MudMan

You can’t hear it from there, but I am screaming in non-native English speaker.

Or, to put it another way, every single song you know released before 1995.

For reference on how this is different (and how it’s not) to previous instances, here’s mainstream-AF PC World magazine in February 2020:

Windows 7 was understandable before; now it’s a liability. With no security updates and a still-vast market share, Microsoft’s operating system will be a big, juicy target for hackers.

We recommend migrating to Windows 10 if you’re able to, and have a guide explaining your Windows 10 upgrade options (go.pcworld.com/10up) . If you perform only basic tasks on your PC—email, web surfing, and documents—then Linux is a viable, user-friendly option these days. We’ve got a Linux beginner’s guide (go. pcworld.com/lnxg), too, and better yet you can try it for free with no risk to your main Windows 7 installation.

You can probably still upgrade to Windows 10 for free (see page 103), too.

I don’t have APC’s issue on hand, but if anybody wants to share how that compares, do go ahead.

For some additional reference: https://vivaldi.com/blog/replace-windows-7-with-linux/ https://www.ghacks.net/2020/01/14/windows-7-support-ends-today-here-are-your-options/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-and-how-to-replace-windows-7-with-linux-mint/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFHBBN0CqXk

Short term history is so fun and so weird.

Yep. Definitely falls into this category. The roguelite stuff is a fun quirk, and I do enjoy unraveling the steps metagame more than I enjoy the “find a clue in a piece of paper and remember it for the next run” or the “doesn’t look like a puzzle but it is” bits.

Guys, I’ve been around a while. You’re probably not gonna recommend the game I accidentally missed that changes my mind.

Oooh, Outer Wilds. Did a couple of puzzles, I think I got around the loop once or twice, bounced right off.

I swear, I don’t know what it is. The sense of wonder just isn’t there. Maybe I’m too aware that all the pieces are put in by the designers and that withholding some pieces doesn’t inherently make the puzzle more interesting or even harder. I guess I find myself tapping my foot playing first person Lunar Lander while I wait for the thing to get around to the real game while I do rolling ball puzzles or whatnot.

Hah. Wasn’t into the “multimedia” era as much, either.

But still, I’d say context is important in that distinction. Old point and click was a AAA genre, through and through. Big, cinematic visuals and storytelling were at the core of that.

I’m not saying that’s better or that I like it more. In fact, I’d say I’m less into that kind of thing these days. But it was a different moment in time to get hold of one of those compared to an indie release overcomplicating the self-revealing world concept from Myst.

Why I haven’t been into that idea since all the way back in Myst is harder to parse for me. Maybe I’m just less metatextually enamoured with the idea of self-revealing games as a flourish than I am about having the reveal be a fully functional narrative? As I said above I adore Obra Dinn. There’s a lot of the same connective tissue there, but maybe I’m just more in touch with it when it’s a medium for a good, old-timey gothic horror story than when it’s this abstract world-in-code thing.

No, I don’t think so. I love puzzles. Hard puzzles, even. I really, really like Return of the Obra Dinn, I spent the 90s fawning over point and click adventures. I have zero problems blasting through the Portal games and a bunch of their derivatives.

For some reason it’s specifically this setup of “figure out the rules of the world and peel off the layers of the game” thing that misses me. I don’t know what to tell you there.

I wanted to like it, couldn’t really get into it.

I see what it’s going for, it’s just… not my thing. It never clikced with me moment to moment and the self-congratulatory aren’t-we-smart information discovery stuff just doesn’t work for me in most cases (this applies to Fez and The Witness, too).

I’m not mad that people do like it, though. There’s nothing in there I find… objectionable, or poorly designed. I just didn’t get into it and that’s alright.

I mean, even without FOSS zealotry there are plenty of Android derivatives without Google services in them on weird Chinese emulation handhelds and SBCs and the like. Never mind fricking Huawei, at least until last year, and depending on how much you think their newer one counts as not-Android.

Nah, it’s the dedicated Nvidia GPU. Gaming PCs with those come with 250-300W power supplies these days. I was using that one specifically for transcoding and to try to self host AI models for a voice assistant, so it did go all in under load. If anything I’m mildly disappointed. The power brick is 100W, I would have expected higher power limits. I guess they saved the rest for the display and the USB ports.

Not my experience. I’ve used a bunch of stuff, and I can tell you a RasPi is what, 10W under load and 4 idling? A repurposed laptop (with a dedicated GPU but screen off) was 11W idling and 45W under load, and a repurposed desktop was about 40W idling and 120W under load.

You maaaay be able to find some laptop with an efficient CPU and iGPU that gets into the realm of a RasPi, and I guess the “identical storage” qualifier helps if you’re adding a bunch of heavy storage to the Pi to bring total consumption up and lower the percentage gap, but my real world, real time measurements don’t quite match that.

That said, if you already have one of those things and not the other the power consumption difference is fairly small in absolute numbers. You may save more money by buying a slighlty better lightbulb for your living room lamp. Definitely recycle whatever you have lying around that will still do the job.

The time I point people at is the early Ubuntu drops when Linux was getting easy to intall, computers were simple to build and magazines would sometimes just pop up in stores with a Linux install CD in the cover. That’s the time I remember more normies suddenly gaining awareness of Linux as an option.

But yeah, I don’t have a problem with any of the stuff you said.

It’s just all unrelated to Windows 10 end of support.

Steam OS and Bazzite are way more relevant than it. Because they fix problems for a subset of users who are mainly focused on gaming.

They don’t do it fully, and not for all users, but yeah, that stuff will move Linux from 1.5% of the Steam survey to 3-5% eventually. That WILL move the needle to some extent.

Now if you did that for Adobe users, video editors, graphic designers, people who HAVE to use Microsoft Office, people who only play Fortnite, people with zero capacity to troubleshoot, people who rely on commercial software with no Linux ports in general, people who have Nvidia cards and want to use Game Mode, people who use other specialized hardware that isn’t currently well supported…

…those things will move the needle.

“My ancient copy of Windows 10 I use as a Chromebook is no longer getting security patches” is, by itself, less of an event than any of those. That’s my entire point.

I don’t need to wonder. I get “so upset” because I hang out here a bunch and it’s boring and repetitive to see the same posts every single day. Especially when they’re kinda weird, wrong and self-defeating.

I’m also not super inclined to letting the Linux/OSS community play the “you’re mad at people being wrong on the Internet” card. Holy crap, is this place not the place to do that with any self-righteousness or moral high ground. In a conversation about lack of self-awareness that may be the biggest instance yet.

It doesn’t have a big impact on anybody. Which is the point. The friction IS the impact.

The hype drives attention if you’re targeting the people that don’t already know. That’s not what’s happening, regardless of your impromptu Instagram IT advice anecdotal experience.

Hype driving attention also doesn’t work if the product you’re hyping doesn’t do the thing it needs to do the way the people you’re marketing it at need it to.

Acknowledging either of those things is not negativity or pessimism. If we’re talking about pushing for open source software as a community then denying or ignoring the practical issues is not helpful. OSS isn’t a religion where you proselitize, facts be damned. It’s meant to be a project for an alternative way of handling software development. That video I linked is not an attack, or a bummer, it’s a hopeful sign that contributors and developers often have more clarity on the situation and the work left to do than the user-level advocates and activist forum posters.

It is fricking not, though, that’s my point.

I have heard exactly zero normies talk about this. Nobody cares. Just like nobody cared when Windows 7 ended support. People just… kept using it. Today Windows 7 is as high up the Steam hardware survey as Linux Mint.

Windows 10 doesn’t shut down in October, it just… stops receiving security patches for free. Anybody clueless enough to not have migrated or stuck there for hardware reasons either already mitigated the issue or does not care. This is Linux’s Y2K moment. Everybody is expecting this big shift to be a moment and it’s really not going to be.

So I’m getting exhausted for nothing, which just makes it more annoying. Not a single normie space is even thinking about this. This is 100% Linux users talking to other Linux users about this big game-changing moment that’s never gonna happen. The EoL day will come, a couple of tech outlets will run a piece saying “hey, MS ends Windows 10 official support” and maybe a listicle of things to do (“1. Move to Win11, 2. Pay Windows for patches 3. Move to another OS”)…

…and nothing will happen.

We’ll all be here and we’ll all quietly stop talking about it and all this friction generated by this delusional hype will just fizzle out.

At the start of the process I was mildly excited, not about the influx of Windows 10 users, which was obviously not going to be a thing, but about maybe the hype leading to Linux development spaces focusing on long overdue work to ease that transition in time for the deadline. That didn’t really happen, so now we’re all just advertising this weird narrative to each other multiple times a day.

The quiet acknowledgement that… well, yeah, it won’t happen, but don’t break kayfabe just in case there’s a Windows guy looking, just reinforces that point. I would much rather have spent all this energy addressing WHY it won’t happen, or how to address the work that is needed to make it happen. I’d argue THAT is what a “fan and user of FOSS” should be pushing the community to do. In that, you know, it may actually work.

Hah. I fear you and I are not the same, but you and the trumpeters may be equally disappointed.

I’ve said it before, but MAN am I excited to get to Windows 10 end of support so the old people and professionals stuck with highly specific hardware can just keep using their Windows 10 and the Linux community finally moves on from this stuff.

I am exhausted of these threads. Maybe we do a two week nostalgia revival when their paid commercial support ends again, but for now, can we make a deal right here to absolutely stop this crap by the end of the year when the needle moves exactly zero percent? Pretty please?

Which part?

For closed source repositories of software that is currently available it’s just a matter of having them included by default and actively prompting them on app managers as opposed to defaulting to hiding anything that isn’t open source by default. Different distros come closer or further from this in the first place.

I imagine if you were going to go out of your way a bit further you’d restructure some of your splash pages and manager layouts to promote those based on popularity out of the gate.

There’s an argument for a next step to be pre-packaging windows apps that can work under Wine directly in a package manager, but that’s a bigger project and I genuinely don’t think Wine is ready for that yet. Linux probably needs a better translation layer that works more reliably and comprehensively before that’s an option. But hey, somebody should get on all of that, too.

True story, OneDrive is the one piece of Microsoft software where I always accept any prompts to give feedback or fill surveys.

My feedback is always the same: “This is the piece of software that has cost me the most money and work hours over the years”

This is an accurate assessment.

Oh, I didn’t mean to come across like that, I’m just saying you don’t sound like the archetypal Windows user and even if you were you’d be in a tiny minority.

Which, yeah, tracks with what you’re saying about both your use case and your profile. You sure don’t sound like you’re using your PC as the average end user does. The average user has not tried Linux, doesn’t have those applications in mind, certainly has no set opinion on dual booting or UEFI. You ARE a bit of a unicorn there. As am I, I suppose, although I’m bouncing back and forth, not maining Linux, and not because I’m particularly dissatisfied with Win 11 specifically.

You are pretty archetypal on the OneDrive thing. Everybody has had an annoying experience with One Drive recently. I don’t know that there are any other experiences to be had with OneDrive at all, to be honest.

Cool, mr. Unicorn. You are a small minority of a small minority, though. I do have lots of questions about whether you would have upgraded to 11 given the chance, or about when you intend to get a new PC, and whether you’d switch to Win 11 then, or about why you didn’t try the workarounds for the compatibility issues, or why you aren’t trying the options to extend the support on Windows 10, or whether the spyware thing would have been enough and so whether you’d have switched regardless. Because you sure sound like a guy who would have tried Linux before. “Why I am on Linux on my primary desktop computer” is… very specific wording.

But taking you at your word you’re still 2% of 2%. Of 2%, given that you’re on Lemmy. Except you seem to be on programming.dev, so… of 2%?