The point is that the data you're sharing may look banal to you now, but you have no idea how it might get used in the future, and by whom. You should assume that all data you share is available to everybody. Thus everybody should prefer privacy by default.
Caring about jetpacks, flying cars, or robot maids is such modern-day capitalist brain rot. George is the family's breadwinner and works only two days a week for one hour a day in the show.
Elon didn't want to get outshined after Sam Altman suggested that "maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system". When will people realize that these "geniuses" are only good at making money, and any benefit to society is coincidental.
There's an audience for this. People have been taking these vapid statements and his trouble with communicating as evidence of genius for well over a decade now.
Poland is still low on the EU ladder in terms of GDP per capita and PPP. What I wish is that the amount of subsidies from the EU was better communicated in the face of rising anti-EU sentiments, and the periodically-returning topic of WW2 reparations.
The voter base doesn't care. Federal agents are sent to a state against the governor's will, a man gets shot and killed while carrying a holstered pistol, and all the MAGA 2nd amendment republicans think this was a justified killing because he had a gun on him.
The other side of the voters has happily expanded the power of the executive for decades while demonizing those who would put in some restraint. Both sides do this and here we are. The people voting against Trump still gave him power, just not while he was in office.
A Federal intervention is generally not called for unless a State pointedly does not get with some Federal mandate or another. See desegregation in the South for another notable historic example.
Of the Little Rock 9 in Arkansas:
>When integration began on September 4, 1957, the Arkansas National Guard was called in to "preserve the peace". Originally at orders of the governor, they were meant to prevent the black students from entering due to claims that there was "imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace" at the integration. However, President Eisenhower issued Executive order 10730,[18] which federalized the Arkansas National Guard and 1,000 soldiers from the US Army and ordered them to support the integration on September 23 of that year, after which they protected the African American students. The Arkansas National Guard would escort these nine black children inside the school as it became the students' daily routine that year.
Ideally though, this type of intervention should be exceedingly rare or reserved for the most egregious cases. Unfortunately, the present administration sees only the mechanism, and is motivated more by pettiness than any real commitment to Statecraft.
I thought he had freakishly large hands before, but that picture of him on the top with his hands in the air makes him look like the lawyer uncle from Always Sunny. He's built for free solo.
What a weird techno-optimist blog post, full of cherry-picked examples, with a twist of consumerism. Refreshing take in a sea of nihilism, but saying people are interested in Pokémon and N64 games again when it's mostly post-NFT "everything is an investment" mentality is cute in its naivety.
I think the key, and I’m basing this on people in real life, is that these are all different people, and the person toying with Linux desktop is not also buying an mp3 player and paper notebooks and that person isn’t the one who’s building a DVD library.
But what he’s onto is the thing that unifies all these weird little niches: they’re motivated by a bone deep annoyance with the most popular big tech offerings. None of these groups are all that big, but if you add them together there’s something here.
> is that these are all different people, and the person toying with Linux desktop is not also buying an mp3 player and paper notebooks and that person isn’t the one who’s building a DVD library.
Hey! That's (almost) me!
My desktop has been Linux for multiple decades.
I buy paper notebooks and write with pen. Always have.
mp3 player: You got me on that one. Although I did buy a Yoto (https://us.yotoplay.com/) and perhaps I should just use it as an mp3 player, but to be honest it's a poor player (no shuffle without app, etc). On the flip side, what I like about it is putting podcasts on cards. I can assign a card to any podcast feed and it will let me choose which episode to listen to.
DVD library: Nah - I used to have one and gave in to Plex. I don't know how many of my 20 year old DVDs will work now. Video files have more longevity. But someone did once post on HN how he had set up a physical card + NFC for his kids. A given card has a particular movie/TV show. They insert the card, and the TV plays just the movie on the card and turns off after. I'd definitely pay for that if I could buy it. I'm sure many parents would.
It was the "growth of Linux on the desktop" that broke my suspension of disbelief. If there was going to be any year where Linux made strong gains it should have been 2025 with the forced retirement of the "forever OS" Windows 10. But the needle barely moved at all.
The author paints a nice picture but there's a lot of wishful thinking and projection there.
> ... If there was going to be any year where Linux made strong gains it should have been 2025 with the forced retirement of the "forever OS" Windows 10. But the needle barely moved at all.
I beg to differ...I have a feeling the needle will indeed move, but it won't be a single big jolt. Overall, I think it will be oh so very slow over this and the next couple of years. Sure, some percentage of windows users will migrate over...but i think the bulk will keep using windows until the machine literally dies, and will ignore as many error messages and warning that microsoft displays to them. ...and that death of windows usage will take time, hence why i think it will take time...but i do indeed feel that the needle will move...its just that its only beginning now, but not yet ending. ;-) Time will tell of course.
Every time a new version of Windows drops there are legions of Windows users who say this is the final straw, they're keeping their old version until the updates stop then they'll use Linux. And every time that doesn't happen, they just keep going back to Microsoft like it's some sort of domestic violence situation. Their standards forever dropping, getting slow boiled like an apocryphal frog. I've seen this repeating over and over for the past 20 years at least.
At this point I don't even have sympathy for Windows users. They choose their lot.
And yet their standards still haven’t dropped low enough for Linux to be an acceptable replacement. I don’t think that’s a knock on the Windows user, but an indication that Linux desktop (and its replacement applications) still isn’t user-friendly enough for most people.
It can never be user-friendly enough if how windows does things is the yardstick. Windows users bemoan about how terrible Macs are all the time just because things are done differently, and they don't even try to figure it out. If it doesn't work like windows it's not good enough.
If you install a distro that uses KDE Plasma, you're already most of the way there. Not just because of it's design similarities to Windows but it's the desktop environment that's been getting the most financial support lately and has seen the most rapid improvement.
I personally prefer it at this point. Dolphin blows away explorer, window management is more slick and more flexible out of the box and it also happens to be deeply customizable.
The ASUS laptop I bought has a litany of issues: blue screens, audio dying, won't wake from sleep. MSFT, Nvidia and ASUS all blame each other.
I have a feeling modern Linux on this machine wouldn't be worse than what it shipped with. The days of fighting for 3 days with audio or printer drivers after an install are mostly behind us.
If Linux isn't uploading their FDE keys to Microsoft servers by default, Windows users will get scared and start crying. Needless to say, their tastes and desires should never be entertained.
I hope Linux is never suitable for windows users, who's tolerance for abuse is matched in magnitude only by their lack of taste. You have no idea just how over I am with the very premise of Linux evangelism. I will go as far as find reasons or even just flimsy pretexts to oppose and criticize any change to Linux calculated to win over Windows users, because being co-users with such people is plainly against my own interests. My lack of sympathy extends to full blow gatekeeping.
What is "Linux for normals" besides Android anyway? If that's the crap you actually want, use it. But no, that's not good enough, you want to bring the riff raff into real distros to stink up the place. I hope this never works.
This comment is harsh, but after many years of seeing HN threads about this topic I agree. You can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves. Linux is great, I love it, but I’ve stopped trying to convince people to use it.
I was ready to install Linux. I installed a new 1TB ssd in my laptop. I shrunk the windows volume using Windows' Disk Management.
Then I started reading the Arch wiki on this task. It forced me to learn things like MBR vs GPT. Then it said Windows by default makes an EFI partition way too small so I have to re-create a new partition by temporarily mounting EFI, saving the files, deleting the EFI partition, and recreating a new one.
This seems like a horribly complex task and I can envision about a million unwritten things that can go wrong that the answer would be "well duh, that's obvious if you had any experience with linux disk partitioning. I myself bricked a dozen PCs."
Deleting the EFI partition, if it goes wrong, by definition my system would be bricked until I could figure things out.
Also, everything must be typed into terminal exactly with no error and one chance. (If the typo causes the command to error, phew. if the typo causes something else to happen, beware)
How does someone browse this forum and get to the point of installing Arch without intimately understanding that Arch is infamously, abnormally difficult to install? Proving GPs point perhaps
If you had tried Ubuntu, KDE Neon, CachyOS, ElementsryOS, or really any other distro, this would not have been your experience.
Arch is a Manual experience designed for power users. It is not a good choice for even your average Linux user, let alone a first time Windows convert dipping their toes.
This is the issue though, Windows obscures the natural complexity of many things and picks defaults that serve to lock you into the ecosystem. You have expectations about how easy certain things should be that you are unwilling to let go of, and you dismiss the things that other systems make easy as irrelevant.
If Windows had never hidden the natural complexity of EFI, or chosen sane defaults, your experience would be better. It is absolutely insane to blame that on Arch.
After leaving that comment I had a moment of doubt that maybe I had gone too far, but no, you've reassured me. The windows user wants to stink up a power user distro to make it a fisher-price toy. Disgusting.
Valve's the main force here, AFAIK. I do think it'll make a big difference for home users. Home PC gaming, outside a handful of much-smaller niche use cases that're full of Windows-only software, was the only notable reason for a home user to have Windows at all, after the rise of Chromebooks and iPads to serve the rest of the home market. Valve's made ditching Windows for PC gaming viable for a high proportion of those remaining must-have-Windows users, which means Windows is hanging on to the home market by its fingernails. Just about all it has now is momentum, and that's fading.
I also don't think any of that matters much, because it's done nothing at all to the enterprise market, which is still full of Windows and other Microsoft stuff and that shows no sign of shifting.
I feel like the needle is moving, but maybe not because of the retirement of Windows 10, but other factors:
* Proton got really good and the Steam Deck is making inroads for Linux on the desktop. We are at the point were even gaming publications start to say: you could as well run Linux.
* The disintegration of the 80-years long transatlantic alliance. This really has a lot of people thinking about their big tech dependence on the east side of the ocean (and perhaps Canada?). Currently a lot of OwnCloud pilots are being started in European universities and other organizations. I see more and more people in my country buying Fairphones, the adventurous people even with /e/OS. There seems to be more interest in the Linux desktop.
The change is not very fast yet, but awareness is increasing and the ball starts rolling.
You have great points here! Not only is linux a destination for folks who currently and historically might have used Windows....but beyond linux and the operating system itself, there's a whole massive opportunity for other open source *software* that sits atop the operating system, and that is where migrations (away from Microsoft stuff, etc.) will also happen...maybe not all at the same time...but yeah, awareness has increased and i think will keep rolling forward - even if slowly. I really hope that migration to opeon source software happens too!
As an American I'm super disgusted with the current administration and the awful things they are doing...but I'm also a big supporter of open source and an advocate of every group's sovereignty....so if increased digital sovereignty for many nations (and my good friends all over the world), plus more software freedoms for everyone globally is one of the unexpected manifestations...then that's wonderful, at least something good comes out of the current chaos! As Europe, Canada, other nations start pilots for using their own instances of open source software (like Owncloud,etc.), i welcome that and wish them all the best!!!
I really want to switch from Windows to Linux but it's not an easy transition.
For one, I am in a season of heavy workload and little free time. So I need to wait for my next period of reduced workload.
Second, I am not desperate for a new PC yet and it's hard to justify spending the money at this time.
Roughly my plan is to get a new PC this summer and start with a dual boot approach. So at first it will be more like going from 100% Windows to 80% Linux 20% Windows or something. Over time as circumstances afford maybe I can do away with windows altogether.
Just one data point - I am someone who has been using windows for over 30 years but Microsoft pissed me off so much in 2025 that I have a committed to switching even if it takes me years.
> it should have been 2025 with the forced retirement of the "forever OS" Windows 10.
Still too soon, no? Windows 10 continues to work just fine. The layman using it doesn't really care — and probably doesn't even realize — that it isn't supported anymore. Only when they start to have trouble will they start to care. Eventually a time will come when they want to use some new software that won't work in it, or what have you. When that time comes, that will be the true test.
I'm in a few Linux communities and they have grown somewhat over the last couple years. There's definitely been a swell of users moving over, if not a wave.
I don't even think it's some sort of nostalgia for many. It's some sort of lifestyle they envision themselves of having by buying certain products, these older products are just more 'unique' nowadays.
I think the distraction problem is more fundamental than that. Especially for children growing up now with a very capable smartphone who will experience genuine anxiety being separated from it.
Nostalgia is perhaps a catalyst, but I'm convinced there is something more there.
Individual investors can buy whatever they want. The idea is to be competitive with the US, so that indices like MSCI World are more than just thinly-veiled S&P500 indices.
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