the thing is… you shouldn’t have to “search up the settings to turn off the saving redirection in Office programs and toss it in the default Group Policy settings”. cloud shit in windows and ms office needs to be optional, and explicitly opt in

SOP. They only care when it affects them.

and then when it comes time to vote again, they’ll line right back up to take another beating themselves.

dell’s been going down the crapper for at least a decade… ever since dell and the vultures took it private ~ 2013.

‘entry level’ specs have been 4gb ram for over a decade, and they’re still selling shit-tier laptops with only that today.

that would require the software companies to actually spend money on competent developers instead of tossing peanuts at prompt writers.

an 8gb pc with win11 is today’s equivalent of running vista on 1gb.

there’s a number of laptops already that do have 8gb on the board and no sodimm slots.

people got lazy about plugging them in

always have been, here. the old cdma flip phone went about a month between charges, even when it was 5+ years old. the new volte one sucks. with a higher power draw and the shitty 4g signal here, i have to plug it in every few days. the only ‘plus’ is that i always know where a charger cable is now, because it’s usb-c and i use that for other things, too.

if you’re being paid to run windows software… that’s a little different.

i’ve run across a couple prebuilts where shift-f10 didn’t work at any screen of the oobe. those just got clean installs via rufus.

rufus can download the latest 10 or 11 iso direct from ms servers (incorporating the fido ps1 script, made by the same guy), so you only need rufus and a flash drive.

And no, 4k desktops do not “look nicer”, it is stupid and tiny for no reason. Unless you have like 250 shortcuts on your desktop what is the point?

if you have an ultra-high desktop resolution, you’re probably using a scaling factor to make everything look about the same size it would otherwise be at ~ 1080p… windows will even default to something around that… just no ‘jaggies’.

so yea, it does ‘look nicer’ and no, everything is not ‘stupid and tiny’.

every system is different. landscapes, textures, shots from tv or movies, people… only one is using ‘defaults’, the wp from the ‘sunrise’ win11 theme (was set to that for some screen caps and recording, to avoid any… uh… ‘issues’… over having copyrighted imagery in them–it was a still from one of the lego movies). my phone is anna and elsa and will always be anna and elsa. dunno why. it just is.

my ‘arch based’ system is a cinnamon-flavoured manjaro. manjaro gets shit on for reasons, one of them being they hold back updated packages for a bit… which is basically what you recommend, and it’s what i usually do anyway–defer updates for awhile (even on windows), unless it’s a super critical issue that could actually be a problem.

that manjaro desktop has been solid, never once messed-up an update even with the aur packages i have installed, and even if it’s been a month or two since it last updated.

2000 ran the best and was the most stable of all of them for me.

apple did their part by putting siri front-and-center on iphones.

opera has been owned by chinese company since 2016.

easy to use gui backup utilities (like pika and déjà dup) can also encrypt its backups

if your system uses full disk encryption (such as via LUKS) and you simply copy files off to an external or a secondary drive for a ‘backup’, no. the copy is not encrypted unless the destination has encryption set up on it, too.

the alternative would be using a backup program, instead of a simply file copy, that encrypts its backups.

the thumbnail looks like part of a paint sample strip.