russjr08

About the bonus peeve, it's definitely a double edged sword for me. I know exactly what you mean, and I hate those moments.

But at the same time, one thing I've come to dislike on GNOME is when I click a link in Thunderbird expecting it to open right away, and instead get a "Mozilla Firefox is ready" notification. It makes it feel a bit clunkier/slower when I've come to expect that interaction to be instant (and I wouldn't be surprised if that's precisely why it hasn't changed in most places).

So now instead of being bothered by one case, I get bothered by both cases lol. I wish there was more of a middle-ground, like middle clicking the link (or holding control/some other modifier key) would bypass that notification and just directly open/focus it.

It’s like “Have you tried turning it off and then turning it on again?” Yes, yes, and I tried that, too!

And the reason why this is a universal T1 tech support tactic (to the point of being a meme) is because there are plenty of times that this does do the trick. Definitely not all the time, but as someone who worked in internet tech support at a call center the solution often was "Unplug the modem, unplug the router, give me a moment to do something on my side (which sometimes was nothing - but it made sure that they actually unplugged it), now plug both back in".

And before someone jumps me for lying about the "do something on my side" part, when you can clearly see someone's port uptime is 200 days despite them claiming they reset their router minutes before calling in, you tend to learn very quickly that people lie (or are wrong/misinformed) whether that's intentional, or because they thought they unplugged their router but instead unplugged their PC/monitor/etc - the end result was the same. We had customers on all sorts of different infrastructure, some of them I could do a port bounce from our end (and I did for those cases), but others the customer had to unplug it from their end.

So even if the troubleshooter only fixes say, 25% of people's problems - that's still 25% of problems resolved right away, and without needing to go search online. I do not think I've run into a Linux distro that has any sort of built in troubleshooter that could at the very least help those 25% (or whatever the actual percentage is) cases.

This feels like a bit of a sideways take. I'll preface this with that I love Linux, and its been my preferred operating system for years.

That being said, "helplessness" isn't Microsoft's fault. Most people do not want to know the ins-and-outs of how something works, and that's perfectly okay. I am a software developer, but despite the fact that I have an Android (Pixel) phone I generally do not care to root my phone, flash alternative ROMs, etc anymore. I use Linux on my PC, but I do not want to spend hours tinkering with my phone, only for it to most likely end up in a state that is less-than-par than what it came with. I am glad that Android is open enough (well, its not as cut-and-dry as that but its more open than iOS) for the people who do want to tinker around with it to be able to do so, but its not for me. If I'm out and trying to request an Uber, I don't want my phone to crash every time I open the app just because the ROM I'm using has a bug.

By the same token, there are times where I don't really want to mess around with going through a million settings on my PC when I just need it to allow me to do some work. That is a trade-off that you tend to make with Linux (though its certainly gotten a lot better over the years), and I can't fault people for not wanting to go through that. Sometimes, I wish I hadn't made that trade-off and had just stayed blind to the love/hate relationship I've come to form around Linux.

I do not want to tinker around with my keyboard, I just want it to allow me to type. I don't want to tinker around with my headphones, I just want to listen to music. I use my refrigerator every day, and while I have some rudimentary understanding of how it works, I really rather not tinker around with it - and if it stops working, you're not likely to find me trying to fix it myself (short of say, the light bulb going out).

A coworker of mine convinced another coworker to wipe their system and install Fedora, and use the Looking Glass + VFIO passthrough trick to have a Windows VM within Linux like he does. He spent both of his days off trying to get it to work (and facing weird issues that even I couldn't explain and find a solution for), and at the end of today he decided to reinstall Windows so that tomorrow he can have something reliable to use for work. This is exactly why I usually don't push people to use Linux. If they want to know more about it, sure I'm happy to show them the ropes - but selling it as a perfect solution is a bad idea and only makes Linux look bad.

If Microsoft didn't make an operating system that was simple enough for users who just want things to work, yet powerful enough for those who want to do more with it (such as making games, or using CAD software for engineering) then someone else would. I definitely get frustrated with Windows, but at the end of the day, it is what most of the world uses for a reason (just like Linux is used for most web servers around the world for a reason) - its the right tool for their job, whatever that job might be. Sure, the vague error codes that you get from Windows is frustrating at times, but Windows isn't open source and that is not likely to change. How is the old XP error code format of STOP CODE 0X003ABF VIOLATION OCCURRED AT KERNEL.DLL (along with the rest of the useless stack trace) going to help you anymore than the shorter ones that are generally found on Windows nowadays? You can't exactly go submit a pull request to fix the issue. In terms of the ability to search for the error, I've very rarely ever seen a Windows error code that didn't have a million and one causes (and ^2 the amount of potential "solutions" for the supposed cause). It's certainly not going someone whose just trying to do their homework for school, or edit their resume for job applications.

The same thing applies to the whole iOS vs Android debate. The same coworker who sold Linux to my other coworker uses an iPhone (actually, they both do as far as I'm aware), because its been reliable for him. He doesn't need to have the source code to iOS in order for it to do what he needs it to do. Quite frankly, the whole "sheeple" thing that you tend to hear people say, and this "Windows users are zombies" take being portrayed in this comment is incredibly childish. If you're not sharing the computer, the phone, etc and someone else owns it - why does it matter what they use?

I suppose you could argue that the majority of people these days don't want to troubleshoot anything, but can you really blame them? Imagine yourself before anything that you learnt about Linux, Windows, and computers in general - with the way things are built (think laptops and phones, with how their components tend to be soldered in) doing anything yourself to repair stuff is very difficult, and has a high chance of leaving you with a brick (which isn't a Microsoft invention). How many people have you seen try to fix a software related issue on their PC or phone, and ended up making the issue worse (which can be done just as easily, if not easier, on Linux)? Those stories are why a lot of people do not want to try to fix something and reach out to support, take it in for repair, replace it, etc.

Assuming they're tagged appropriately by the person who setup the account, you can also just disable seeing bot content in your account settings.

That just means that moving forward, now you will! 😅

Battle.net Account != Requiring the Battle.net client.

I'm not the biggest fan of Blizzard/Activision right now because of the shit-show with D4, but OW2 doesn't require the Battle.net client which is very clear if you just install and run the game.

This was somewhat done for Destiny 2, when they moved from Battle.net to Steam (so like the Bethesda situation mentioned in another reply). I'm sure it was a bit easier for them since the base game went F2P which obviously hasn't happened here for Diablo 4, but all of my purchases/DLCs for the game were transferred over to the Steam equivalents.

I'd assume if they really wanted to, they could find a way to just give everyone who has it on BNet a key to the Steam version, but there's no real incentive for them to do that.

Thank you, that means a lot to me! After hearing some bad news yesterday, this was a nice ray of sunshine through the clouds!

That is certainly a cause for celebration, that's a lot of pills to have to take daily and in particular usually there's a not-so-great aftertaste from antibiotics that I tend to dislike too haha

You should make a post about how that goes, I'd be interested in hearing about it!

They don't to my knowledge, I believe that's mounted through rclone which just usually sets the filesystem size to 1PB so that it doesn't have to try to query what the actual limit is for the various providers (and your specific plan).

Ah, you are right - thanks!