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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2896 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is it possible to run Windows 11 without its inherent spyware and your personal data being vacuumed up by MS (or other big tech they might let in or share data with)?

I've never been too keen on 'upgrading', because 10 has been pretty good to me, and 11 introduces few new things, other than a new start menu that most nerds hated, and some added latency, I think. And the TPM requirement that comes with some issues on some mainboards.

But the Win 10 support cycle is coming to an end in half a year. And 11 does offer better window management, for multi display users, so I've heard. 10 does tend to mess with sizes and positions when the display has been switched away from or turned off. And 11 has auto-HDR so that you don't have to remember to go into display settings and enable HDR before launching a game that has HDR...? That's about all I can think of that I want.

Edit: Found this: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

It's time to switch to Linux. There were some good threads on here recently.

I use Linux and fucking hate it. There's no clear instructions on how to do anything. I have hardware encoding and decoding working perfectly... Except in any chromium-based browser, and no amount of troubleshooting has gotten me any closer to figuring it out. Or anyone else on the Internet judging by Google results.

It's not even clear to me how to go about finding out how to find things out with Linux. Programs end up in random folders that can only be accessed through the terminal, unless it manages to make it into the macOS ripoff start menu which there's no button to add stuff to manually.
I was using dosbox to play moo2 the other day and CD-ing into the correct directory like it's 1989 was easier than figuring out how Linux wants you to load programs from a tar.gzb.wtf file

And oh god the audio drivers. Most of my restarts are to fix audio glitches or (yesterday) videos just refusing to play after any Bluetooth device had been connected.

Yeah, it's still not perfect unfortunately. One upside of the impending paperclippening is that the chatbots have ingested everything ever written about how to solve Linux problems. If you haven't tried it yet, I'd recommend prompting an LLM to act like a condescending neckbeard expert Linux user and friendly troubleshooter, with permission to ask you for further info or to ask you to run commands, and see if you can get it to narrow down your problem.

I actually tried that with chatgpt last night, and it did a decent job of working me through all the stuff I'd already wasted hours figuring out. Didn't solve the chromium issue, but at least went faster than using Google.

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