyway.)

Steam works very well on Linux. There is a setting in Steam to enable ‘proton’ for all games - this allows you to play Windows games on Linux without having to do anything else. It has worked flawlessly for every game I’ve tried.

As for your movies thing, I don’t know. I deliberately avoid software that automatically searches and catalogues stuff on my computer. So I’m not sure how easy it is to do what you are asking for. It’s something that I’d avoid rather than seek out.

In my specific case the manufacturer is Microsoft. (It’s a Surface Pro.) There isn’t anything wrong with the battery. The gist of the issue is that there are milllion-and-one different things that can wake the computer from sleep, and then a couple of reasons why it might not automatically sleep again when ideal. If it was up to me, I’d have it so that the power button was literally the only thing that could wake it. But alas, I cannot even find a way to stop it from waking when opening the case (which I would like to do to check if it has woken up from some other reason).

In any case, I’m just saying that power management can be a problem in Windows (as well as in Linux).

Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won’t even boot. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery (even then, to really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero).

Are you kidding? Windows does this all the time. There have been countless times when I’ve left work with a fully charged laptop, then bring it back the next day to literal zero charge without having used it. I no longer trust sleep or hibernate mode at all for anything longer than an hour. And I’m not the only one with this problem. My partner (with a different laptop) has had the same thing happen, and so have my colleges.

I’ve got some ideas about why and how it might happen; but kind of beside the point. The point is that it is not true that Windows would never let your battery drain to zero while the computer is not in use. It does do it. Often.

Microsoft’s insidious insistence on online accounts is the main reason I stopped using Windows. Even with a local Windows account, one time I accidentally opened Edge, and it started automatically importing browser info from Firefox and then syncing it to the Microsoft account that I was using for MS Office. From my point of view, that was some extreme bullshit. Too much to tolerate. I didn’t want Edge to import anything from anywhere - no matter how ‘convenient and easy’ it is. and I certainly didn’t want it to upload anything - no matter what assurances of ‘privacy and security’ are claimed. And until that point, I thought accounts for individual apps could be keep isolated to just that app.

How can such a fundamental element of thr human experience can be so conspicuously absent for almost all art and media.

What are you talking about? Heaps of movies have sex scenes. Heaps of songs are about sex. There are heaps of books and other stories about sex. The internet is packed with sex stuff of all kinds. Advertisements in the street are obvious implicitly or explicitly about sex. So how can you say that sex is ‘conspicuously absent from almost all art and media’? Are you looking?

Allowing explicit porn on twitter doesn’t make it ground-breaking in any way. It just changes the tone and target audience of the site, such that you will now see porn inserted into basically any conversation or topic.

Your problems are with capitalism and how we distribute our resources, not with advancements in automation.

This particularly story isn’t about wealth distribution though. It’s about environmental damage caused by this technology. So that’s a whole other class of problem. As for the other problems being about capitalism, I agree for sure that capitalism is a source of many many problems… but while we are in that system we should still try to minimise the problems. So if this technology has major problem when combined with capitalism, then we should either stop using capitalism, or stop using the technology - or both, until we make up our mind which we prefer to keep!

Google providing links to dubious websites is not the same as google directly providing dubious answers to questions.

Google is generally considered to be a trusted company. If you do a search for some topic, and google spits out a bunch of links, you can generally trust that those links are going to be somehow related to your search - but the information you find there may or may not be reliable. The information is coming from the external website, which often is some unknown untrusted source - so even though google is trusted, we know that the external information we found might not be. The new situation now is that google is directly providing bad information itself. It isn’t linking us to some unknown untrusted source but rather the supposedly trustworthy google themselves are telling us answers to our questions.

None of this would be a problem if people just didn’t consider google to be trustworthy in the first place.

Yeah, for me it is the ads. No one likes ads, but I hate ads more than most people. So when Windows started putting more and more ‘recommendations’ into various places… I’ve been building up a list of registry tweaks to turn it all off - but as more ads got added, just couldn’t tolerate it any more. I installed Mint with dual boot (defaulting to Mint). I thought I’d be booting into Window every so often for one reason or another, but as it happens - the only reason I ever loaded Windows was to check that the dual booting was working.

Password managers are good; but keeping track of passwords is not the main problem with making online accounts for everything.

Yeah, I will. These decisions don’t just come out of nowhere, and I think its always a good idea to try to understand why things happen. By understanding the reasons for things, the world is less likely to feel arbitrarily hostile and unfair - and I can make better informed choices for my own life.

Brand integration definitely is not neutral. Functionality to make it smooth and easy interact with nazi-central lends Nintendo’s credibility to that platform. It’s not a neutral feature.

I’m sure you’ll be thinking about this conversation for longer than it took to make the original post.

I have shared a computer with people, but we definitely don’t want our stuff open at the same time. I would find that confusing and a bit of a violation of privacy. So that leaves me (and most people I assume) just trying to imagine what it is that you are not happy with. And I honestly don’t know what you are talking about when you say ‘regular shortcut’. As far as I know, there is only one kind of shortcut in windows. It’s a icon that runs a command of your choice, with an icon of your choice, placed in a location of your choice (any folder, any part of the start menu, or somewhere on the taskbar). So when you talk about shortcuts not being the regular one, I don’t know what you mean.

But look, if you say it’s bad for your use-case - I believe you. When I said that it was a stretch to blame Firefox, I didn’t mean it was a non-issue. What I had in mind was that your primary complaint seems to be about what Windows is doing rather than what Firefox is doing. In any case, like I said before: if it isn’t doing what you need then it makes sense to look elsewhere. Good luck to you.

I’m not really sure what you are asking for. From what I understand it sounds like you have multiple people using the same computer, and they all want their own Firefox profile open at the same time. You’ve got a shortcut for each profile; and it works… but you are unhappy with how the Windows taskbar looks when you have these multiple profiles open at once?

I feel like its a bit of a stretch to blame Firefox for what the Windows taskbar does while you have multiple people simultaneously trying to use the same web-browser. But sure, everyone has their own use-case. And if this isn’t doing what you need, then it makes sense to look elsewhere.