Every hardware is beautiful from every angle.

I thought so too, but about a year ago or so this same question popped up, and some of the comments were really eye opening.

The essence of it was something like this: if you use the upvote/downvote buttons as agree/disagree, then you’re contributing to turning this platform into an echo chamber, which is the particular thing that makes social media such a shitty place.

You should use this feature on posts to indicate if it’s relevant to the community’s rules or not, meets the community’s guidelines or not, contains factual, useful information or not.

On comments, you should use it to indicate if it’s relevant to the topic or not, valid argument to what they’re replying to or not, regardless of your own opinion.

A great example someone commented was, when he explained they were browsing lemmy together with his girlfriend, they had a great laugh at a comment, and then he promptly downvoted it, to her surprise. And it’s because, even though the comment was fantastic, it was off topic, it wasn’t useful for the actual conversation.

Oh, and actually, there was a thing, even on Reddit - believe it or not - which acted as upvote/downvote guidelines, describing how you should use those buttons.

I’ll try to link the original post here if I find it.

Edit: Here’s the comment I was referring to on the original post: https://lemmy.world/comment/5219066

Firefox because it works perfectly for me, and it’s customizable with extensions.

I guess, that’s not the biggest issue. Everyone has that, who’s sorting their trash. The real annoying part (at least for me) is taking the effort to physically take the trash apart. For example removing cellotape from cardboard, removing metal clips from cardboard, washing food remains from containers, removing paper labels from cans, etc. It takes time, and sometimes it’s not even easy to do.

I go to great lengths to do all that, but when it turns out to be impossible, I just throw it in the general waste and I don’t care.

Here’s a mixture of applications, some for Linux, some for Android, some for both. And some of them might work on other platforms as well, but I’m not sure.

Borg for making backups. For the first glance it could look overwhelming, but after reading through the quick start guide, it’s really easy to use.

VeraCrypt for encryption of removable media.

Megalodon as a Mastodon client.

Voyager as a Lemmy client. It has a very weird and unintuitive UI, but there are no ads and the content is well readable, well presented.

OsmAnd for offline navigation. It’s especially great for cycling and hiking, as even the most insignificant trails are on the map. It isn’t free, but it’s cheap.

Thunderbird for emails. Until recently I just used the online interface for my emails, but ever since I got a Proton subscription and multiple aliases with it, I started to use Thunderbird so I can see everything in one place, and also it has advanced filtering capabilities (the best of any email client I’ve ever used).

Proton Calendar, just for the sake of not to use Google.

Firefox with uBlock Origin. These two together is the bare minimum nowadays if you are thinking about browsing the internet.

VS Code for smaller stuff. Not gonna list my extensions here, but there are a few less known ones that I always install.

Zed is in early development, but if it gets as mature as VS Code, I’ll consider using this instead.

JetBrains IDEs for software development. It makes me cry every year when I spend a buttload of money on renewing my license, but for me it’s worth it. No other IDE ever made it so easy for me to set up and work with projects.

Dia for UML or database schema diagrams, and bunch of others. Sadly it’s a bit outdated, but it’s simple and easy to use.

I guess, it depends on the dictatorship. For example if it’s the one being formed in the US currently, here are some ideas: https://theintercept.com/2024/11/14/trump-agenda-organize-protest-movement/

Ever since I got my own place, I’m significantly less stressed. So much, that my health condition pretty much got back to normal after living with a colon disease (AND my mom) for a long time.

Folks, do not underestimate the power of stress.

The good things:

• It really is an advantage over normal USB, that I don’t have to trun the plug three times while trying to connect it, as it can be plugged in either way.
• I find the extra protection also cool, so in case you accidentally try to plug in something you are not supposed to, it just simply won’t work instead of, I don’t know, supplying too high voltage or something.

So far it caused a lot of headaches though:

• Way too often I found myself in a situation, where I couldn’t use some devices, because I didn’t have the necessary adapter. This issue should be temporary though, so I’m not complaining.
• Some cables are not compatible with some devices, and it can be really confusing. Before I knew this, I was certain that a monitor and a laptop of mine weren’t compatible for a long time, until someday I read about this and tried it again with a different cable.
• In most cases this is not an issue, but rarely I find that the USB type-c plug is not as robust as a micro USB for example. On my girlfriend’s Samsung S8 it always slipped out, so the contact was terrible, while a micro USB plug does have some clamps to properly attach. Again, in most cases the type-c plug is clicking in properly, so it’s not an acute problem.

No need to tell me all this; I’ve been using Linux for more than 15 years and I don’t freakin’ care what’s happening to Windows.

Now either you haven’t read properly what I said, or my wording was not clear - apologies in the latter case. Either way, I’ll try to explain what I meant.

1. It’s pointless for Microsoft to make Recall (or anything) unremovable, since someone will find a solution to it pretty quickly. So those who use Windows, most likely will still have the option to continue to use it without Recall, in my opinion.
2. I also highly recommend everyone to just use a usable operating system instead.
3. Telling the average user to use a better operating system is one thing. That’s fairly doable nowadays, I don’t see basically any obstacle to that, and I wouldn’t even mention it, because you just tell them the facts, and the smarter ones will listen and think it through, the rest of them will do whatever they want, it’s their problem. What I find very problematic, is industrial environments. There are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of workstations, terminal computers, controllers in companies of varying sizes, where it’s absolutely not cost efficient to switch from Windows to something else (well, at least not until they get into their first data breach attributed to Recall or other shady Microsoft services). They have highly specialized tools complete with documentation and support and everything made for the one specific platform they are operating on, and it’s certainly not easy to change that, especially without halting production. If there’s one IT advice I could give to those companies, it would be to start creating a strategic plan to drop their Microsoft dependencies, and then execute their plan. It would take probably years, but they gotta start doing it like ASAP. And along the way, while porting their toolchains, they could as well do it the smart way: make it highly portable, so whatever platform they switch to, wouldn’t be the only option. Should that platform go south just like Windows did, they’d have the option to switch again to something else, just much easier this time.
4. According to my experience, customization tools to remove bloat (including Recall) are not permissible in work environments, and spyware (such as Recall) are not (supposed to be) tolerated either. If this doesn’t make them switch to a better platform, nothing will.

Just because Microsoft makes Recall “unremovable”, doesn’t mean anything to me. We’ve seen debloater tools, alternate start menus, someone even ported explorer from Windows 7 to Windows 10/11.

I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be a solution for this in no time.

That being said, just use a better OS ffs. I get it, some companies cannot easily switch from Windows because of tools specifically built for Windows, or due to strict policies or regulations or software support, but damnit, somewhere you have to draw a line and start a migration process to an alternative system. And maybe learn from this, and make your tools portable next time.

Having spyware on your system is certainly a big no-no at companies, and probably the aforementioned debloater/customization solutions as well.

The amount of people not knowing what a “web app” is, is seriously concerning.

Anyway, I tried “old” and Alexandrite, but I just ended up sticking with the default. I find “old” ugly, and on Alexandrite, I couldn’t find my saved posts. Maybe it has been fixed since, but the default one works for me best.

I’ve switched to Gboard on Android back in the days, when it was the only one with proper multilingual features, and been using it ever since.

I’ve experienced the opposite: I actually found it rather more helpful than not, despite the occasional errors like you mentioned. But nowadays it’s quite rare that it “mispredicts” a word. And what I’ve found extremely helpful is, that nowadays it doesn’t only correct individual words, but it picks up other grammatical errors as well in the sentence. So it’s working for me.

Luckily I’m not involved in this smart-TV saga in any way, as I haven’t been watching TV since my childhood (there were no smart-TVs back then, but TV shows in my country were shit).

Now my biggest fear is, if enough people realize that smart-TVs are shit, then desktop monitors will start to become “smart” too. My life will be doomed if that happens.

Hmm that’s unfortunate. Wherever I worked so far, ThinkPads didn’t break, even after the warranty expired.

Well, I wish you better luck with your Framework laptop(s) then.

Check again.

At least the T580 I worked on was the best quality laptop I’ve laid my hands on. My current M1 MacBook Pro is close, to some extent. It’s a great machine too, and obviously better in performance as it’s newer, but in laptop keyboards, ThinkPad’s is still no.1, not to talk about the track point that, to this day, no other manufacturer could properly reproduce. I worked with a Dell Latitude (a couple of years ago they were great), but the track point is shit on it.

Regarding maintenance, Lenovo provides detailed disassembly and repair guides, plus you can get replacement parts anytime.

Of course there are shit decisions on the ThinkPad line as well, but I still only can recommend them.

Exactly.

Also, besides the fact that over this time PHP transformed into a whole different language, most of the concepts the author is dissatisfied with, are just nuances.

There are a few valid points as well.

Overall, if I were to use a scripting language for web development, I would 100% pick PHP, as that’s the best suited language for the job. Nowadays, however, I go with Rust because I wanna squeeze out as much performance as I reasonably can.

For single use scripts and smaller tools on my desktop, I used Python in the past, and then I learned Ruby. I’m sticking with Ruby for these use cases.

Well, I guess it depends on the use case. For me, mine was a damn good investment for sure.

I know. Still, that’s the best hardware out there for laptops. I have to add though, only the T and P series are worth buying, the rest are trash.

Buying HP products is bad investment.

I only had the chance to two of their inkjet printers and one of their office laser printers, plus an elitebook laptop. In short, all of them suck.

Much better (to me, the best) alternatives, that I can safely say are good investments: Canon for inkjet printers, ThinkPad T and P series for laptops. Those are quality products. Unfortunately I don’t have any experience with other office laser printers, so I cannot recommend one.

Edit: specified which series of ThankPads are still good.

Just as a mildly interesting story, I thought I’d share:

The best self checkout experience I had so far, was at a Japanese clothing store in Germany. There was a box at the checkout station, and each clothing item had an RFID in their labels. You just toss all your items in the box, it detects which exact products you’re gonna buy, and if the list of items shown is correct, you just pay and go.

A few years ago I heard of a similar concept for groceries, but that one was experimental and I don’t think they’ve implemented it ever since. But this one at the clothing store was not a test, and it worked flawlessly.