I used to work in a public institution and I can’t fathom how this could be done until 2027. There’s just so much cruft hinging on .doc and .docx files. Maybe for entirely new processes if software enforces this.

Tried Manjaro and Opensuse for a presentation machine lately: issues over issues, that just shouldn’t exist on new installation (problems with USB disks, input). Came back to Debian asap because Debian, weirdly, "just works ™ now.

Actually, if Linux/BSD/… doesn’t work the way I want it to, I can always tweak it. Win or Mac? Tough luck. So Linux’s usability is always there, whereas the proprietary OS’s quickly hits a very hard, annoying wall.

Soo, booting your computer from someone else’s computer?

I mean we’ve had thin clients and PXE for ages?

DDG has also gotten much worse since the introduction of AI features.

It used to be somewhat better: Corel Linux and Creative apps existed…

Thank you for the info! Otherwise I would have missed the deal. The affinity suite is the best thing since Photoshop 5.0

2008 ultimate

I’m still consulting my venerable encyclopaedia britannica dvd until this day. It works great under wine and actually does not work under a current version of windows anymore.

It’s actually worse! Last jan Microsoft bricked the entire fleet of laptops in my company with a borked generic driver update. It overwrote the sd reader’s vendor driver blocking all storage access from working whatsoever. From one week to another more or less all devices refused to boot. They basically killed our entire company for half a week, until IT could walk people through efi-disabling the sd reader in every laptop (recent industrial models mind you) just because windows had pulled in the wrong driver. So… no - it’s not great at all with automatic driver installation in windows …

Emacs ist doch die Kirche des heiligen Ignutius

Thanks I might try that. Unfortunately I can’t mount everything at boot, because that would take forever with some slow NAS around the network.

Yeah, though I presume I’d need to set xdg values so mounted shares through nautilus will show up in programs/interfaces. I’ll look into it, thanks.

How on earth can people stand using Windows full time? Everything I’m on a Microsoft product I feel claustrophobic!

Genau so ist es! Und was brauchen wir für eine funktionierende Infrastruktur? Genau: Arbeitskräfte! Und woher bekommen wir die? In meiner Branche gehen in den kommenden zehn Jahren 3x mehr Menschen in den Ruhestand als demografisch nachkommen. Ohne Einwanderung sind wir doch am ****$&#@

For me the direct opposite is true. About two years ago Google stopped giving me any accurate results, feeding me a bunch of semi-related garbage instead. DuckDuckGo feels like the Google of old: results that actually (literally) contain the terms of the query and not much else. I’d hate using the internet without it.

Honestly all this feels like the railway’s Dieselization 100yrs ago. When the end of steam powered engines was drawing near, coal hauling railroads and Baldwin Locomotive in the U.S. tried all kinds of whacky and hilariously inefficient engine designs, just to keep the ol’ ways alive… none of these worked out - everyone who stuck to it lost hugely. Viz. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_and_Ohio_class_M-1

Hegel

I think a lot comes down to preinstalled SW on phones (Chrome/Safari) and the enterprise world. My rather large employer just switched from FF preinstalled to Edge for all work devices since it alreadz comes with Windows.

Maybe Firefox is missing a really compelling enterprise offering for Desktops? Everybody less savvy is on mobile anyways, which is dominated by the Duopoly Apple/Google.

Actually in my country DuckDuckGo is the only reliable search engine left. Google started giving me a bunch of bogus results for very specific queries a couple of years ago. Sad that FF depends so much on Ma’Google.