WashedOver

Today after reading this I’m sure I’m taking crazy pills…

I’ve been a user since Dos 5.0 and Windows 3.0.

Today I mostly use Linux Mint on my dual boot laptops and need to convert my main PC over to dual boot Mint next. I rarely boot into windows at home and if it wasn’t for proprietary software at work running only on Windows I would have been done sooner.

I was mostly able to go from XP to 7 and avoided Vista and 8 altogether. Windows 10 was sort of ok with the ability to go back to a Windows 7 control panel when needed but it always felt half baked and unfinished to me.

I’ve just not been interested in 11 at all and the tidbits I’m hearing about Co-pilot reminds me of not only Clipit but the forcing of IE/ Edge constantly on user’s especially after every larger update but to mention resetting the default PDF reader to edge. In a work environment of 20 plus shop PC’s I was managing for low tech skill employees it was a pain in the ass chasing down the changes that were not made on my behalf.

What will be the Co-pilot’s flavor of this new round of BS from Microsoft? The forcing of a cloud account is another headache I don’t want to deal with either.

I will say Mint just mostly does what I need for my web browsing and general productivity needs without the constant game of trying to keep it the way I want it versus what MS wants for me with every update.

I’m at the stage of get off my lawn and screaming at a cloud in the sky next. That cloud is MS these days when adding in the annoyances of their Android keyboard *Swiftkey injecting Co-pilot and Bing into my searches. I’ve not played in Office 365 for a bit now but I can only imagine it’s just as bad now.

I’ve been becoming irritated lately with search in other apps being taken over by their flavor of AI. I use the Microsoft Swift keyboard on my phone and it’s now trying to inject their AI search results over my Google searches in Firefox and the results take me to Bing.

Then today I was watching a video on Instagram and the screen went off. I lost of the video as the app refreshed when I turned on the screen again. I tried to search for it but now IG search has been turned into a Meta AI search. It offers AI answers instead of the videos I was looking and it seems like it’s the only option.

WTF are they messing up search across the platforms? Get off my lawn!

I’m impressed. It speaks to the strength of the Apple brand. Meta should benefit if this becomes the next thing despite the differences.

Sure seems like a great way to avoid severance in those places it’s required.

Amazing how the companies that “care about employees” don’t care so much these days…

That’s pretty cool.

It’s been awhile since I last used a iPhone 13 Pro Max for work but I do recall the constant announcements there with previous models when Apple would announce yet another great “new” feature for iPhone that Android users already had for a year or two at that stage.

Samsung also made some good media campaigns on the announcements and used the lineups for new iPhones fairly well in their advertising.

I will say I thought the iPhone 13 camera was pretty goof, the battery life was too, and within the Apple walled garden the texting of videos was nice. The overall user experience for me wasn’t a good fit. I like to browse the web without ads and watch videos without them too. Some of that can be done with a iPhone but it’s clunky and the web browsers are just safari.

There’s other customizable options I prefer that I can do with Android that isn’t an option yet for Apple but I do know they will be able to at some stage.

Overall the whole apple vs android has been great for consumers. If it wasn’t for the competition between Apple and the Android products neither group would be as far along.

I recall the early days of PC chat services like ICQ, MSN, AOL and the clients like Pigeon and Trillian to try to have them all in one place. It didn’t always seem to work the best for long.

It’s too bad BBM took way too long to open up to others beyond BB devices. They had some of my favorite emojis and they had for a time a big user base that they could have kept in their services.

I recall some pretty bold statements being made that Apple couldn’t stop this reverse engineering from working ever in the early days of tech reporting on this.

Even as a Android user I thought this was pretty bold claims to make as this whole walled garden is a big part of the Apple brand and they will need to protect this as they really don’t have leading software inovation and they are no longer ahead on tech advances or specs that made the first couple of iPhones ground breaking.

Since they are a couple to a few years behind the Android features and specs, they need to protect the special brand identity above all else so I expected them to tweak things to break anything they don’t want to have happen to their systems.

I can’t blame them at all from a business prospective. While I don’t like or enjoy their products, they had built a great brand that sells itself for those that “want to be different” but actually the same as all of their friends.

I feel like an outsider on these debates. I totally agree we should be able to own forever.

In my case I find there is so much new TV and movies I rarely go back to re-watch shows or movies so owning them isn’t on my radar. It’s a challenge just to watch a whole series I find.

I’m wondering how often do people beyond kids re-watch movies and TV shows? Kids seem to be able to rewatch the same movies several times a day…

Or you melt down the pot which I’ve done by not paying attention to the pot that boiled dried. I couldn’t figure out what this metal stuff coming out of the bottom of the pot was for a moment.

Yes I’ve noticed this on my devices now for awhile. I gave up and downloaded a separate app instead.

If I understand this correctly in my use case Assistant will get worse in my car with a aftermarket head unit. The mic isn’t that great on the radio and I’ve had better luck using the handset mic instead.

I have a couple of phones in use. 1 never answers which is fine as I have a display too, but the other answers every time I can do that if you unlock your device first.

For me coming from the Westcoast with lots of rain at sea level the lack of drain fields around the houses in the Prairies was a similar moment for me when I was looking at homes for a move many years ago. Their drain spouts just run out into the yard above the ground. It was a what the heck is going on here?

Their basements are also fully enclosed under ground. On the coast we require a secondary drain field just for the down spouts and the basements are only halfway in the ground so it was very strange to me.

“job creation” they would say as they throw their receipt on the ground before leaving…

Kind of reframes the whole being a vegetarian thing…

The various scam phone calls that threaten jail time due to unpaid tax bills from the IRS (US) and CRA (Canada) is still thing.

It’s humorous when the Chinese/Indian call centers where they originate from mix up the countries when threatening people with the RCMP is coming to arrest an American or the IRS is coming for a Canadian.

However we are expecting these boomers that copy and paste status updates limiting Facebook rights use of their account photos and info at midnight over and over again to navigate these scams on their own.

To be fair much of the customer support for large companies have been offloaded to India and the Philippines so that’s one less barrier to overcome in triggering the BS detector of the not so savvy among us.

The various scam phone calls that threaten jail time due to unpaid tax bills from the IRS (US) and CRA (Canada) is still thing.

It’s humorous when the Chinese/Indian call centers where they originate from mix up the countries when threatening people with the RCMP is coming to arrest an American or the IRS is coming for a Canadian.

However we are expecting these boomers that copy and paste status updates limiting Facebook rights use of their account photos and info at midnight over and over again to navigate these scams on their own.

To be fair much of the customer support for large companies have been offloaded to India and the Philippines so that’s one less barrier to overcome in triggering the BS detector of the not so savvy among us.

Most here will recommend Linux Mint and it’s what I use now after trying many different versions over the years. There’s a simplicity to Mint that just works especially well for those just surfing and doing office tasks. I’ve given away old work laptops with just mint installed as most people just need a web browser and it works great for that.

MS office can be used in your web browser or you can switch to Libre Office which should open most of your office files.

If you have a old laptop or computer I recommend trying to install Mint there first to try it out. It’s pretty easy to start out there first before trying dual boot. You might be surprised at how quick your older laptop works with Mint in the process.

I use dual boot on my machines but most of the use these days is to get to a web browser so I find I rarely boot into windows now.

You will find Firefox is the default web browser but you can add Chrome to Mint if that’s your browser of choice.

Many will say what about the privacy issues with Chrome but many still use it. I’ve switched back to Firefox myself and I like it better for my Android phone.

Good luck on your journey!

I recall at one point Windows 10 was going to be the last version of the OS and they would just maintain that. I’m wondering if they said that to get the last of the Windows 7 and XP users to finally move to 10?