I’m still using Windows 10 on my personal work laptop, and I’ve got to say that what you’ve described sounds pretty appealing. Windows 10 with most of the crapware removed, and extended support. That sounds like a good deal…

But on the flip side, I think it’s a bad idea to get an OS from a piracy site. Maybe it’s all genuine and tickety-boo, but being a reputable 3rd party source is a fairly high bar. I certainly wouldn’t trust a site I’ve never heard of to give me a legitimate copy of a better-than-standard version of Windows. Their offer to verify their own files is less than convincing. I think I’d need to be an active part of the scene to be able to trust something like that - because it certainly smells like an easy way to get back-doored.

Huh. Based on your screw-you, got-mine attitude, I did guess you were American. But I guess selfishness exists pretty much everywhere.

Cool. Since you believe they’ll figure it out, I guess that means you don’t have to spam.

I’ve never owned any Apple product whatsoever - and yet I’m in a similar position to you. Their standings have risen in my eyes simply by keeping their badness level relatively stable while Microsoft and Google rapidly get worse.

Fair enough. Thanks for the additional context.

So you got this survey in an email. Was the link intended to be shared like this? Can I find the survey link somewhere on Mozilla’s own websites?

I guess I’m not totally convinced that this is an official Mozilla survey, or even if it is - I’m not sure who their target survey audience is.

As in “we are the knights who say jif”

I thought it was a old animated image file type.

That does sound pretty bad. I guess it really highlights the power of a monopoly. Businesses may rely on each other, but if one relies more, then they pay all costs due to necessity while the other pays nothing because they can easily outlast the pain.

Unless I’ve misunderstood the law, it doesn’t hurt small engines, because small search engines don’t have to pay.

No quantity of counter-content can overcome the person who controls what posts are actually seen by other users. Staying on X can never lead to any kind of balance. Staying there only serves to prop-up the false sense of legitimacy.

Chrome is already spyware on its own. That’s basically the reason Chrome exists.

Is Brave the one with the built-in crypto scheme and its own ads?

Yeah, and although it will be painful for Mozilla in the short term - it would be a good outcome. It was always bad that Mozilla’s main source of funding was from their most powerful competitor. It’s an obvious conflict of interest. And obvious way to skew decision making. … But that money is just so addictive.

There will be some pretty severe withdrawal symptoms if the money gets taken away, but everyone will be healthier in the long run… unless the overpaid CEO continues to suck in all the remaining money and leaves nothing for the people actually doing the work. That would be bad. In that case, if the corporate structure chokes the company to death, I suppose we’d be hoping for Ladybird, or something like it to take Firefox’s place.

I mean yeah, subscription services are shitty, but what’s wrong with lifetime purchases?

This thread is about subscriptions. So I’d assume that when people talk about ‘rent seeking companies’ etc, they are referring to subscription payments rather than lifetime purchases.

By default there is a shortcut to the terminal shortcut on task bar. From memory it is one of three default shortcuts. (File browser, Terminal, Firefox.) You can also find it by pressing the menu button (the ‘start menu’). From there the terminal has a prominent special position where it is always accessible. And if you don’t notice it there, you can always start typing to search for it - as with any other installed app. I find that if I type ‘t’, then “Terminal” is the top result; and obviously I can kept typing to eliminate the other results if I want.

So if your difficulty in finding the terminal is your main complaint about about Mint… I’m not sure what to tell you. Do you want it to auto-launch or something?

Mastodon isn’t a person. So I don’t know who you are talking about when you say ‘mastodon was attacking people’. I certainly didn’t see anything like that. Perhaps you have an example link for context?

I’d say mastodon is a better choice, mostly so that you’re not beholden to yet another profit-focused tech corporation. I’m sure Bluesky is fine right now, but once they have their userbase they will shift to monetization - and you may regret letting yourself become entrenched in the world they control. They’re not doing it for your benefit.

That said, I’ve come to understand that a lot of people kind of like having their content feed controlled by others. When they only see what they ask for, they get bored. So I’m expecting Bluesky to always be bigger than Mastodon.

And this is why it is ludicrous to believe that ultra-rich people earn their fortune with hard work or good ideas. Being rich generates its own money. Being poor is expensive. There should be no billionaires, for any reason. Such concentrated wealth is very bad.

While I disagree that “billions is beyond being halved”, there is some truth to the idea that numbers can get so big that halving doesn’t make much difference. That seems very very counter-intuitive, so I’ll try to briefly explain.

Consider (10^10 + 2). That’s 10000000000+2. I think it’s fair to say that the +2 doesn’t make a lot of difference. It’s still approximately 10^10.

So then, consider 10^(10^10)×100. That’s a huge number, too big to type here, then multiplied by 100. So the result is 100 times bigger than the huge number. But… writing it down we see this:

10^(10^10)×100 = 10^(10^10+2) ≈ 10^(10^10).

So although ×100 does make it one hundred times bigger… that just doesn’t really make a lot of difference to a number as big as that one. As numbers get bigger and bigger, they start to take on properties a bit like ‘infinity’. Addition stops being important, then multiplication, then for even bigger numbers exponentiation doesn’t huge much of an impact either.

Mathematically, I think this is really cool and interesting. But I don’t think 1 billion is that big. 10^9 is big enough that +2 doesn’t matter much, but not so big that ×2 doesn’t matter.

[edit] (I’m struggling to get the nested powers to look right… So hopefully my meaning is clear enough anyway.)