Youtube Is Taking Down Videos on Performing Nonstandard Windows 11 Installs
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Windows 11Youtube CensorshipLinux Adoption
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Windows 11
Youtube Censorship
Linux Adoption
YouTube is taking down videos showing nonstandard Windows 11 installations, sparking debate about Microsoft's influence on content moderation and the implications for users seeking control over their devices.
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90% of Windows games run on Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736925
LibreOffice is an okay office suite (good enough for my purposes): https://www.libreoffice.org/
GIMP is a good image editor: https://www.gimp.org/
VLC is a good media player: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
OnlyOffice is made by a Russian company that doesn't condemn war of aggression that Russia wages against Ukraine.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1j7zlf2/onlyoffi...
* Doesn't condemn war (understandable in their position)
* Has dev team in Russia
* Pays taxes to Russia, which directly fuel war
* Does not support UAF or donate to Ukraine (also understandable)
* Keeps selling their software in Russia, which might have links to military and administration
Am I missing something here?
The fact that all of the above is being presented as an exclusively Russian strategy. When almost all companies mentioned on this website are proudly and directly tied to non-Russian war industries. The tendency to omit pointing out non-Russian examples almost always indicates endorsement of their actions.
And let me beat you to this that I condemn all offensive war industries no matter the country of origin. Unlike those who believe it is ok to side with one and not the other even if they do the exact same.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, none of our hands are clean. We all deal with our complicity in various ways, and draw our lines in the sand where we will, but at the end of the day survival in this world forces us all to be hypocrites.
And this whole falsely applied narrative is unironically a very frequent laundering tactic of their proponents.
And btw I don't even think most are really willing to accept the accusations of the American companies, as they've been told for centuries that these are the good guys.
Where did I ever present those as exclusively Russian strategy?
> When almost all companies mentioned on this website are proudly and directly tied to non-Russian war industries.
So?
As for GIMP, while I understand it can do many things as Photoshop, it is not close in terms of features and the UX is unfortunately terrible.
Read this: https://gist.github.com/stdNullPtr/2998eacb71ae925515360410a...
No one reached directly for kernel-level anti-cheat. It was the result of an escalation of the sophistication of cheating solutions.
People who work with Photoshop have never worked with any other thing. The way they learned to edit bitmaps was through Photoshop. They can't separate the act and the product in their heads. Thank god for Affinity getting into the mix.
One just has to deal with GIMP as it is, and stop trying to project Photoshop paradigms onto it. People just need to stop thinking of FOSS as the generic, off-brand or ersatz versions that pass or fail due to their degree of imitation of some other product.
IMO, every step GIMP takes towards Photoshop UI is a regression. GIMP's problems have been technical, such as color management and non-destructive editing, and they're gradually falling away.
writer, perhaps. calc, not even close - google sheets is unfortunately better in almost every way, and google sheets aren't great either.
This really depends on your needs. I'm sure it's not enough for someone who does Excel wizardry for living. But I use it for tracking personal finances and other simple tasks and graphs, and it is completely sufficient.
This in my book easily earns it the "okay office suite" badge. To be honest all office suites in the last 20 years have been good enough for most small scale needs, including OpenOffice back in the early days.
...but everyone uses a different 10%.
Something that's useless to you might be a dealbreaker to someone else.
I would guess reliance on excel is declining
In some places, yes, especially where certain online options are good enough.
Definitely not in financial services, and many offices I could mention. Even for me: Excel is the reason I haven't completely binned MS Office. For the subset of features I use⁰ it is better all round¹ than other things I've tried.
I'll miss it significantly when the last Windows machine that I operate away from DayJob is no more.
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[0] Probably less than that 10%
[1] There are many tasks for which there is something better, but the something is different in each case. Excel is a very good jack-of-all-trades.
It's in the sweet spot of "already installed" and "kinda-sorta database" and "kinda-sorta programming environment" where industrious people can build massive tooling over the years on top of an Excel sheet.
Yes, it could be an Actual Application, but then Legal gets involved (where is the data stored, what's the contract with the supplier), then you need to talk to Finance (Who's paying for this? Justify the cost!), IT (Managing the installations and licenses) and Security (Is the provider following good practices, is the application audited).
...then you decide "fuck that" and just use Excel, it's good enough.
Anecdote:
A programmer friend got promoted a few steps upward quickly and got into the "provide us with reports" level of employment. Their predecessor (a career manager) had spent multiple days each month manually doing the reports.
But a programmer's mind isn't built like that so they used the fact that Excel can pull stuff from HTTP APIs and now the report takes about 15 minutes to build automatically.
Frankly, calc is just as full featured as excel is, it's just different. About the only issue calc has is correctly parsing excel docs is notoriously difficult.
This is a familiarity problem, not a calc problem.
Not sure what you mean by this exactly, but I work in banking with a lot of "financial professionals", and the general opinion is that Excel is not good because it screws with numbers, whether its scientific notation (Why? Its just as long as the original number), rounding of numbers (had that with a large list of account numbers just last week where half the account numbers lost the last 3 digits) and there is no easy way of saying "just treat these as entered".
Even setting fields to text doesn't stop Excel from fucking around and overriding them to be date formatted if it feels like the balance could be.
The main issue is that Excel comes with Office and you aren't allowed to install other software so it forces you to use it and get used to it. It really wouldn't take much to be better than Excel.
Both xlsx can be exported and imported. It is just harder
mac - if you need battery
It's not the case that calc is lacking any features which excel has in a finance situation.
CSV import in Excel sucks. LibreOffice Calc is far better there.
Best feature of all in LibreOffice Calc: highlight current row/column, so you have a cross-like cursor.
Easier and better embedding of Python and other languages, not the "Python in the Cloud" crap that Excel does.
Less crappy conversions like "oh, that surely looks like a date, let's mess up your data"...
I'm going through a project at the moment where all the data is held in spreadsheets, and every time anyone opens them Excel fucks the numbers to be "scientific notation" despite there being space to display the full number and no way to disable this anti-feature. The amount of times I've had to restore the spreadsheet from a backed up CSV because of data loss is frustrating. I wish I could stop using Excel.
It sounds like the problem in this case is that you don't know how to use basic Excel features.
It isn't rounding or truncating while you are actively using the workbook or saving in its native formats, but it does when saving back out to CSV or certain other formats.
As much as I like Excel for many things, it is sometimes the bane of my existence wrt people using it to manipulate tabular data that isn't in its native formats and causing accidental corruption.
One of the many projects on my list of “things I'll never get around to” is a good⃰ CSV (or other text-based tabular data) editor.
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[*] There are actually quite a few that look good, but don't have some of the features behaviours I want, or in some cases are not available on an appropriate platform (there are a couple of Mac only options for instance), or are paid proprietary apps that are surprisingly expensive (I could justify it and get work to pay in DayJob, but not for my own use).
In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically. Yesterday, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/21/23926585/microsoft-excel...
Also it drops leading zeros which is annoying when a column is zip codes and it should be imported as string and not number
I agree excel gives ways around these and maybe that's considered basic knowledge but it definitely has poor data-mangling defaults
You just are mixing up two different problems I've listed into one problem and then made the arrogant assumption that I don't know how to use Excel.
Excel has definitely truncated numbers.
> writer, perhaps. calc, not even close
For what I see 99% of people do in excel (make a table, then sort it and draw some charts), calc would support all their uses just fine.
For those using it for actual accounting/financial stuff with equations in the cells, and custom macros, etc ... then no, calc won't be sufficient.
The real issue is familiarity and importing, but if you start fresh, LibreCalc is better for me.
excel runs the world, and I mean that unironically.
There is enough issues running games on Linux that there are specific distros created for running games because everything from the kernel version, X/Wayland, Compositor and the pipewire version can affect immensely how well the game runs.
There are also other issues around how well those games work. Some games will work perfectly fine. I am not disputing that. It is a bit of a lottery though e.g. I had annoying sound issues with Hell Divers 2 that was only fixed with an update to pipewire. Performance issues were solved by upgrading to Kernel 6.16.
On Windows I had to do literally nothing for the game to work perfectly (also don't believe some of YouTubers that are complaining HD2, their PCs were actually broken!).
Generally on Windows I have to do very little to get a game to work, outside of extremely old games from the late 90s/early 2000s.
It really seems like you aren't reading what I said. I accept that old games will often work fine, provided they are on a store like GoG or Steam. Big budget releases are often what people want to play.
> If those are the games you really want to play then Windows is the answer, have fun ponying up your drivers license to Microsoft for the privilege of getting root kitted by those games.
It isn't about what I want. It is about what is the reality for the vast majority of people. I would rather everyone play games that work on Linux. Unfortunately many of the people I play games like playing new titles, often they only work well on Windows. There is a social aspect of this that many people on here ignore.
> Literally everything else just works on Linux, one click install and play through steam, no bullshit fiddling around.
They don't though. There are always odd issues with games e.g. borderless window doesn't work in a lot of games, because the mouse will get lost. Having that happen mid-match sucks, having fullscreen window has it own draw backs. I won't get into performance and sound issues as I've already explained the issues there.
These things are mass market slop which are engineered to be bland and predictable to make the most reliable returns for institutional investors. Discerning consumers know better and don't go by what's popular.
There are plenty of popular franchises that I've liked in the past. There are plenty of "slop" movies that I enjoy, I really like Mission Impossible movies, Fast and Furious movies. I've also liked some of the Call of Duty games. There is room for both.
Is there much value there for users or the linux platform? Some definitely, but it's not going to move the dial much compared to if say valve, codeweavers, or someone else could work with EA to get an agreeable solution that lets Battlefield6 work on linux, as an example with a large audience that's locked into windows to play what they want.
I live fine without a console, so I live fine without a Windows gaming PC too. I don't think the AAA chasers have more fun than me when it comes down to it, dealing with these companies seems to be an aggravating affair even if you do everything the way they want.
I run into more problems with Linux than I do typically with Windows. I've been using Linux on and off since 2002. I don't particularly mind it, but I also don't pretend it is for everyone.
If you play single player games with no or limited online features you'll be fine in 99% of the cases (number pulled from my ass).
It's developed by a single guy, which I think is very impressive given how much of Photoshop's functionality it has. I just really wish it were open source (and not a web app).
> There are no uploads. Photopea runs on your device, using your CPU and your GPU. All files open instantly, and never leave your device.
(Krita is pretty awesome though, it's up there with Blender for me)
Adjust levels in photos.
They are all available as non-destructive filter layers, by the way, and Krita users had access to this way before GIMP 3.0 was released with non-destructive filters.
[1] https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/filters/adjust.ht...
Honestly, I did not know that these existed in Krita (when I used Krita, I did not find them).
However, I still stubbornly maintain that I answered the question sufficiently, which used the qualifier "with a better UI".
Taking a leaf out of my wife's book "Even when I'm wrong, I'm right!* :-)
(Yeah yeah, I know I was wrong)
GIMP also has an excellent print interface. Krita doesn't have one at all.
Krita has them both destructively, and non-destructively as transform layers. What is it you're missing?
It is really not the limiting factor in Linux desktop adoption. The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.
Buy the wrong laptop, and you have to fight with X, wayland and Nvidia graphics like a terminally inclined caveman in danger
Spoken like a true techbro. This attitude is so incredibly destructive. Technology is how we mediate our lives, cutting a very large number of citizens out of that is simply wrong, even if 'the numbers just aren't there' (and they are!).
Did I advocate for lack of accessibility features ? I just pointed out that in this context there are things far higher in the priority list. Especially given the fact that there are accessibility features, just not on par with windows.
Do you seriously believe that improving accessibility would have a higher impact in Linux adoption than improving robustness and hardware compatibility ?
I was writing assembly before you were alive buddy ;)
Yes, absolutely. Linux is plenty robust and has lots of hardware that you can use today. The reasons people end up not using it are:
- Microsoft
- Lack of favorite application 'x' (see: Microsoft)
- Difficult to use (unfamiliarity plays a role here)
So yes, accessibility is a key factor, and not just for the people that have challenging bodies.
It is flooded by complaints about HW incompatibilities, HW acceleration not working etc. Haven't been able to find complaints about accessibility.
Furthermore, what is the percentage of visually impaired people in the US and what is the percentage of linux desktop users ? The numbers speak for themselves.
Anyway, I think the CLI approach of Linux is way more accessible than the more GUI oriented approach of Windows/MacOS.
But surely there can be a point in which there are larger problems than that Linux reached 5% adoption this year in the US:
https://ostechnix.com/linux-reaches-5-desktop-market-share-i...
That's better than what it was. It's also not a whole lot. But you must understand, the more people use Linux, the better it becomes. Even if value accessibility over other matters, increasing the market share surely will increase the amount of people working on accessibility too.
And hardware compatibility issues are? The fact that orders of magnitude more people don't use Linux at all, disabled or not, because of lacking features or usability is optional?
If 5% of people is an insane number of people, surely usability for them all is more important than for a fraction of that? And again, this is not a product sold by a corporation. Leave features behind and adoption goes down, then you get no accessibility features at all. If you want more accessibility features, you want more developers. For that you want more usage.
Since you're such a noble white knight, why don't you code up those accessibility features you think are the most important missing part ? I'll wait.
Things that challenge accessibility plugins challenge any plugins. Steps away from accessibility are always steps towards lock-in.
> The inherent fragmentation and HW compatibility issues are much more pertinent.
But you seem to desire this. Don't buy the wrong laptop if you like lock-in; Apple and MS aren't making their OS compatible with your every hardware whim. Or learn how to reverse-engineer and write drivers.
The Linux answer is often repeated but unfortunately, some users depend on various Windows software that only runs properly on Windows. E.g. CAD/CAM, Quicken finance, sewing embroidery, etc can't run in a Linux WINE emulator nor QEMU/KVM virtual machine. And avoiding the WINE/KVM incompatibilities by switching to "Linux-native" software such as Gimp often means having less features and/or not having ability to open old files because they use different formats.
Sure, there's the idea that "90% of users just use email and surf the web so they can just get by with a Chromebook" ... true, but there's still a lot of users who can't because they use other productivity software.
For me, there's always some unexpected situation that requires a working Windows computer. Last year, I had to do an unplanned firmware update on a digital audio interface via a USB cable. There was no Linux updater. They had a firmware updater for macOS but it didn't work. Based on the tech support forums, I had to download the firmware updater for Windows platform and that finally worked.
reply to: >What software do you have that doesn't work in a VM?
Example would be software that use hardware USB dongles for DRM. E.g. embroidery software for sewing machines. The passthrough USB emulation to the vm is not invisible enough to fool the software searching for hardware dongles. Another example was Trimble software for LIDAR that depended on DirectX which crashed in a vm.
reply to: >A good-enough compromise is a dual boot with a tiny Windows partition for the rare cases
That is a very techie solution that's not practical for "normies". Dual-boot creates the "2 os file systems" issue instead of having a single unified disk mount. Windows doesn't have a built-in way to read Linux ext4 file system. Linux doesn't have a bulletproof reliable way to read/Write NTFS partition (various tech forums mention data corruption). Unless one goes external with external NAS hardware and store all documents on an SMB mount -- but that also layers on more technical issues and doesn't work for laptops on-the-go being disconnected from the NAS.
Your go/no-go decision tree
1) If your MacBook Pro is Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3): Running Split Second in Parallels with Windows 11 ARM is a no-go because the Sentinel/HASP hardware key that Split Second uses is not supported on Windows ARM. Thales (the dongle vendor) is explicit: “Sentinel HASP keys … are not supported” on Windows ARM; LDK works via emulation but not the HASP/HASP-HL USB keys you plug in.
You can feed it the output from Kicad, and if you include the ipc netlist it’ll even generate models. Great for doing a check before manufacturing, especially if the viewer matches what you see in Kicad.
Unfortunately I’ve never gotten it to run in wine.
Also, the extent to which windows is needed to accommodate uneducated operators is overstated. A lot of industrial equipment runs other oddball operating systems configured by the manufacturer and machine operators don't need to know the difference because they just know which buttons to press to get the job done.
- Some machines use embedded MCUs with no operating systems. I haven't seen one of these in the last 15 years. The last DNA extraction machine we got (a glorified sample shaker with 2 stepper motors) runs Win10! It has no keyboard, no network, and absolutely no ports of any kind (or at least not accessible without dissasembling the machine). A 8051 could do the job and still have memory left for Pong. [1]
- Very old machines run MSDOS and a proprietary software that directly talks to hardware ISA boards via I/O ports - no drivers. That software can't be ported to Windows2000+ because of the same reasons DOS games can't run in Win2000 - the kernel won't allow direct hardware access. Linux doens't allow it either.
- Newer machines run Windows 2000/XP/7/10, many of them offline. Some of them were updated to run Win10 from older versions, with the same app version (just Windows updated).
- Since Win10 can no longer be bought, newer machines run Win11 with permanent internet connection and they are minimally customized - the vendors left all ads, Copilot, Store and the kitchen sink installed. It's atrocious to work with those, but nobody cares. The management that make the decisions to buy the machines never ever touch them or even see them, and they don't take advice or feedback from us (or anyone else but accounting).
[1] https://gentechbio.com/en/producto/panamax-48/
Are you perhaps not aware of the millions of embedded Linux installations that never see the internet?
Windows owns the industrial space for historical reasons, mostly to do with OPC being Windows-only and software for doing maintenance on field devices originally running on DOS. It quickly became a chicken-and-egg situation - everyone wrote their software for Windows because everyone else wrote their software for Windows. SCO owned a decent chunk of the field before that, but we know how that worked out.
We're seeing some change now that OPC is being phased out. Ignition now has feature parity between Linux and Windows (barring OPC, of course). Windows won't go away any time soon (if ever), but you can now have a fully functioning SCADA system with no Windows at all.
[0]https://github.com/openai/whisper
that is never the solution. that is the workaround. workarounds are not solutions.
Players like mpv are way better unless you want to use nightly build of v4
Not on Android yet though.
Just how new does the new stuff have to be? I use VLC daily (because even though we have 4x streaming services, when I want to watch 3rd Rock from the Sun, it's not on any of them.
Some of the very new movies are also not on any of the streaming services, so I am left wondering, if I downloaded a movie that was only torrented a few days ago, just how new does the movie have to be to be unsupported by VLC?
I really appreciate VLC for how it can play just about anything, but it's a "player of last resort" for me.
In general, unless you need advanced Excel features, you can switch to linux.
[0] e.g. https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-cant-help-break-window... and couple others
While email is asynchronous and I can live with not seeing it all the time (I check it occasionally anyway), the calendar feature is a must, and specifically the reminders. This is why I cannot live without Outlook launched, and it reminds me of meetings I would miss otherwise.
It is the poster child for enshittification.
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