Mount a Windows 11 ISO. Open an administrative command window. Navigate to the new drive letter. Enter this command:
.\setup.exe /product server /auto upgrade /EULA accept /migratedrivers all /ShowOOBE none /Compat IgnoreWarning /Telemetry Disable
I've used this to upgrade 10 to 11 on non approved hardware, going back to at least 2nd gen Intel CPUs. I've used it to upgrade existing Pro, EDU and IOT that didn't want to upgrade.
Just a note for others that that the language of the ISO needs to match what you used to install Windows 10.
For example, I installed Windows 10 with the "International English" ISO and if I try this with the Windows 11 "US English" ISO, then it doesn't let me do an upgrade where it keeps installed programs and drivers.
My understanding is that TPM is secure, and Win 11 still supports TPM. Am I mistaken and/or misunderstanding your statement that Microsoft is enforcing a hardware requirement with a known back door?
Here's a significantly more credible (stacksmashing) video that demonstrates how ineffective some TPM implementations are. If the TPM was integrated into the CPU die, this attack would likely not be possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTl4vEednkQ
Despite the TPM being a pretty good and useful idea as a secure enclave for storing secrets, I'm concerned that giving companies the ability to perform attestation of your system's "integrity" will make the PC platform less open. We may be headed towards the same hellscape that we are currently experiencing with mobile devices.
Average folks aren't typically trying to run Linux or anything, so most people wouldn't even notice if secure boot became mandatory over night and you could only run Microsoft-signed kernels w/ remote attestation. Nobody noticed/intervened when the same thing happened to Android, and now you can't root your device or run custom firmware without crippling it and preventing the use of software that people expect to be able to use (i.e. banking apps, streaming services, gov apps, etc.).
Regardless, this is more of a social issue than a technical issue. Regulatory changes (lol) or mass revolt (also somewhat lol) would be effective in putting an end to this. The most realistic way would be average people boycotting companies that do this, but I highly doubt anyone normal will do that, so this may just be the hell we are doomed for unless smaller manufacturers step up to the plate to continue making open devices.
Sure let’s just centralize hardware attestation to Microsoft’s cloud tied to a Microsoft account with keys you can’t change what could possibly go wrong?
This is all publicly documented by Microsoft you just need to translate their doublespeak.
Google is doing does the exact same thing and people were sounding the alarms when they did it but Microsoft gets a pass?
Use ChaGPT to outsource your critical thinking for you because I’m not gonna do it.
I've looked into this fella before because he didn't pass the smell test. He's running a grift selling schlocky cell phones and cloud services. His videos are excessively clickbait-y and show minimal understanding of the actual tech, it's more or less concentrated disinformation and half-understood talking points. GrapheneOS devs also had something to say about him: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/20165-response-to-dishonest...
No they will make the same money either way because they are selling the OS, not the hardware. They are requiring only newer hardware to limit their surface of exploitation and reduce their compatibility list.
They might sell more Windows 11 if it ran on more hardware. How does this make them money?
It's worth asking, but I think there's an answer: they want the OS to be transformed into an interface to their cloud where recurring revenue is easier. To do that, they need to make it more like a mobile OS and more locked down. TPM helps this.
> They might sell more Windows 11 if it ran on more hardware. How does this make them money?
Given the free Win 7/8->10->11 upgrade path, almost every end user who'd want a Windows license probably already has one. This leaves enterprise licensing and computer manufacturers (laptops, mini-PCs, desktops), who wouldn't care about this because they'll have newer hardware anyway.
Dropping windows 10 support is a pretty big lever to apply pressure to get people to upgrade to 11. Oh turns out you also “need” to buy new hardware to run it.
Dropping windows 10 support is a really reasonable decision. The focus is on 11, it's been out for almost 5 years. I'm guessing they are close to releasing 12 at this point, maybe in a year or two. Supporting three entire fully fledged oses is quite alot of work. I also understand supporting newer hardware, they dropped 32bit on 11 and moved the instruction set up a bit. You gotta do a cutoff somewhere and I'm happy that they are at least allowing us to use the improved performance our modern CPUs have. I'm not happy with alot of stuff, but I get this at least.
I'd argue it's probably time to drop 32-bit x86 support, but the rest of this stuff is arbitrary and doesn't have any tangible benefit except conveniently providing hardware manufacturers with an excuse to unload new hardware onto people when there's nothing wrong with what they have. (not to mention, pardon the conspiracy theory, they're probably trying to use the TPM to turn the PC into a smartphone-like platform)
I mean... documenting the details of the investigation to support the first decision and relying on the documented details the second time would easily explain that.
Google censors the world, together with Microsoft.
Well - it is time that the rest of the world censors these two corporation. I don't want them to restrict information.
People will find workarounds by the way. This is now a Streisand effect - as people see that Google and Microsoft try to hide information from them, they will now look at this much more closely than before, with more attention.
(Having said that, my bypass strategy is to not use Windows 11 altogether. I don't depend on it, having used Linux since 21 years now, but my machine to the left is actually using Win10, for various reasons, such as that I can fix problems of elderly relatives still using Windows. But I won't use Win11 ever with its recall-spy software. I also don't care that it can be disabled - any corporation that tries to sniff-invade on me, is evil and must be banned.)
Edit: Ok so the video was restored. That was good, but still, we need an alternative here. Google holds WAY too much power via youtube.
> This is now a Streisand effect - as people see that Google and Microsoft try to hide information from them
This comment section is wild.
The videos are up. Microsoft and Google weren't meeting in secret backrooms to censor this one channel. The most likely explanation is that a competing channel was trying to move their own videos up in the rankings by mass-reporting other videos on the topic.
It's a growing problem on social media platforms: Cutthroat channels or influencers will use alt accounts or even paid services to report their competition. They know that with enough reports in a short period of time they can get the content removed for a while, which creates a window for their own content to get more views.
The clue is the "risk of physical harm". People who abuse the report function know that the report options involving physical harm, violence, or suicide are the quickest way to get content taken down.
A tale as old as time. A long time ago I worked in DDoS prevention and the bulk of our first customers were competing gambling sites and online eyeglass retailers.
Why? Because they were all paying people to DDoS each other. Kinda silly, but good for business.
I never thought I’d live to see the day a link to Action got posted on HN but alas, it has arrived! Show those Dollar General losers across the pond how it’s really done
lol. Available languages include 4 kinds of Dutch/German, 3 kinds of French, 2 kinds of Netherlands, 2 kinds of Swiss, 1 kind of Spanish, and no English. Really defined their market, I suppose.
Zenni Optical is the antidote. Even my too-blind-for-Zeiss-VisionPro-inserts prescription in the highest refractive index lenses is under $100 for a full pair.
The landscape is a little different now than then.
At the time(and really, even now) people would get their eyeglasses from their local provider. Who cares, insurance probably covers some or all of it. Even getting contacts or glasses as a prescription was like pulling teeth, since they wanted to keep it in house.
So the new market of get your prescription, then buy online was born. And it was like the wild west, not full of eye care professionals but...mostly less than above board places all fighting for your click.
Think about it...if you finally decide to Google eyeglass frames or such, you were entering a whole new realm. And why fight over SEO, when you can just take your competition offline, as most people will click a link, watch it load for 5s, then click back and try the next.
I have no idea if the industry is still shady or not, but 20 years ago, it was full of nothing but bad actors.
I don't know if it matters at all to the conversation or not, but none of the actors(gambling or eyeglasses) were based in the US, despite their domain names and courting US customers. The DDoS company was based in the US.
Just a reminder that "insurance covers" doesn't mean society doesn't pay for it: all the people pay for it. The insurance company paying causes prices raises for everyone else, same country and abroad. So the whole world ends up paying more for that "insurance coverage": more for the product, more for the insurance, more in taxes that fund public free healthcare...
> Microsoft and Google weren't meeting in secret backrooms to censor this one channel
That's not the argument IMO. They don't have to be intentionally malicious in each action. A drunk driver doesn't want to kill a little girl in the road. Their prior choices shape the outcome of their later options. A drunk driver decides to get behind the wheel after drinking. A large company makes a decision to make more profit knowing there are repercussions and calculating the risk.
The article has no sources, and is in fact entirely hearsay near as I can see. They don’t even attribute their quotes, and there is no screenshots I can see of these supposed notices either.
So they might be right, they might be wrong - it might as well be a Twitter post.
I looked through it, and saw none of that. I did see at least a dozen ads though. Maybe it got lost in all that BS?
Edit: it’s a tiny text chip embedded in a reaction video type image in what looks like yet another ad, that actually showed up hidden by 2 other actual ads when it loaded.
The DMCA is from 1998. I don’t think Larry and Sergei were taking a break from inventing google so they could lobby congress from their Stanford dorm room.
So Google is between a rock and a hard place here.
If they don't react quickly and decisively to reports of "possible physical harm", even if the reports seem unfounded, they'll eventually get the NY Times to say that somebody who committed suicide "previously watched a video which has been reported to Youtube multiple times, but no action was taken by Google."
You can act quickly and decisively and also correctly. Take the average number of reports per day times the average length of a reported segment times two, divide effective work hours per day by that number and hire that many people to process reports. Congrats, your average time to resolution is 24 hours.
If that's too expensive, your platform is broken. You need to be able to process user reports. If you can't, rethink what you're doing.
Not saying you’re wrong in this particular instance, but there are all sorts of areas where we accept that harm will occur at scale (e.g. that 40,000 people per year die in motor-vehicle incidents just in the US). How do we determine what is reasonable to expect?
We require auto manufacturers to include certain safety features in their vehicles, to decrease deaths to a socially acceptable level.
The central ill of centralized web platforms is that the US never mandated customer/content SLAs in regulation, even as their size necessitated that as a social good. (I.e. when they became 'too big for alternatives to be alternatives')
It wouldn't be complicated:
- If you're a platform (host user content) over X revenue...
- You are required to achieve a minimum SLA for responsiveness
- You are also required to hit minimum correctness / false positive targets
- You are also required to implement and facilitate a third-party arbitration mechanism, by which a certified arbitrator (customer's choice) can process a dispute (also with SLAs for responsiveness)
Google, Meta, Apple, Steam, Amazon, etc. could all be better, more effective platforms if they spent more time and money on resolution.
As-is, they invest what current law requires, and we get the current situation.
Please explain what kind of magic your solution uses to ensure that reports always come in at a perfectly even pace without any peaks or valleys. Because without that, your proposed approach will not work.
It’s even worse when you think about what happens when it’s NOT English + NOT mainstream content.
I really wish someone could tell me that either
1) Yes we can make a system that enables functional and effective customer support (because this is what this case is about) no matter the language
2) No we can’t because it’s fundamentally about manpower which can match the context with actual harm.
Whatever I suspect, having any definitive answer to this decides how these problems need to eventually be solved. Which in turn tells us what we should ask and hope for.
> a system that enables functional and effective customer support
I'm not saying that it's humans, but it's humans.
Augmented by technology, but the only currently viable arbitrator of human-generated edge cases is another human.
If a platform can't afford to hire moderation resources to do the job effectively (read: skilled resources in enough quantity to make effective decisions), then it's not a viable business.
> They know that with enough reports in a short period of time they can get the content removed for a while
This can be accomplished with bogus dmca notices too. Since google gets such a high volume of notices the default action is just to shoot first and ask questions later. Alarmingly, there are 0 consequences (financial or legal) for sending bogus dmca notices
They have a history of removing videos that describe things they don't like under the guise of "harm", eg Linus Tech Tips video on De-Googling your life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apdZ7xmytiQ
YouTube claim these were not automated actions. This explicitly rules out "algorithm/LLM makes a stupid mistake" but also seems to rule out "hits a threshold of community reports and gets automatically taken down pending manual review".
Also, it doesn't even need to be collusion between Microsoft and Google, but to pretend like that's never a thing is to be ignorant of history.
Stop defending these big companies for these things. Even if your version of the story is true, the fact they allow their platform to be abused this way is incredibly damaging to content creators trying to spread awareness of issues.
But also, do you seriously think there is a massive amount of competition at the scale of a 330k subscriber channel for people to bother pulling off this kind of attack for two videos on bypassing Windows 11 account and hardware requirements?
Regardless of what happened here, Google is to blame at least for the tools they have made.
As for Microsoft, I don't think there's anything disagreeable with saying that they've tried hard to get people to switch to hardware with their TPM implementation and lying about the reasons. Likewise for forcing Microsoft accounts on people. I am not certain they were involved in this case, but they created the need for this kind of video to exist, so they are also implicated here.
> But also, do you seriously think there is a massive amount of competition at the scale of a 330k subscriber channel for people to bother pulling off this kind of attack for two videos on bypassing Windows 11 account and hardware requirements
Enough to cause this behavior. I don’t know if theres a mathematical or organization law or something, but it seems like theres always a way to abuse review mechanisms for large communities / sites.
Never enough manpower to do review for each case. Or reviews take a long time.
> Never enough manpower to do review for each case.
Manpower at a given salary cost.
All content platforms could throw more money at this problem, hire more / more skilled reviewers, and create better outcomes. Or spend less and get worse.
It's a choice under their control, not an inevitability.
YouTube frequently claims this and are frequently caught lying. (Oh, you really watched this one hour video and reached your decision in an email sent 96 seconds after the appeal was submitted? Yeah okay...)
They'll silently fix the edge case in the OP and never admit it was any kind of algorithmic (OR human) failure.
I'm aware that there's a chance that Google is lying, I'm just pointing out that their comment doesn't make any sense if they believe that Google deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Content hosts are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they take their time and are cautious with reports, people end up swamped with garbage that people complain about. If they try to be quick to clean up the garbage, some clean stuff get caught and people complain.
The only frequent obvious problem I see is Youtube not telling people why their videos get hidden or taken down or down ranked. Long time creators get left in the dark from random big changes to the platform that could be solved with an email.
What became of the old ruse of simply not listening to contents that one find objectionable? Now it needs to be nuked from orbit yesterday to make sure nobody's pure eyes glance at it.
The world got more connected and we all had to suffer the consequences of other people consuming propaganda, so we decided it should be banned, except for the ones who consume it, who decided the same process should be used to ban reality and only allow propaganda.
In the olden days this would simply be solved by... having customer support befitting the size of the company. Of course nowadays that's "inneficient".
We have companies with billions of customers but smaller customer service than a mid-sized retailer from the 90s. Something is not right.
Google, Facebook etc does have support for some customers. If you have a $10m a year advertising account with them I’m sure you’ll have an account manager.
People posting on these sites as content creators aren’t customers.
IME it's especially bad with Admob. They've purposefully kept their email contact option broken for years and the only "help" you can access is from their forum, which is the absolute worst and never provides any meaningful resolutions. It's awful.
They are absolutely aware of these sorts of abuses. I'll bet my spleen that it shows up as a line item in the roadmapping docs of their content integrity/T&S teams.
The root problem is twofold: the inability to reliably automate distinguishing "good actor" and "bad actor", and a lack of will to throw serious resources at solving the problem via manual, high precision moderation.
The problem I see with that attitude is that it's excusing companies with immense profits from having even the tiniest modicum of actual human review for things.
In certain niches, the marginal value of kneecapping the competition exceeds the viable budget for counteracting gaming. It may be a quirk of this reality’s hyperparameters that a UGC media monopoly inevitably suffers from this. Or maybe at a certain point it hits their bottom line and better enforcement is contrived.
The video was restored because of the noise the takedown created. Small creators have no voice and for every big channel that can ignite a PR backlash there are potentially thousands that would disappear without trace or chances to be restored. YouTube has been unreliable for years, but AI just makes it even more so; how could one base their business on such an unprofessional and unstable partner that appears managed by kids with too much power in their hands? An alternative is badly needed asap.
> Rich appealed both immediately. The first appeal was denied in 45 minutes. The second in just five.
> The platform claimed its "initial actions" (could be either the first takedown or appeal denial, or both) were not the result of automation.
If they claim that a non automated review occurred but then still took down/denied appeal, what caused them to change course?
What is your source that the restoration of the video was not because of the noise?
Pattern recognition, an innate skill in most humans. When most bogus takedowns are not reversed, but the more people you see talking about them, the more likely they are to get reversed, you can easily see the pattern.
Yep. While my mom was working she needed too many Windows-only applications. But once she retired, I set her up with a Linux desktop and it's been smooth sailing.
I installed zorin on an old machine that was given to me because it wouldn’t run win 11. I like it a lot. Debian based, clean smooth UI. Just tell them Microsoft improved the user experience with windows 11.
X X Windows L.E. => (e)X X Windows (Wayland) L.E. (Linux Edition)
Even the one major 'windows' app that my mom needs to use is going Web only... so I figure if I install Debian Stable + Widevine that'll cover 99.9% of the use case and I gain an OS that just works correctly.
i think a good ubuntu is a bit better than just debian for this. probably linux mint or kubuntu. for just debian, then mint debian edition or mx linux would be best, imo
I feel your passion, but I feel this is a little hyperbolic? I feel your passion is directed more at UEFI secure-boot than at Linux. I am no lover of the UEFI secure-boot world, using shims as a first-stage boot loader component whose job is to bridge the firmware’s trusted key infrastructure (typically Microsoft’s signing key) to a Linux (or other non-Windows) bootloader/kernel chain.
> Linux is under control of the same companies
Linux is indeed open source, so are you trying to say that "Linux is EFFECTIVELY under control of the same companies VIA UEFI WITH SECURE BOOT ENABLED"? Or is there a big-Tech cabal controlling Linux in another manner? I get that most big-Tech companies are major contributors to open source projects.
> all major distributions (Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu) ship with a shim signed by Microsoft
Having a shim signed by Microsoft makes no difference if these distributions are being installed on hardware without UEFI firmware implemented on the motherboard’s SPI flash e.g. motherboards from Purism (Librem Laptops), System76 (Thelio, Galago Pro, etc.), Framework Laptop (2021 →), Star Labs, Raspberry Pi / Single-Board Computers and uncountable DIY PC builds with motherboards (ASUS, ASRock, Gigabyte, etc.) that expose Secure Boot options. It is usually only when consumer hardware is being used from major OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.) that ship with only Microsoft’s key in the firmware trust database.
> and systemd
You are suggesting that “systemd” is also part of the lock-in or control (in your mind) of those distributions. But strictly in the context of shim and Secure Boot, systemd is not the same issue: systemd is an init-system/process manager in userland, not part of the firmware/boot loader signature infrastructure. Major distros use systemd, so from a “vendor/lock-in” narrative they may lump bootloader trust and systemd governance together. But strictly speaking your assertion is more of a opinion/ideological piece than a formal technical dependency.
> *BSD is the only escape
Not true. Not all Linux distributions use it — Tails, Qubes OS, PureOS, Alpine, Void, Gentoo, etc., deliberately avoid it. Most minimalistic, privacy, or DIY distributions refuse the Microsoft-signed shim route because their users are expected to control their firmware settings or use owner-controlled keys.
Windows 10 is also the stop I'm getting off at. Windows 11 does not serve me and it does not suit my needs. Windows 10 was not too great either, debloated was somewhat manageable to run on one of my machines. It's inertia of all these years, my first windows installation was Win 95. But Windows 11 is a horror show I don't want take part in and warn anyone that could be tricked into using to stay away.
I realize crypto has become dominated by the investment community, but money is not just a store of value. As a medium of exchange, fiat currencies use money to implement monetary policy and control. Electronic exchange of fiat currency is a permission based activity, and significant transactions are simply disallowed and users often debanked. You don't have to wait for a monetary system to collapse before crypto has meaningful value. That value can come from simply not being subject to corrupt monetary policies and control.
Maybe not totally related but I remember a comment from few years which lets say, was "dismissed" at the time by votes where user said that Google doesn't innovate when it comes to web standards but pushes own agenda by planted people at W3C. To ensure their browser will work for them and not for the user.
Microsoft on the other hand seems to be reheating the old Palladium/Trusted Computing concept enhanced now by Copilot. This idea was already criticized over 20 years ago as a dangerous attempt of turning desktop machines to uncontrollable appliances which would run only approved software and serve, access approved safe content rigged with DRM. And frankly, with all this play with chat control, age verification it's hard to not see some similarities. Maybe that's where this is all going.
Microsoft is just a video game company to me, I can live without its products and be happier. With Google though, things are bit different, they have Google Maps and YouTube, which I use nearly on daily basis. I can probably replace Google Maps with something else, even though that will probable be a downgrade in terms of user experience, however replacing YouTube is impossible, so many unique content in it.
(a big) But YouTube has grown to be such a monopoly, that they now dictate what we are going to be able to watch on the web.
This is sadly so hard to change, so many creators are now literally working "for" YouTube, and there are so many quality videos there.
Replacing YouTube with a drop-in substitution is obviously impossible, but it's not that hard to replace with a different hobby. I've never used YouTube to any significant degree, and manage pretty well without it.
I think it's only a matter of time before youtube starts injecting ads directly into the video stream, and only allow streaming it at the actual playback speed.
They might even put the ads in different places for different users to throw off things like Sponsorblock.
What is so much of value in YouTube that you cannot live without? The platform has turned into clickbait conspiracy board, exactly because creators are trying to adapt to the algorithm. Apart from fun gaming channels, there are very few channels where you can actually learn something. It’s mostly noise.
I’m having much more trouble imagining life without Google Maps that without YouTube.
Google Maps is garbage as well, full of inaccurate shit or meme stuff people added but the process of getting it fixed has been made worse and worse over the years.
The report system has been gimped massively,can't even type in reasons any more just have to select from some limited options and hope for the best. Took me over half a year of reporting a permanent street closure near me for them to actually change it and all the whole they were happy to direct people and cars down it . Other times they just outright reject reports without any reason.
Directions have got more sucky over the years.
More and more advertising has creeped into the maps as well, seeing the logos for stores and restaurants over other places and when zoomed out because they paid to be boosted.
I only use Google for street view and, on google earth, for historical aerial imagery these days, not for navigation. For that I use apps that use OSM like Organic Maps or now CoMaps.
Google Maps has a practical value. I know why I use it - I want to get to somewhere, I open the app, type my destination and I'm given a route. Most of the times it has worked very well, in numerous different countries that I visited.
I find it hard to extract the same practical value from YouTube. There have been cases where I would see how people repair stuff and to some degree it has been useful but it is hard to find that "useful" type of video you look for among all the noise. Product review videos are always kind of fishy, because reviewers are mostly sponsored. So I can't quite get to extract anything of great value from YouTube.
Btw, thank you for the Organic Maps tip. Looks really really cool!
I've had a pretty good experience with OpenStreetMap to replace Google Maps. For YouTube it depends on your needs. If it's just entertainment there's Nebula, Odysee, Nicovideo, Twitch, Dailymotion, et cetera. For more educational content the alternatives can be a bit hit-or-miss.
That said, YouTube has been auto-dubbing videos using an algorithm that overdubs English spoken by people with an accent, which I consider discriminatory (if not outright racist), so I'm trying the various alternatives now. In a few months I think I'll have more of an opinion about them.
> (Having said that, my bypass strategy is to not use Windows 11 altogether. I don't depend on it, having used Linux since 21 years now,
I'm not quite that cool, but I have been using it full time since about 2009, so I'm not too far behind :)
The only time that I have to use Windows is because I have to play tech support for my parents, because despite considerable effort on my end, I have been completely unsuccessful at convincing them to move to Linux or Mac. It's a little annoying, because when I bring up the subject they act like I should just "live and let live", but that's a really stupid argument when they're saying this while I am fixing their computer. Somehow this is lost on them.
I have complained about this a bunch of times on here, but I'll say it again: If you work on Windows Update, then you should consider any career other than software engineer. Windows Update has made the world a worse place because it disincentivizes updating your computer, leading to an increase in open. Update software isn't allowed to suck.
Obviously it depends on your relationship, but it's not really nice of them to insist on your tech support like this AND refuse to make it easier for you AND be ungrateful (?) for it. You could set a date after which you won't help anymore unless they switch to Linux or Mac.
And if they do care they will find workarounds as you said.
Nothing will change, the frog has been sitting in boiling water for more than a generation now and the newbloods never experienced the computational freedom you hold dear; they will happily use whatever corporate surveillance technology is being forced upon them. They will even defend it to the bone if you try to take it away
most games run in Ubuntu with steam now, Google workspace replaced excel for the great majority of tasks online and I ubuntu improved a lot drivers support.
I'm happy to work in Linux and see the great improvements they did thru decades
I'm a bit of an LLM skeptic but chatgpt could probably explain this kind of thing pretty well and a) it's interactive so you can ask if you don't understand a step b) there will be no filler to pad the content for ads (well not at the moment anyway)
Suppose we hadn't done so; what alternative method of disseminating information might we have used, that would have had within a few orders of magnitude of the same reach?
The implication here is that YouTube enabled the reach it got; whereas in reality the reach was induced because of the faith we put in it. Had we not done so, then whatever alternative method of communication we did put our faith in - like blog posts, or self-hosting videos - would have had the same reach.
We can't and we shouldn't, these people only care about making more money, even if it means teenagers contracting diseases in the process. They are then using the money to shape the public opinion about them. The societal norms should change in a way that makes these people miserable the more they are successful IMHO.
I'm not even sure I know who Billie Eilish really is but she was all over Reddit for telling billionaires to donate their money.
More or less, the charitable and responsible approach to being ultra-rich, and which has disappeared in this century.
I see the people in charge of these big corporations as lizards, given every decision they take seems to be anti-Humanity. We should cherish non-profits, small businesses, having a good and boring life, doing normal things. Instead we idolise being successful, rich, or famous. What a stupid system…
Framing it in terms of trust is already problematic.
We don't trust the NYTimes or Washington Post, they are a source of information that needs to be taken with shovels of salt and require additional research to get to anything trustworthy. And we always understood that was their role.
We don't trust supermarkets or retailers to give us important pricing information, we do the research to get anything actionable.
You can't, and this was readily apparent in 2020 with Covid. Even doctors presenting factual information got censored and de-platformed by YouTube.
The only real competing video platform that promises no censorship is Rumble ( https://rumble.com ), but it has a very right-wing slant due to conservatives flocking to it during all the Covid-era social media censorship.
Yeah the moment they started I knew it was doomed to fail. Get it wrong once and your credibility is ruined. They should have never tried to censor content outside of what is legally required and therefore defined.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
I looked at the front page alone and it's full of right wing hot takes and neo-nazis. If a platform wants to accept white-supremacists that's one thing. When it's right on their front page though it's being actively promoted.
If Windows keeps going in this direction, I will try again.
But in the past 20 years I tried using Linux on the desktop a couple of times.
It always ends the same way - out of the blue it refuses to boot. Of course there's usually a solution, but I just really don't like that my PC can just suddenly decide that I'll be troubleshooting for the rest of the day, usually in front of some very minimal "maintenance" CLI. And that's if I got the time - I may have to use my laptop for the rest of the week, now dreading the weekend instead of welcoming it.
Right now I'd have to do a bunch of research first. Would I still be able to play all the games I play with my friends once a week? I have 3 monitors, one of them has a different DPI than the others, did they fix that by now? I got a stream deck, will that be essentially useless? Is my webcam / mic supported? Do I need to learn about various audio architectures before I can ever use a mic again? Which ones of the dozens of apps I use every day can be made to run under Linux?
It'll probably take a 40-hour work week to get to like 90% of where I was on Windows, and then I'd consider myself lucky that I got that much to work at all. And then I'd start waiting for the first "troubleshooting day".
With all that negativity I have to also say that I adore Linux on the server. When all you need in terms of hardware is basically a CPU and any number of storage devices and all you get in terms of UI is SSH, Linux is far superior to anything else.
Because it doesn’t work reliably on the surface pro 4. Yes, I have tried surface-linux, and no it doesn’t work well enough. When shutting down, the machine actually doesn’t shut down and my battery was dead the next morning. The boot process sometimes hangs. The OS doesn’t properly differentiate between finger and stylus. It doesn’t seem to do palm recognition. Etc…
I know this is a special case: hardware with specific Microsoft firmware. But I imagine that other people have other specific cases.
Distros like Mint, Ubuntu, Bluefin, etc all annoy me to the same extent as Windows.
Distros like Arch, NixOS (my current laptop driver) or even Debian require a bunch of tinkering to get some things to behave properly.
Also, I get tired of all the tech "reboots", eg the 3 or 4 different ways of setting up network or DNS, pipewire vs pulseaudio vs whatever, Wayland vs X11, etc.
It was the same problems on the Fedora and Ubuntu since ever (I have Linux-based work laptop). Also on Fedora i had to upgrade very slowly, so they could release bugfixes - stable new releases were always crippling my ** Dell somehow.
Easier to work on than Windows but my Linux pisses me off every day.
Problems with docks, forgetting all monitor setups except for the last dock (I use three, two at the office, one at home), Zoom ALWAYS having problems with screensharing, Network Manager issues since forever (can't VPN like a human being, have to use vpnc like an animal), etc, etc.
I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for years and while it is decently stable, it is far from perfect.
For example i think the first issue any new user will face is with many codecs not being available in the official repository distros, making various sites (and video plays) unusable. The solution to that one is simple, add packman, which is a community repository that contains all codecs - but IIRC packman is not mentioned anywhere during the install, it is something you need to search for (it is in the wiki). However, packman very often conflicts with the official repos when it comes to updates, making all GUI-based ones (that do not seem to handle cross-repo conflicts like zypper) pretty much unusable as they always give up in the presence of a conflict. And unfortunately some comments i've seen (mainly on Reddit) from people working on the distro seem to indicate at least a minor hostility towards using packman, so i do not see this being solved any time soon.
For an experienced Linux user this is a trivial issue, something that i doubt most (long time) openSUSE Tumbleweed users would even think about, but for someone new to Linux it can be a larger issue they wont find in distros like Debian (though they may find other issues :-P).
There have been other issues i had with openSUSE Tumbleweed, like -e.g- at some point after an update every 3D game had some significant input lag regardless of vsync state. I never solved that one, i just rolled back updates (snapper is great for that, but again an advanced Linux user feature) until at some point -months later- the problem stopped happening. Though now i have another issue where the X server randomly starts not updating the screen for random numbers of milliseconds - essentially it feels as if the entire thing is stuttering - but weirdly enough there are no CPU or GPU usage spikes and it doesn't seem to be relevant to CPU/GPU usage at all. If anything, it does not happen at all if there is some OpenGL or Vulkan program running in a window (so it doesn't affect games at all, just regular desktop use) and sometimes i just end up running vkcube in another virtual desktop (it doesn't matter if the output is visible or not) to avoid it. My guess is that there is some sort of scheduling bug in the modesetting driver as i never had that issue with the amdgpu driver (my guess is the modesetting driver doesn't get as much testing as the amdgpu driver on AMD GPUs), but the amdgpu driver causes the X server to hang after i suspend and resume my desktop since i got a RX 7900 XTX (it did not happen with my RX 5700 XT, which was rock solid), so it is choice between the lesser evil.
Ah yes. The Linux user is always holding it wrong.
In my case it stems from having to deal with multiple distros (and multiple generations of distros, eg 3 LTS Ubuntus) professionally.
In other cases, distros give a choice on which tools to use, usually because the new one is better (but also happens to come with its own new bugs).
Unrelated, I love that any "why aren't you using Linux?" question is actually almost always just a thinly veiled "let me tell you why you're wrong" plant.
That's actually the opposite of what I said. All those issues seem to come from the fact that the user didn't choose a distribution where it's "one-click install".
If you came to me and said "I tried Arch Linux and my installation broke after every update", I think it's fair to say that it's something you should've expected before you installed the distribution. It's unfair to make the comparison for stability between Windows and Linux if your only example is Arch Linux.
So yes, I maintain that the distribution choice is important and that if you constantly run into issues, it's probably a problem with your distribution (or your use thereof).
"You chose the wrong distro" is very much in the "you're holding it wrong" vein, in my book.
If there's one thing I'll admit to "doing it wrong" it's that I've been on a distro-hopping binge the past few years because I've (fortunately) not actually needed my laptop as a daily driver, so I've experienced a bunch of them and, so far, none of them have given me a compelling reason to stay.
Many have been interesting (particularly NixOS and Bluefin), some have been easy until you decide you want to get away from defaults (Mint comes to mind). All of them have had some quirks/issues.
I haven't tried a SUSE in probably 25 years so maybe that'll be my next hop.
Mind you, I've had Linux devices for 30 years and I was also a FreeBSD-as-my-main-desktop user for about a decade, so it's not like I'm not into this kind of tech.
I see. Sorry if I came off as trying to invalidate your experience. That's not what I meant.
I've tried about 4 or 5 distros before settling on openSUSE Tumbleweed (now on my 4th or so year). Linux Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu, Solus, Manjaro...
Ironically, I find Tumbleweed (a rolling distro) more reliable than all the others I've tried. I can't say it's stable per se, but if something breaks you can rollback very easily. Doesn't break often, though.
Because the ads are the devil I know and can be defeated. Linux for desktop has been the bottom contender YoY because it is still not reliable enough for daily use, especially on laptops.
My requirement is not to have a random Linux evening. Whenever I try Linux, it eventually involves one or two of these Linux evenings to get something working or something fixed. I'm just done with those. Windows on laptop will sleep and wake consistently without bluescreen. Once the ads are removed, its great. I much prefer battling ad injection to battling critical functional issues. Ads can be ignored until I do something about them; Kernel panicking and locked up screen cannot be ignored.
Granted, I don't use the sleep feature because I'm on a desktop and seeding Linux ISOs.
But whenever I run into an issue after an update, I just rollback and wait for a few more days because it usually gets fixed. More often than not, it's not even an issue that deserves to rollback, let alone spend a whole evening troubleshooting.
Next time you try a Linux distribution, may I suggest openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma?
My time involved in making Linux work right mainly, there's always minor issues that take a lot of effort to solve. Like my audio interface has CH 1&2 working fine, but CH 3&4 are at half volume no matter what I do, and after waking from sleep it stops working entirely. And this is an interface with no special drivers needed.
Also Lightroom and Fusion 360 don't run on Linux, fusion kind of works through wine but barely, and lightroom does not work at all.
Half the time I woke it from sleep the lockscreen would be broken and unresponsive too, requiring a reboot.
Overall its just too much time to figure out these problems, windows just works with very little involvement on my part.
Dual booting is the worst possible combination, given that any windows update will kill the linux bootloader (major update to be fair, but it will happen and then you have to recovery iso to fix the bootloader every time). Plus having to disable all boot optimizations on the windows side because of tainted filesystem that linux can't figure out without risk of data destruction. I'd rather just use a VM - but the same games that don't run on linux also dont want you playing in a VM.
I've been dual booting windows/arch for almost 1 years now. Except the rare case that windows fucks my grub and I have to mkconfig again it'd been smooth sailing.
Yep. I've been a paying Google Workspace user for almost 20 years now (in the various iterations of the product name).
Some stuff goes in GitHub, none of which I actually truly care about though.
I'm sure you'll groan. :)
But hey, if it's good enough for Cloudflare and Datadog (two past employers), it's good enough for me.
I also may be weird because I don't own any media and I'm perfectly happy with the streaming model. I enjoy not having the mental load of thinking about self-hosting and backing up terabytes of stuff.
Yeah it makes it very easy to be OS-independant. I have backups of my whole home directory so if anything goes awry I can just reinstall software as I go and restore my config files from the most recent backup.
I have a Nextcloud instance for family to store files, though.
Google used to proudly say "Don't be evil"... But they just forgot to add "let us take that part".
When tech giants start deciding what technical knowledge is too "dangerous" for users to access, we've crossed into a different kind of territory. Installing an OS on your own hardware is now physical harm? That's some creative interpretation of their policies. The irony is that this kind of censorship just validates why people want to bypass these systems in the first place, nobody wants corporations deciding what they can and can't do with their own machines.
The point is to prevent viral videos from getting widely viewed during their peak. To cut it off. It doesn't matter if the block is removed some days or weeks later and then there's a trickle of traffic. This is the status quo for corporations that wish to suppress content on Alphabet's platforms. Another well known recent example is Forbes attacks on Gamer's Nexus investigative documentary on the GPU black market that competed with their video.
Isn't the damage done though? Like if they were down at the time when people were told that win10 reached end of support and it's time to get on 11 does it matter that they are up now?
Anyway I doubt youtube did this intentionally, but it does show how vulnerable their system is to false reports.
I don't game much, but as a parent, we have both a ps5 and a xbox. Frankly, console graphics are good enough for me. I don't see much point in having a gaming PC.
Actually, I would trade visuals for better games. Most games nowadays are better enjoyed as movies than games.
If anyone at YouTube Trust & Safety is reading this article, I've got a real problem for you to solve.
There are channels that exist solely to pump out AI slop seemingly designed to trick gullible seniors into identifying themselves in the comments. I suspect the scammers will go after these people later in pig-butchering or related scams.
For example, the “Senior Secrets” channel pumps out videos such as “Over 60? Add THIS Powder To Your Coffee To Walk like You’re 40 Again! | Senior Health Tips.” (I won’t link to the video, but you can easily find it with a search.) The video makes bold health claims justified by citing what appear to be scholarly research studies, such as:
> University of California, San Francisco (2023). "Mobility Enhancement Through Nutritional Supplementation in Older Adults." Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, Volume 78, pp. 445-453.
However, none of the cited studies and papers are real.
The deeply concerning thing is that the video’s narrator invites the seniors who are duped by these claims to identify themselves and reveal their age and locations in the comments. From the transcript at 1m44s:
> "Before we begin, tell us in the comments now your age and where you're watching us from. We're reading and replying to every single comment, so drop your comments below."
I’ve already reported this content to YT, but I’ve seen no apparent follow-up.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Google, but not in anything YouTube related. If you’re in YT and want to reach out, my contact info is in my HN profile.
Age and city isn't all that identifying, I don't see anything useful there that isn't already in census etc. They are just doing it because YouTube promotes highly commented videos, hence the old saying "like, comment and subscribe"
It's not the age and location that are concerning. It's that the seniors who are especially susceptible to being misled will identify themselves as such. Further, if you look at the comments from these seniors, their YT usernames often reveal their real names.
This isn't merely AI slop. This is AI slop that appears to have been designed to specifically target a vulnerable audience for the purpose of later running financial scams against them. It ought to be in a different category altogether.
Funny, because all the LLMs are more than happy to spit out the steps. Alphabet, if you want to get ahead, you need to be sure you're consistent. It's literally 4 clicks to get the same info from your sister product.
Governments (we the people in general) have the right and duty to regulate corporations, non-human entities which exist at our regulatory pleasure. The US and the EU could easily rip Google/MS/Apple to pieces if they wanted to. Hit some other media conglomerates while they're at it. Vote or something.
It's like they want people to bypass Windows 11 altogether. I've finally bit the bullet and gone to Linux recently. Certainly dying by 512 cuts and counting, not for the faint of heart, but I'm surprised at how much of my daily usage I've been able to replicate. I'd say 80% of life works, unlike previous attempts.
As if people would not talk to each other or post such instructions elsewhere....
What a clumsy attempt to censor that.
As if we now would love Microsoft for their shit and crap they produce since centuries.
I only got a gaming machine running it here, all my private data will stay on another linux machine
Windows 11 attempts to remove local only account is the last straw. I have mostly moved away from Windows already but if they fully implement this will never recommend to anyone period. I manage 2600 computers where I work and am down to less than 150 running windows … could see this reaching 0 in just a year or two.
I forsee a lobby to the government for further restriction on our freedom of speech by google and others as these companies can't compete with open source and decentralized alternatives that are beginning to offer really well made alternatives.
Observations indicate we're approaching a point of inflection. We've had about three decades of Big Tech running a serfdom, unless power starts shifting back to users we'll be locked-in serfs for good.
I reckon most of us don't actually realize how much trouble we're in already.
If a company chooses to automate something that should not be a defense. They should still be held equally accountable for their actions no matter if they employ a human or an algorithm to do their censorship for them. If they know their software/automation is shit and keeps screwing up, they're still making the choice to continue using it.
Unfortunately for right now, KDE has recently released major version 6, which is also about as stable as Windows (meaning, very not). This is reminiscent of the KDE 4 transition and much worse than the KDE 5 one.
For example, half the time I try to log in or unlock the screen, it just ignores my password. Fortunately, I have discovered that pressing Escape triggers a crash, and I have to deliberately trigger a segfault by pressing Escape, in hopes that next time the password will be accepted.
Plasma 6 is nearly two years old, and is totally fine in my experience. The transition was more like 5.x to 5.y. The biggest change is Wayland by default (X11 is currently still available, so might be worth a try).
It sounds like your problem may be with SDDM (the login screen program) rather than Plasma itself. You could try an alternative: https://alternativeto.net/software/sddm/
As someone who's been bouncing back and forth between Arch and Tumbleweed for a while now I had a very different experience. The transition from KDE 4 to KDE Plasma 5 was terrible, plasmashell would crash all the time, tons of stuff would break between updates, and I had to switch to running awesome for a while (which is fine, awesome is pretty great). The transition from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6 was basically 'these 2 KWin scripts don't work any more' and everything else was fine.
Changing the KDE theme into something other than the default Breeze breaks the whole Plasma: black screen with a cursor instead of the SDDM login screen. Hit this while setting up an Arch system for my wife, spent hours rebooting with recovery USB image and tweaking configuration until it all worked again.
SDDM is garbage and I've switched to using lemurs now (for whatever reason graphical display managers are terrible. GDM doesn't allow changing the mouse cursor theme, SDDM doesn't show battery percentage, LightDM doesn't do fonts properly,... the KDE people are apparently working on a new DM, but the info I got was vague as anything and may as well have been referring to the KDE LightDM greeter).
I wouldn't say that SDDM is garbage. Apparently, it sets the environment variables & etc. needed to enable automatic HiDPI scaling that a shockingly large number of Wayland proponents insist Xorg doesn't support. [0][1]
[1] Manual scaling (even non-integer scaling) works fine as long as you have a settings editor that will speak the XSETTINGS protocol, and a daemon running that can be queried. GNOME has both by default. KDE has the settings editor, and you might need to install xsettingsd or similar. The quirk I've found is that while GTK programs accept the display scaling changes immediately, QT programs must be restarted to adopt the changes.
> automatic HiDPI scaling that a shockingly large number of Wayland proponents insist Xorg doesn't support.
Assuming they know what they're talking about and not just parroting whatever they read others mention, usually when someone says that "Wayland does $THING that X11/Xorg doesn't do", this is really a shortcut for "X11/Xorg could technically do $THING, if enough developers and projects cared about it, but that would be a massive undertaking and it is easier to convince developers do $THING if we can control most of the stack to only do $THING in one particular way we want by working from a clean slate".
Since you mentioned environment variables, not sure what SDDM exactly is doing, but in the case of HiDPI scaling under Xorg the only method for HiDPI i'm aware of that uses environment variables is Qt's `QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS` which is a semicolon-separated list of per-screen scaling factors that Qt applications can use to automatically scale themselves depending on the screen the window/application is in. Considering SDDM is written in Qt, i'll guess that this is what it set.
But the thing is, this is far from enough if you want "robust" support under X11/Xorg. The reason is that a typical X application under a typical X desktop has multiple components: an X server (which i'm going to assume it is Xorg for now - other X servers are basically Xorg forks and sync with its features), a window manager, an optional desktop compositor and a widget toolkit on the application's side (not strictly needed as an app can use its own adhoc code for that but let's assume it uses one since this doesn't really matter in this case).
The behavior you need for robust HiDPI support is for the application to use the proper scaling for each of its toplevel windows depending on the connected output the window is in (note: this may or may not actually be relevant to DPI - someone may have bad eyesight and want their 27" 1440p monitor to be 150% scaled) and have that be done automatically - ideally, transparently from the user's perspective - as they move windows between outputs and/or add/remove outputs (e.g. connecting/disconnecting or turning on/off a graphics tablet with an embedded monitor would add/remove an output).
Now, technically, Xorg does provide the necessary core functionality to implement the above, however the issues begin when you start considering who is going to implement it and what part of the stack is responsible for which aspect of supporting window scaling.
Ideally, what you'd want is for applications should be able to scale each of their toplevel windows arbitrarily based on notifications from the underlying system as the user interacts with the application windows (note: this is not necessarily limited to just the user moving windows between outputs - a user could, for example, select an option from their window manager to scale a window at 200% or 300% - this could be useful when doing video streaming or recording videos for example).
So, in an ideal world, the following should happen under X11/Xorg:
1. Widget toolkits can scale their widgets arbitrarily (ideally not just at fractional level but also sub-100% level too - useful when using secondary screens with a low resolution).
2. Window managers can receive RandR events for output DPI changes and use that information to maintain a scaling factor for each output (the user could also specify custom per-output scaling too).
3. As the user interacts with the windows, the window manager sends notifications to the windows/applications whenever a window needs its scale changed. The widget toolkits use these notifications to scale their windows' contents.
Ignoring a few details, the above is basically what Wayland does since it started from a clean slate where they could dictate everything from scratch.
However X11/Xorg already has a lot of software already written for it and there are a few snags in the way:
1. Pretty much no toolkit supported arbitrary scaling, so they had to be extended for it. Since Wayland needed that, toolkits that need to support it added the functionality anyway (e.g. Qt and Gtk) though not without issues along the way (AFAIK Gtk didn't support fractional scaling for a long time). Though not all toolkits have support for this.
2. Window managers must be extended to monitor outputs via RandR and send appropriate notifications whenever windows move across outputs to those windows. This would also need some new notification protocol (most likely a new version of EWMH). However...
3. ...toolkits must also be extended to support these notifications - supporting scaling isn't enough if they do not know when to scale. This introduces a problem because...
4. ...window managers will have to deal with toolkits not supporting the notifications. One way would be to just ignore them, but another way is to do the scaling themselves. However, there is another issue here.
5. When using (and having enabled) a desktop compositor scaling can be easy (especially when dealing with edge cases like a window lying across the edge between two monitors :-P), but without one, the window manager needs to scale the window itself (there was a Xorg branch by Keith Packard that introduced server-side window scaling but AFAIK it was never merged) without affecting the rest of the desktop - and of course do the appropriate coordinate transformations for various events (e.g. mouse motion). Moreover since a desktop compositor can be a separate program than a window manager (many -if not most- X11 window managers are not desktop compositors), they both need to somehow coordinate with each other.
6. Since this requires all window managers (and desktop compositors) to be updated, the inevitable result is that there will be a lot of them that will not be updated for quite some time, so applications (or realistically, widget toolkits) will need to also handle HiDPI scaling themselves by doing the RandR queries and automatically sizing their own windows based on output. This is a subpar option because the application does not know the window manager's own state and you can end up with the two "fighting" with each other. Also the window manager cannot do desktop-wide configurations (it is actually blind to them).
7. Obviously whatever protocols in place (as i wrote above, probably a new EWMH version) are used, they'll also need to let the components (window manager, widget toolkit) provide information for when any of the above are in place so the proper action is taken (e.g. a toolkit should not try to do the output tracking itself if the window manager supports it and a window manager should not try to do scaling itself if the widget toolkit supports it - but both need to inform the other about this).
As you can hopefully imagine, the above require the developers of all window managers, all desktop compositors, all widget toolkits and applications not only to coordinate with each other but also handle various cases in case the user used something in the stack that did not support things.
With Wayland since everything was done from scratch, there were less people that needed to be convinced to cooperate - and in practice since Wayland originated from RedHat and the GNOME ecosystem, convincing the appropriate GNOME and Gtk developers to cooperate was probably a coffee break away :-P. Meanwhile Qt would already need to add (or already had, not sure when it was added) support for scaling/HiDPI anyway for Windows and macOS, so the infrastructure was there.
The current situation is that Qt, currently, supports the #6 i mentioned above since it can be implemented without needing support from window managers, desktop compositors or specifying new protocols (something that seems to be much harder than it should be - e.g. AFAIK Cinnamon implemented a very trivial X attribute for displaying a percentage for windows in a taskbar/icon overlay -think of download percentage- but despite the developers' attempt to have others adopt it, i do not think it saw much adoption). But this is really the "fallback solution" when everything else is just not there, it is not the ideal one.
That said, from a technical perspective there is nothing theoretically stopping Xorg desktop environments having top-notch robust HiDPI support. What blocks everything is convincing the developers of the various components of the desktop stack to cooperate, implement and support it.
Point of order: SDDM is entirely unrelated to the KDE project.
I've been using the Breeze Dark theme for approximately forever and I've never run into the problem you're describing. However, I've very rarely used SDDM... I find its default rainbow-colored background intolerable and use LightDM instead.
Do you happen to remember configuration that you ended up having to change, and is that computer running Nvidia graphics hardware with the closed-source drivers?
Gotta be something specific to your machine - for me version 6 is way more stable than 5 was. That line would crash doing sillies things like resizing task bar or applying settings. Now I feel as good with CachyOS and Plasma 6.5.2 as I was with W2K or W7
The only issue I have on my Plasma 6 laptop is also lock-screen related: About 20% of the time keyboard input is ignored/blocked after coming back from sleep. Closing and reopening the lid usually sorts it. Haven't seen what you describe.
I did have some earlier snags which all went away after switching from Wayland session to X11 session.
I switched from Windows 10 to Nobara KDE plasma ~1 month ago. It's a Fedora based distro, so most of the Fedora documentation applies. I came from server Linux but Windows desktop (20 years or so) and I'm amazed how similar it is and reacts. It comes with Libre Office, Steam etc. pre-installed and while the Libre software is certainly different and needs getting used to - for me, coming originally from Wordperfect and Quattro Pro it was no challenge. There are some minor bugs which I attribute mostly to the Nvidia 580 graphics driver, like distorted fonts in certain mouse positions, but these are really minimal and I won't deep dive (yet) into that. Support online via discord which isn't optimal, but at least there is support.
OpenSUSE has traditionally done a bunch of work on making sure other software works well with KDE (for example patching Firefox to use the KDE file chooser). Much of that work is no longer needed with new tech like the XDG desktop portal stuff, but Tumbleweed is still a fairly solid system (up to date, stable, GUI system administration tools, automatically installs packages with AVX3 if your CPU supports it,...).
It would help to know what it is you are not loving with Mint+Cinnamon... My picks for a beginner-friendly batteries-included Linux dist for KDE:
- You can install KDE on Mint without switching distro or reinstalling[0]
- Debian (caveat: packages can be out of date if you need the latest-greatest of something)
- Fedora (caveat: two major OS upgrades per year can feel like a chore)
- EndeavourOS (caveat: Requires a bit more expertise and grease to properly maintain)
- Aurora (caveat: Still young project and I'd still consider it a bit experimental and adventerous)
- kubuntu (caveat: snaps. Accept them or learn how to disable)
KDE Linux is a thing and something to keep an eye on but it's still in alpha/beta and probably not ready for your use just yet.
[0]: Caveat: it's possible that some DE service might not be disabled properly from your old setup and conflict with KDEs variety if you keep the cinnamon packages around
The better question would be what is the best distro for you. Personally I like Debian. But I don't know enough about you and how you use your computer to say for sure what is best for you.
I used Kubuntu for years, but ultimately moved away from the Ubuntu based distros due to Canonical cruft. I haven't really missed anything going with vanilla Debian.
I've found Gentoo Linux to be a good developer- and sysadmin-oriented distro. It requires a lot more work up-front than most any other distro but -IME- once you have it running, it just keeps running and upgrading just fine. If you wish, you can even subject yourself to systemd, as that's a supported init system.
As a bonus, if you don't want to build everything from source, there are prebuilt packages available. Instructions for how to use them are in the "Installing the base system" section of the Gentoo Handbook. I've not used the Gentoo-provided prebuilt packages, but I do use my own prebuilts. I've found the process of using them to be well-documented and fairly straightforward.
Don't worry too much about distributions, they'll mostly just affect package formats and default settings, but imo Debian is the best choice for stable desktop computing, with the best overall support and community.
This happened to me when Amazon KDP's fraud prevention AI hallucinated that my Kindle version was plagiarizing my paperback (yes, it's the same book). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40992654
Unfortunately, I'm not sure a human ever really looked at my case, or was strongly disincentivized to go against the AI. I got nothing but bland, contentless denials of my appeals that got vaguer each time. And I was never able to go viral, so I'm banned from KDP for life for complete nonsense.
If it has to be Windows, just remove all the shit of Win11 yourself, set it to unattended installation with a local account, remove the hardware requirements barrier while you are at it, remove the games, controller add-ons, virus scanner and whatever else you would like to (the windows store?) and create your own LTSC.
This isn’t a solution to the problem and missing the point of the whole argument. But if it has to be Windows, I would recommend to try it.
> Then came the twist. YouTube eventually restored both videos. The platform claimed its "initial actions" (could be either the first takedown or appeal denial, or both) were not the result of automation.
The videos are back. It's also possible that a group of people "brigade" reported his posts for some reason. YouTubers attract haters, too.
So why shouldn't I use the windows 11 on the other partition that I use for games that don't run on Linux or run with degraded performance?
(Yeah, it's Nvidia, no, I didn't do my homework and bought Nvidia for a Linux PC).
While it may make sense for others, I don't find system that can lock up for 11 hours for updates suitable for anything other than occasional gaming. But why shouldn't I use it for it?
I already think twice before getting any game that doesn't run on Linux and gave EA WRC Rally a downvote after they rug pulled Linux users. (A game that run on Linux on the beginning got borked with anticheat. A racing game, so you don't cheat your friends by having 1s less on that race you all compete on).
There is no worse usage of windows than the occasional one given the huge amount of updates it starts to download whenever you start it up after a long period unused.
I guess it might be useful if you only keep it offline but in that case you aren't playing games online and thus you would be fine gaming on Linux given the only downside is lack of anticheat support.
My Windows "fun" was when it decided that the "unknown" space immediately after its little boot partition was free for it to expand into. (Imagine not being able to recognize an ext2 filesystem...) After repairing that disaster, I ensured it would never happen again by putting Windows onto its own harddrive. That's worked for a great many years.
Though, now that I've quite a bit of personal experience with how good Steam/Proton is for video games, I think I'll reclaim the surprisingly large amount of space that Windows is taking up.
But there is a harm. Just had to repair a pc of my family, because you are able to install windows 11 on a MBR Partition without EFI Boot. Has to convert it and fix some stuff, but it still starts only every second boot (srsly)
Perhaps someone at Microsoft threatened physical harm to a Google engineer if they didn't remove the videos... and they caved into their demands rather than reporting the threat, or perhaps did both.
You see, Windows 11 has new, improved, patented prevent-the-computer-from-physically-beating-up-the-user technology. But this technology requires an online account; you can't trust a local-only account to prevent the computer from beating you up, because it's on the computer in question (duh). So we prevent you from learning how to bypass the requirement for a remote account for your own physical safety.
Because the only mechanism to hold these mega corporations / billionaires accountable is government, and they're already powerful enough to have waged massive information wars convincing people to fight each other instead of them.
Because people like my mom don't know there is an alternative and people like my dad thinks OSS has ties to communism (really, I wish I was joking) and MacOS is for hipsters. Doesn't matter that I work for a FAANG company and we use and contribute to OSS or that my work laptop is a Mac.
Why should I care that much what Microsoft is doing? I sold my Windows 11 computer long ago and haven't looked back. In fact, more user-hostile they get the better that is for the Linux ecosystem which is better for me!
I think it will be better with a little bit higher marketshare, but once the masses come in they demand stuff like kernel-level anticheat, DRM and to never accidentally run things in a terminal and then it will become way worse. Linux is as user-friendly as it is, because it is used by professionals and power users and the masses use something else.
Can anyone provide any attempt at rationalizing their decision? Could your computer overheat and explode if you do this? Could hackers take over your computer and play a flashing light pattern that will give you an epileptic seizure?
You can watch the latest Hollywood movies for free on YouTube and they don't care about any copyright, but if it's for showing a genocide to the world or bypassing Windows tutorials, YouTube lost it's spirit.
This is meek and seems almost resigned. I don't understand how discourse and responses around these kinds of strange, bewildering, or stupid corporate decisions is always so nice. This corporate bullshit thrives in respectful environments where nobody needs to be afraid of being told how it is and publicly humiliated for their obviously disingenuous or stupid behavior.
When you're dealing with full-on idiots like that "support specialist" (AI?), all bets are off anyways. Might as well tell that clown that what he just said is the dumbest shit you've heard all week.
Take off the gloves and burn some bridges if you have to, the world will be better place for it.
Mount a Windows 11 ISO. Open an administrative command window. Navigate to the new drive letter. Enter this command:
I've used this to upgrade 10 to 11 on non approved hardware, going back to at least 2nd gen Intel CPUs. I've used it to upgrade existing Pro, EDU and IOT that didn't want to upgrade.The install window will say server but it isn't.
Physical harm realized because boot took eternity.
Thanks, this is great.
Just a note for others that that the language of the ISO needs to match what you used to install Windows 10.
For example, I installed Windows 10 with the "International English" ISO and if I try this with the Windows 11 "US English" ISO, then it doesn't let me do an upgrade where it keeps installed programs and drivers.
Crazy how windows 11 objectively works fine on pretty much all hardware you'd expect but Microsoft is insisting it doesn't and we need to upgrade
The unsupported CPUs lack the support for Virtualization Based Security, which is a major security feature in Windows 11.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...
They want everyone to have neo-clipper-chip "TPM"s.
My understanding is that TPM is secure, and Win 11 still supports TPM. Am I mistaken and/or misunderstanding your statement that Microsoft is enforcing a hardware requirement with a known back door?
TPM can be secure. But secure for whom against what? Microsoft and “against you” are not implausible answers to that question…
TPM is not secure. At all. At least when when you’re using Windows.
https://youtu.be/t1eX_vvAlUc
Do you also have a source thats not a youtuber? Would be far more interesting to read on apparently it being a spy chip rather than just a HSM.
Here's a significantly more credible (stacksmashing) video that demonstrates how ineffective some TPM implementations are. If the TPM was integrated into the CPU die, this attack would likely not be possible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTl4vEednkQ
Despite the TPM being a pretty good and useful idea as a secure enclave for storing secrets, I'm concerned that giving companies the ability to perform attestation of your system's "integrity" will make the PC platform less open. We may be headed towards the same hellscape that we are currently experiencing with mobile devices.
Average folks aren't typically trying to run Linux or anything, so most people wouldn't even notice if secure boot became mandatory over night and you could only run Microsoft-signed kernels w/ remote attestation. Nobody noticed/intervened when the same thing happened to Android, and now you can't root your device or run custom firmware without crippling it and preventing the use of software that people expect to be able to use (i.e. banking apps, streaming services, gov apps, etc.).
Regardless, this is more of a social issue than a technical issue. Regulatory changes (lol) or mass revolt (also somewhat lol) would be effective in putting an end to this. The most realistic way would be average people boycotting companies that do this, but I highly doubt anyone normal will do that, so this may just be the hell we are doomed for unless smaller manufacturers step up to the plate to continue making open devices.
It’s not like these things aren’t publically documented by Microsoft.
You just need to be able to translate their doublespeak.
Apparently not.
Sure let’s just centralize hardware attestation to Microsoft’s cloud tied to a Microsoft account with keys you can’t change what could possibly go wrong?
This is all publicly documented by Microsoft you just need to translate their doublespeak.
Google is doing does the exact same thing and people were sounding the alarms when they did it but Microsoft gets a pass?
Use ChaGPT to outsource your critical thinking for you because I’m not gonna do it.
I've looked into this fella before because he didn't pass the smell test. He's running a grift selling schlocky cell phones and cloud services. His videos are excessively clickbait-y and show minimal understanding of the actual tech, it's more or less concentrated disinformation and half-understood talking points. GrapheneOS devs also had something to say about him: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/20165-response-to-dishonest...
Secure against what threat model?
They are lying to make money. It's a common tactic.
No they will make the same money either way because they are selling the OS, not the hardware. They are requiring only newer hardware to limit their surface of exploitation and reduce their compatibility list.
Microsoft and their OWM partners sell hardware and have done so for a very long time.
They might sell more Windows 11 if it ran on more hardware. How does this make them money?
It's worth asking, but I think there's an answer: they want the OS to be transformed into an interface to their cloud where recurring revenue is easier. To do that, they need to make it more like a mobile OS and more locked down. TPM helps this.
> They might sell more Windows 11 if it ran on more hardware. How does this make them money?
Given the free Win 7/8->10->11 upgrade path, almost every end user who'd want a Windows license probably already has one. This leaves enterprise licensing and computer manufacturers (laptops, mini-PCs, desktops), who wouldn't care about this because they'll have newer hardware anyway.
Dropping windows 10 support is a pretty big lever to apply pressure to get people to upgrade to 11. Oh turns out you also “need” to buy new hardware to run it.
Dropping windows 10 support is a really reasonable decision. The focus is on 11, it's been out for almost 5 years. I'm guessing they are close to releasing 12 at this point, maybe in a year or two. Supporting three entire fully fledged oses is quite alot of work. I also understand supporting newer hardware, they dropped 32bit on 11 and moved the instruction set up a bit. You gotta do a cutoff somewhere and I'm happy that they are at least allowing us to use the improved performance our modern CPUs have. I'm not happy with alot of stuff, but I get this at least.
I'd argue it's probably time to drop 32-bit x86 support, but the rest of this stuff is arbitrary and doesn't have any tangible benefit except conveniently providing hardware manufacturers with an excuse to unload new hardware onto people when there's nothing wrong with what they have. (not to mention, pardon the conspiracy theory, they're probably trying to use the TPM to turn the PC into a smartphone-like platform)
Does this work with 25H2? I haven't tried it yet.
Yes. I've done Win10 to Win11 with a 25H2 ISO. I've also used it to push 24H2 to 25H2 when WU wasn't offering the upgrade.
Thanks. Good to know it still works. I've got a few unsupported machines I need (ugh, not want) to do.
Schneegans.de autounattend XML files generator
> Rich appealed both immediately. The first appeal was denied in 45 minutes. The second in just five.
> The platform claimed its "initial actions" (could be either the first takedown or appeal denial, or both) were not the result of automation.
Didn't know YouTube can improve their review time from 45 minutes to 5 minutes without automation. I bet it's pure magic.
I'm sure someone is figuring out a new version of the DMCA that prohibits circumventing data collection "in the name of preserving copyright".
If the DRM can't spy on you, you could be a pirate!
I am reading that to mean that they are automatically denying the appeals because it was a human who chose to take the action so it can’t be appealed.
I mean... documenting the details of the investigation to support the first decision and relying on the documented details the second time would easily explain that.
I would love but probably be horrified to see the documented support for "serious physical harm or death".
Google censors the world, together with Microsoft.
Well - it is time that the rest of the world censors these two corporation. I don't want them to restrict information.
People will find workarounds by the way. This is now a Streisand effect - as people see that Google and Microsoft try to hide information from them, they will now look at this much more closely than before, with more attention.
(Having said that, my bypass strategy is to not use Windows 11 altogether. I don't depend on it, having used Linux since 21 years now, but my machine to the left is actually using Win10, for various reasons, such as that I can fix problems of elderly relatives still using Windows. But I won't use Win11 ever with its recall-spy software. I also don't care that it can be disabled - any corporation that tries to sniff-invade on me, is evil and must be banned.)
Edit: Ok so the video was restored. That was good, but still, we need an alternative here. Google holds WAY too much power via youtube.
> This is now a Streisand effect - as people see that Google and Microsoft try to hide information from them
This comment section is wild.
The videos are up. Microsoft and Google weren't meeting in secret backrooms to censor this one channel. The most likely explanation is that a competing channel was trying to move their own videos up in the rankings by mass-reporting other videos on the topic.
It's a growing problem on social media platforms: Cutthroat channels or influencers will use alt accounts or even paid services to report their competition. They know that with enough reports in a short period of time they can get the content removed for a while, which creates a window for their own content to get more views.
The clue is the "risk of physical harm". People who abuse the report function know that the report options involving physical harm, violence, or suicide are the quickest way to get content taken down.
A tale as old as time. A long time ago I worked in DDoS prevention and the bulk of our first customers were competing gambling sites and online eyeglass retailers.
Why? Because they were all paying people to DDoS each other. Kinda silly, but good for business.
Eyeglass retailers are scum of the earth so no surprises there.
As I have limited dealings with eyeglass retailers, why ?
Selling a 2$ piece of metal wire and a 15$ lens of polycarbonate for obscene markups.
It’s also a monopoly, luxottica owns practically all brands and dictates the prices.
> 2$ and 15$
That estimate is way to high. More like 90 eurocents (~$1) for the whole thing, assembled. That's retail price:
https://www.action.com/de-de/search/?q=lesebrillen
I never thought I’d live to see the day a link to Action got posted on HN but alas, it has arrived! Show those Dollar General losers across the pond how it’s really done
lol. Available languages include 4 kinds of Dutch/German, 3 kinds of French, 2 kinds of Netherlands, 2 kinds of Swiss, 1 kind of Spanish, and no English. Really defined their market, I suppose.
Zenni Optical is the antidote. Even my too-blind-for-Zeiss-VisionPro-inserts prescription in the highest refractive index lenses is under $100 for a full pair.
The landscape is a little different now than then.
At the time(and really, even now) people would get their eyeglasses from their local provider. Who cares, insurance probably covers some or all of it. Even getting contacts or glasses as a prescription was like pulling teeth, since they wanted to keep it in house.
So the new market of get your prescription, then buy online was born. And it was like the wild west, not full of eye care professionals but...mostly less than above board places all fighting for your click.
Think about it...if you finally decide to Google eyeglass frames or such, you were entering a whole new realm. And why fight over SEO, when you can just take your competition offline, as most people will click a link, watch it load for 5s, then click back and try the next.
I have no idea if the industry is still shady or not, but 20 years ago, it was full of nothing but bad actors.
I don't know if it matters at all to the conversation or not, but none of the actors(gambling or eyeglasses) were based in the US, despite their domain names and courting US customers. The DDoS company was based in the US.
Just a reminder that "insurance covers" doesn't mean society doesn't pay for it: all the people pay for it. The insurance company paying causes prices raises for everyone else, same country and abroad. So the whole world ends up paying more for that "insurance coverage": more for the product, more for the insurance, more in taxes that fund public free healthcare...
> Microsoft and Google weren't meeting in secret backrooms to censor this one channel
That's not the argument IMO. They don't have to be intentionally malicious in each action. A drunk driver doesn't want to kill a little girl in the road. Their prior choices shape the outcome of their later options. A drunk driver decides to get behind the wheel after drinking. A large company makes a decision to make more profit knowing there are repercussions and calculating the risk.
The DMCA laws prescribe the process. Google (or any other party) isn’t allowed to decide for themselves what is or is not a valid DMCA complaint.
Complain to Congress, they’re the ones who set this up to work this way.
This isn't a copyright issue. DMCA doesn't apply.
False DMCA claims are commonly used to take down videos like this.
And were not in this case.
Cite?
Read the article.
The article has no sources, and is in fact entirely hearsay near as I can see. They don’t even attribute their quotes, and there is no screenshots I can see of these supposed notices either.
So they might be right, they might be wrong - it might as well be a Twitter post.
> They don’t even attribute their quotes, and there is no screenshots I can see of these supposed notices either.
You'd see them, if you read the article. Look for the big image with the caption saying "Source:".
I should warn you that you'll have to make it through seven (7) sentences of text before you get there.
As a side note, not a single word of your comment just now is true. Did you think no one would notice?
I looked through it, and saw none of that. I did see at least a dozen ads though. Maybe it got lost in all that BS?
Edit: it’s a tiny text chip embedded in a reaction video type image in what looks like yet another ad, that actually showed up hidden by 2 other actual ads when it loaded.
I was just reading the text, because wtf.
Have you considered you’re just being a jerk?
Have you?
> they’re the ones who set this up to work this way.
Who lobbied for it to work that way? I'm assuming google aren't entirely innocent here.
The DMCA is from 1998. I don’t think Larry and Sergei were taking a break from inventing google so they could lobby congress from their Stanford dorm room.
From what I remember Google fought against DMCA abuse by media companies and lost.
Google had only been founded a month before, I don't think they had vast lobbying powers yet!
So Google is between a rock and a hard place here.
If they don't react quickly and decisively to reports of "possible physical harm", even if the reports seem unfounded, they'll eventually get the NY Times to say that somebody who committed suicide "previously watched a video which has been reported to Youtube multiple times, but no action was taken by Google."
You can act quickly and decisively and also correctly. Take the average number of reports per day times the average length of a reported segment times two, divide effective work hours per day by that number and hire that many people to process reports. Congrats, your average time to resolution is 24 hours.
If that's too expensive, your platform is broken. You need to be able to process user reports. If you can't, rethink what you're doing.
Not saying you’re wrong in this particular instance, but there are all sorts of areas where we accept that harm will occur at scale (e.g. that 40,000 people per year die in motor-vehicle incidents just in the US). How do we determine what is reasonable to expect?
We require auto manufacturers to include certain safety features in their vehicles, to decrease deaths to a socially acceptable level.
The central ill of centralized web platforms is that the US never mandated customer/content SLAs in regulation, even as their size necessitated that as a social good. (I.e. when they became 'too big for alternatives to be alternatives')
It wouldn't be complicated:
Google, Meta, Apple, Steam, Amazon, etc. could all be better, more effective platforms if they spent more time and money on resolution.As-is, they invest what current law requires, and we get the current situation.
Please explain what kind of magic your solution uses to ensure that reports always come in at a perfectly even pace without any peaks or valleys. Because without that, your proposed approach will not work.
Perhaps the current process becomes the backlog management system. This isn’t an insurmountable problem, were the incentives in place.
It’s even worse when you think about what happens when it’s NOT English + NOT mainstream content.
I really wish someone could tell me that either
1) Yes we can make a system that enables functional and effective customer support (because this is what this case is about) no matter the language
2) No we can’t because it’s fundamentally about manpower which can match the context with actual harm.
Whatever I suspect, having any definitive answer to this decides how these problems need to eventually be solved. Which in turn tells us what we should ask and hope for.
> a system that enables functional and effective customer support
I'm not saying that it's humans, but it's humans.
Augmented by technology, but the only currently viable arbitrator of human-generated edge cases is another human.
If a platform can't afford to hire moderation resources to do the job effectively (read: skilled resources in enough quantity to make effective decisions), then it's not a viable business.
> They know that with enough reports in a short period of time they can get the content removed for a while
This can be accomplished with bogus dmca notices too. Since google gets such a high volume of notices the default action is just to shoot first and ask questions later. Alarmingly, there are 0 consequences (financial or legal) for sending bogus dmca notices
it is a weapon the music industry wanted, but now has this unintended consequence.
I think it's high time google stopped acting as judge jury and executioner in the court of copyright enforcement.
The law says they have to.
The law also says a counter claim can be immediately filed. Google don’t follow that part.
Google has nothing to do with filing a counter claim except accepting it if filed. The content owner is the only one who is allowed to file it.
They have a history of removing videos that describe things they don't like under the guise of "harm", eg Linus Tech Tips video on De-Googling your life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apdZ7xmytiQ
YouTube claim these were not automated actions. This explicitly rules out "algorithm/LLM makes a stupid mistake" but also seems to rule out "hits a threshold of community reports and gets automatically taken down pending manual review".
Also, it doesn't even need to be collusion between Microsoft and Google, but to pretend like that's never a thing is to be ignorant of history.
Stop defending these big companies for these things. Even if your version of the story is true, the fact they allow their platform to be abused this way is incredibly damaging to content creators trying to spread awareness of issues.
But also, do you seriously think there is a massive amount of competition at the scale of a 330k subscriber channel for people to bother pulling off this kind of attack for two videos on bypassing Windows 11 account and hardware requirements?
Regardless of what happened here, Google is to blame at least for the tools they have made.
As for Microsoft, I don't think there's anything disagreeable with saying that they've tried hard to get people to switch to hardware with their TPM implementation and lying about the reasons. Likewise for forcing Microsoft accounts on people. I am not certain they were involved in this case, but they created the need for this kind of video to exist, so they are also implicated here.
> But also, do you seriously think there is a massive amount of competition at the scale of a 330k subscriber channel for people to bother pulling off this kind of attack for two videos on bypassing Windows 11 account and hardware requirements
Enough to cause this behavior. I don’t know if theres a mathematical or organization law or something, but it seems like theres always a way to abuse review mechanisms for large communities / sites.
Never enough manpower to do review for each case. Or reviews take a long time.
> Never enough manpower to do review for each case.
Manpower at a given salary cost.
All content platforms could throw more money at this problem, hire more / more skilled reviewers, and create better outcomes. Or spend less and get worse.
It's a choice under their control, not an inevitability.
Your theory is baseless given that YouTube claimed that decisions weren't automated:
> The platform claimed its "initial actions" (could be either the first takedown or appeal denial, or both) were not the result of automation.
YouTube frequently claims this and are frequently caught lying. (Oh, you really watched this one hour video and reached your decision in an email sent 96 seconds after the appeal was submitted? Yeah okay...)
They'll silently fix the edge case in the OP and never admit it was any kind of algorithmic (OR human) failure.
I'm aware that there's a chance that Google is lying, I'm just pointing out that their comment doesn't make any sense if they believe that Google deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Stop making so much sense
Either that or microsoft and/or google will send someone to my house to Raymond Reddington my ass if I install W11 with only a local account.
The problem here is that companies seems to not be the wiser to such tactics and creators are left holding the bag by such aggression.
Content hosts are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they take their time and are cautious with reports, people end up swamped with garbage that people complain about. If they try to be quick to clean up the garbage, some clean stuff get caught and people complain.
The only frequent obvious problem I see is Youtube not telling people why their videos get hidden or taken down or down ranked. Long time creators get left in the dark from random big changes to the platform that could be solved with an email.
What became of the old ruse of simply not listening to contents that one find objectionable? Now it needs to be nuked from orbit yesterday to make sure nobody's pure eyes glance at it.
The world got more connected and we all had to suffer the consequences of other people consuming propaganda, so we decided it should be banned, except for the ones who consume it, who decided the same process should be used to ban reality and only allow propaganda.
In the olden days this would simply be solved by... having customer support befitting the size of the company. Of course nowadays that's "inneficient".
We have companies with billions of customers but smaller customer service than a mid-sized retailer from the 90s. Something is not right.
Google, Facebook etc does have support for some customers. If you have a $10m a year advertising account with them I’m sure you’ll have an account manager.
People posting on these sites as content creators aren’t customers.
This is the problem.
IME it's especially bad with Admob. They've purposefully kept their email contact option broken for years and the only "help" you can access is from their forum, which is the absolute worst and never provides any meaningful resolutions. It's awful.
Companies listen to small claims lawsuits.
They are absolutely aware of these sorts of abuses. I'll bet my spleen that it shows up as a line item in the roadmapping docs of their content integrity/T&S teams.
The root problem is twofold: the inability to reliably automate distinguishing "good actor" and "bad actor", and a lack of will to throw serious resources at solving the problem via manual, high precision moderation.
The law doesn’t allow companies to do anything other than what they are doing.
The problem I see with that attitude is that it's excusing companies with immense profits from having even the tiniest modicum of actual human review for things.
As long as the bad behavior is profitable, platforms aren't going to fix it: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10...
In certain niches, the marginal value of kneecapping the competition exceeds the viable budget for counteracting gaming. It may be a quirk of this reality’s hyperparameters that a UGC media monopoly inevitably suffers from this. Or maybe at a certain point it hits their bottom line and better enforcement is contrived.
Thank you for the sane reply
People are so quick to assume conspiracy because it is mentally convenient
The video was restored because of the noise the takedown created. Small creators have no voice and for every big channel that can ignite a PR backlash there are potentially thousands that would disappear without trace or chances to be restored. YouTube has been unreliable for years, but AI just makes it even more so; how could one base their business on such an unprofessional and unstable partner that appears managed by kids with too much power in their hands? An alternative is badly needed asap.
> The video was restored because of the noise the takedown created.
Source:
> Rich appealed both immediately. The first appeal was denied in 45 minutes. The second in just five. > The platform claimed its "initial actions" (could be either the first takedown or appeal denial, or both) were not the result of automation.
If they claim that a non automated review occurred but then still took down/denied appeal, what caused them to change course?
What is your source that the restoration of the video was not because of the noise?
Pattern recognition, an innate skill in most humans. When most bogus takedowns are not reversed, but the more people you see talking about them, the more likely they are to get reversed, you can easily see the pattern.
Elderly relatives are the best candidate for switching to linux.
They need to do what? Browser, zoom, email client. They are never going to install anything.
All of these have great options on linux, and they work just as well.
Just put them on Debian stable and be done with it.
Yep. While my mom was working she needed too many Windows-only applications. But once she retired, I set her up with a Linux desktop and it's been smooth sailing.
I installed them Mint and they said it's better than Windows due to all the built-in free apps (like public TV)
I installed Debian (with Mate desktop) for 3 different elderly ladies.
All 3 give it a solid thumbs up. "It never crashes", "It's so easy", "It's fast", "None of that Windows bs".
I installed zorin on an old machine that was given to me because it wouldn’t run win 11. I like it a lot. Debian based, clean smooth UI. Just tell them Microsoft improved the user experience with windows 11.
X X Windows L.E. => (e)X X Windows (Wayland) L.E. (Linux Edition)
Even the one major 'windows' app that my mom needs to use is going Web only... so I figure if I install Debian Stable + Widevine that'll cover 99.9% of the use case and I gain an OS that just works correctly.
Chromebook.
A locked in Google platform while Google is helping Microsoft implement mass data collection...
Most of them can be turned into a vanilla linux laptop fairly easily, and even support custom coreboot firmware: https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/
That being said, it's also pretty easy to get a full linux shell and even install gui apps via flatpak or whatever.
So that all your chat history with the relative goes straight to train Google ads? No, thanks.
Chromebook is absolute garbage
i think a good ubuntu is a bit better than just debian for this. probably linux mint or kubuntu. for just debian, then mint debian edition or mx linux would be best, imo
> imo
Any particular reasons?
i just fret about grandma using plain debian. my first thought is i want to give her puppy linux. it's probably fine if she lives in firefox though.
Linux is under control of the same companies
Besides, all major distributions (Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu) ship with a shim signed by Microsoft, and systemd..
*BSD is the only escape, but for how long?
I feel your passion, but I feel this is a little hyperbolic? I feel your passion is directed more at UEFI secure-boot than at Linux. I am no lover of the UEFI secure-boot world, using shims as a first-stage boot loader component whose job is to bridge the firmware’s trusted key infrastructure (typically Microsoft’s signing key) to a Linux (or other non-Windows) bootloader/kernel chain.
> Linux is under control of the same companies
Linux is indeed open source, so are you trying to say that "Linux is EFFECTIVELY under control of the same companies VIA UEFI WITH SECURE BOOT ENABLED"? Or is there a big-Tech cabal controlling Linux in another manner? I get that most big-Tech companies are major contributors to open source projects.
> all major distributions (Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu) ship with a shim signed by Microsoft
Having a shim signed by Microsoft makes no difference if these distributions are being installed on hardware without UEFI firmware implemented on the motherboard’s SPI flash e.g. motherboards from Purism (Librem Laptops), System76 (Thelio, Galago Pro, etc.), Framework Laptop (2021 →), Star Labs, Raspberry Pi / Single-Board Computers and uncountable DIY PC builds with motherboards (ASUS, ASRock, Gigabyte, etc.) that expose Secure Boot options. It is usually only when consumer hardware is being used from major OEMs (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.) that ship with only Microsoft’s key in the firmware trust database.
> and systemd
You are suggesting that “systemd” is also part of the lock-in or control (in your mind) of those distributions. But strictly in the context of shim and Secure Boot, systemd is not the same issue: systemd is an init-system/process manager in userland, not part of the firmware/boot loader signature infrastructure. Major distros use systemd, so from a “vendor/lock-in” narrative they may lump bootloader trust and systemd governance together. But strictly speaking your assertion is more of a opinion/ideological piece than a formal technical dependency.
> *BSD is the only escape
Not true. Not all Linux distributions use it — Tails, Qubes OS, PureOS, Alpine, Void, Gentoo, etc., deliberately avoid it. Most minimalistic, privacy, or DIY distributions refuse the Microsoft-signed shim route because their users are expected to control their firmware settings or use owner-controlled keys.
Windows 10 is also the stop I'm getting off at. Windows 11 does not serve me and it does not suit my needs. Windows 10 was not too great either, debloated was somewhat manageable to run on one of my machines. It's inertia of all these years, my first windows installation was Win 95. But Windows 11 is a horror show I don't want take part in and warn anyone that could be tricked into using to stay away.
kde is fun!
so is xfce but i'm too old for tweaking so much
I love xfce. It is so stable and practical.
Also Visa/Mastercard are big silencers…
What do you mean?
Payments providers engage in censorship and moral policing, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...
I realize crypto has become dominated by the investment community, but money is not just a store of value. As a medium of exchange, fiat currencies use money to implement monetary policy and control. Electronic exchange of fiat currency is a permission based activity, and significant transactions are simply disallowed and users often debanked. You don't have to wait for a monetary system to collapse before crypto has meaningful value. That value can come from simply not being subject to corrupt monetary policies and control.
The first instance that I remember was when they stopped Wikileaks from taking donations back then.
Nowadays they censor by putting pressure (by denying payment capabilities) on sites that offer content that they dont agree with.
Possibly referring to them pressuring companies from selling adult contact they dont like by threatening to cut off payment capability.
> Google censors the world
It’s literally their mission: to organize the worlds information.
We just didn’t understand it at the time.
It wouldn't be the first time that something gets posted on HN and then miraculously is resolved.
As the article notes, it was already resolved, and that happened five days ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45744503
and what phone do you use? There's no way out from that perspective (apple included), privacy and interoperability should not be mutually exclusive.
Maybe not totally related but I remember a comment from few years which lets say, was "dismissed" at the time by votes where user said that Google doesn't innovate when it comes to web standards but pushes own agenda by planted people at W3C. To ensure their browser will work for them and not for the user.
Microsoft on the other hand seems to be reheating the old Palladium/Trusted Computing concept enhanced now by Copilot. This idea was already criticized over 20 years ago as a dangerous attempt of turning desktop machines to uncontrollable appliances which would run only approved software and serve, access approved safe content rigged with DRM. And frankly, with all this play with chat control, age verification it's hard to not see some similarities. Maybe that's where this is all going.
Microsoft is just a video game company to me, I can live without its products and be happier. With Google though, things are bit different, they have Google Maps and YouTube, which I use nearly on daily basis. I can probably replace Google Maps with something else, even though that will probable be a downgrade in terms of user experience, however replacing YouTube is impossible, so many unique content in it.
(a big) But YouTube has grown to be such a monopoly, that they now dictate what we are going to be able to watch on the web.
This is sadly so hard to change, so many creators are now literally working "for" YouTube, and there are so many quality videos there.
Replacing YouTube with a drop-in substitution is obviously impossible, but it's not that hard to replace with a different hobby. I've never used YouTube to any significant degree, and manage pretty well without it.
Same. It is quite difficult for me to understand the current YouTube addiction... I can go literally years without even opening it.
You can replace the frontent yt-dlp invidious mpv etc
I think it's only a matter of time before youtube starts injecting ads directly into the video stream, and only allow streaming it at the actual playback speed.
They might even put the ads in different places for different users to throw off things like Sponsorblock.
Its wild to me that you watch enough YouTube to care, but won't pay for it. Its a service, either pay or put up with the ads.
Every single video platform that has ever existed has added ads after some number of users are paying.
Also you can block the ads so you have the third option.
And if YouTube do that then I will unsubscribe. Just like I did with Amazon.
Until that point I’ll continue to pay. Content creators tell me they get more income from premium subscribers too so win-win.
The problem for me is that "enough to care" is like a video every couple months. $8/video is poor value.
Fair enough. Thats why there is an ad supported version.
I consider my time to be valuable, and really hate ads though so removing even a few minutes of ads are worth the $8 to me.
What is so much of value in YouTube that you cannot live without? The platform has turned into clickbait conspiracy board, exactly because creators are trying to adapt to the algorithm. Apart from fun gaming channels, there are very few channels where you can actually learn something. It’s mostly noise.
I’m having much more trouble imagining life without Google Maps that without YouTube.
Google Maps is garbage as well, full of inaccurate shit or meme stuff people added but the process of getting it fixed has been made worse and worse over the years.
The report system has been gimped massively,can't even type in reasons any more just have to select from some limited options and hope for the best. Took me over half a year of reporting a permanent street closure near me for them to actually change it and all the whole they were happy to direct people and cars down it . Other times they just outright reject reports without any reason.
Directions have got more sucky over the years.
More and more advertising has creeped into the maps as well, seeing the logos for stores and restaurants over other places and when zoomed out because they paid to be boosted.
I only use Google for street view and, on google earth, for historical aerial imagery these days, not for navigation. For that I use apps that use OSM like Organic Maps or now CoMaps.
Google Maps has a practical value. I know why I use it - I want to get to somewhere, I open the app, type my destination and I'm given a route. Most of the times it has worked very well, in numerous different countries that I visited.
I find it hard to extract the same practical value from YouTube. There have been cases where I would see how people repair stuff and to some degree it has been useful but it is hard to find that "useful" type of video you look for among all the noise. Product review videos are always kind of fishy, because reviewers are mostly sponsored. So I can't quite get to extract anything of great value from YouTube.
Btw, thank you for the Organic Maps tip. Looks really really cool!
I've had a pretty good experience with OpenStreetMap to replace Google Maps. For YouTube it depends on your needs. If it's just entertainment there's Nebula, Odysee, Nicovideo, Twitch, Dailymotion, et cetera. For more educational content the alternatives can be a bit hit-or-miss.
That said, YouTube has been auto-dubbing videos using an algorithm that overdubs English spoken by people with an accent, which I consider discriminatory (if not outright racist), so I'm trying the various alternatives now. In a few months I think I'll have more of an opinion about them.
> (Having said that, my bypass strategy is to not use Windows 11 altogether. I don't depend on it, having used Linux since 21 years now,
I'm not quite that cool, but I have been using it full time since about 2009, so I'm not too far behind :)
The only time that I have to use Windows is because I have to play tech support for my parents, because despite considerable effort on my end, I have been completely unsuccessful at convincing them to move to Linux or Mac. It's a little annoying, because when I bring up the subject they act like I should just "live and let live", but that's a really stupid argument when they're saying this while I am fixing their computer. Somehow this is lost on them.
I have complained about this a bunch of times on here, but I'll say it again: If you work on Windows Update, then you should consider any career other than software engineer. Windows Update has made the world a worse place because it disincentivizes updating your computer, leading to an increase in open. Update software isn't allowed to suck.
Obviously it depends on your relationship, but it's not really nice of them to insist on your tech support like this AND refuse to make it easier for you AND be ungrateful (?) for it. You could set a date after which you won't help anymore unless they switch to Linux or Mac.
The reality is most people don’t care about this.
And if they do care they will find workarounds as you said.
Nothing will change, the frog has been sitting in boiling water for more than a generation now and the newbloods never experienced the computational freedom you hold dear; they will happily use whatever corporate surveillance technology is being forced upon them. They will even defend it to the bone if you try to take it away
What if they censor you for a good reason. Is it ok then?
most games run in Ubuntu with steam now, Google workspace replaced excel for the great majority of tasks online and I ubuntu improved a lot drivers support.
I'm happy to work in Linux and see the great improvements they did thru decades
I'm a bit of an LLM skeptic but chatgpt could probably explain this kind of thing pretty well and a) it's interactive so you can ask if you don't understand a step b) there will be no filler to pad the content for ads (well not at the moment anyway)
Anyone still using Windows for anything but gaming is an idiot.
Unfortunately, this brings an obvious question:
If they sensor something like this, how could we trust platforms with the actually important subjects?
We can’t anymore. Simple as that.
I agree with this except for the "anymore" part. We never could trust them. It just wasn't as obvious before as it is now.
we put way too much faith in them. It's easy to fake authoritative when your substance is virtual.
Suppose we hadn't done so; what alternative method of disseminating information might we have used, that would have had within a few orders of magnitude of the same reach?
The implication here is that YouTube enabled the reach it got; whereas in reality the reach was induced because of the faith we put in it. Had we not done so, then whatever alternative method of communication we did put our faith in - like blog posts, or self-hosting videos - would have had the same reach.
lol, the evening news was always a laugh if you knew anything about the subject matter.
We can't and we shouldn't, these people only care about making more money, even if it means teenagers contracting diseases in the process. They are then using the money to shape the public opinion about them. The societal norms should change in a way that makes these people miserable the more they are successful IMHO.
I'm not even sure I know who Billie Eilish really is but she was all over Reddit for telling billionaires to donate their money.
More or less, the charitable and responsible approach to being ultra-rich, and which has disappeared in this century.
I see the people in charge of these big corporations as lizards, given every decision they take seems to be anti-Humanity. We should cherish non-profits, small businesses, having a good and boring life, doing normal things. Instead we idolise being successful, rich, or famous. What a stupid system…
> trust platforms
Framing it in terms of trust is already problematic.
We don't trust the NYTimes or Washington Post, they are a source of information that needs to be taken with shovels of salt and require additional research to get to anything trustworthy. And we always understood that was their role.
We don't trust supermarkets or retailers to give us important pricing information, we do the research to get anything actionable.
Why is trust involved for YouTube ?
Because unlike NYT or Washington post, anybody can upload a video in seconds, which implies a reasonable level of freedom of speech.
How is freedom of speech lead to trust? it's more the opposite, when it's free for all anyone can lie and have their lie amplified.
*censor
We can't. From COVID to wars, YouTube is like public access TV from the 80s with scam preachers. We have to take it with a bucket of salt.
They removed hundreds of videos documenting Israel's human rights violations.
The answer is no, we can't.
like they did during COVID
This implies we could ever trust them.
You can’t.
You can't, and this was readily apparent in 2020 with Covid. Even doctors presenting factual information got censored and de-platformed by YouTube.
The only real competing video platform that promises no censorship is Rumble ( https://rumble.com ), but it has a very right-wing slant due to conservatives flocking to it during all the Covid-era social media censorship.
Yeah the moment they started I knew it was doomed to fail. Get it wrong once and your credibility is ruined. They should have never tried to censor content outside of what is legally required and therefore defined.
I kind of agree but laws vary from countries to countries. It's quite an hassle to know what is legal in one country and not in another.
Take freedom of speech for instance, half the thing you can say in usa would be deemed as hate speech in Europe.
> promises no censorship... has a very right-wing slant
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
If you want to avoid censorship, self-host Peertube and have peave of mind.
That's just self censorship, since no one will see your videos there
You can do both.
odysee is similar but maybe with more of an anarchist/conspiracy theory slant than rumble
I looked at the front page alone and it's full of right wing hot takes and neo-nazis. If a platform wants to accept white-supremacists that's one thing. When it's right on their front page though it's being actively promoted.
Rumble isn't going to save the internet.
Right, it is explicitly a neo-Nazi platform
>Right, it is explicitly a neo-Nazi platform
We call those "free speech" platforms nowadays, because apparently the only free speech is Nazi speech.
Those of you who don't use Linux as a daily driver: why?
What do you need in Windows that is not possible in Linux? Its slowness to justify your 40-hour work week?
If Windows keeps going in this direction, I will try again.
But in the past 20 years I tried using Linux on the desktop a couple of times.
It always ends the same way - out of the blue it refuses to boot. Of course there's usually a solution, but I just really don't like that my PC can just suddenly decide that I'll be troubleshooting for the rest of the day, usually in front of some very minimal "maintenance" CLI. And that's if I got the time - I may have to use my laptop for the rest of the week, now dreading the weekend instead of welcoming it.
Right now I'd have to do a bunch of research first. Would I still be able to play all the games I play with my friends once a week? I have 3 monitors, one of them has a different DPI than the others, did they fix that by now? I got a stream deck, will that be essentially useless? Is my webcam / mic supported? Do I need to learn about various audio architectures before I can ever use a mic again? Which ones of the dozens of apps I use every day can be made to run under Linux?
It'll probably take a 40-hour work week to get to like 90% of where I was on Windows, and then I'd consider myself lucky that I got that much to work at all. And then I'd start waiting for the first "troubleshooting day".
With all that negativity I have to also say that I adore Linux on the server. When all you need in terms of hardware is basically a CPU and any number of storage devices and all you get in terms of UI is SSH, Linux is far superior to anything else.
Because it doesn’t work reliably on the surface pro 4. Yes, I have tried surface-linux, and no it doesn’t work well enough. When shutting down, the machine actually doesn’t shut down and my battery was dead the next morning. The boot process sometimes hangs. The OS doesn’t properly differentiate between finger and stylus. It doesn’t seem to do palm recognition. Etc…
I know this is a special case: hardware with specific Microsoft firmware. But I imagine that other people have other specific cases.
Software that's unavailable on Linux? That I use literally all day, every day?
I get that's a car-aazy answer, but here I am.
Distros like Mint, Ubuntu, Bluefin, etc all annoy me to the same extent as Windows.
Distros like Arch, NixOS (my current laptop driver) or even Debian require a bunch of tinkering to get some things to behave properly.
Also, I get tired of all the tech "reboots", eg the 3 or 4 different ways of setting up network or DNS, pipewire vs pulseaudio vs whatever, Wayland vs X11, etc.
> require a bunch of tinkering to get some things to behave properly
> the 3 or 4 different ways of setting up network or DNS, pipewire vs pulseaudio vs whatever, Wayland vs X11, etc
Sounds like a problem with your distribution. I've been on openSUSE Tumbleweed for years and I've never had to tinker with any of those.
It was the same problems on the Fedora and Ubuntu since ever (I have Linux-based work laptop). Also on Fedora i had to upgrade very slowly, so they could release bugfixes - stable new releases were always crippling my ** Dell somehow.
Easier to work on than Windows but my Linux pisses me off every day.
Problems with docks, forgetting all monitor setups except for the last dock (I use three, two at the office, one at home), Zoom ALWAYS having problems with screensharing, Network Manager issues since forever (can't VPN like a human being, have to use vpnc like an animal), etc, etc.
I've been using openSUSE Tumbleweed for years and while it is decently stable, it is far from perfect.
For example i think the first issue any new user will face is with many codecs not being available in the official repository distros, making various sites (and video plays) unusable. The solution to that one is simple, add packman, which is a community repository that contains all codecs - but IIRC packman is not mentioned anywhere during the install, it is something you need to search for (it is in the wiki). However, packman very often conflicts with the official repos when it comes to updates, making all GUI-based ones (that do not seem to handle cross-repo conflicts like zypper) pretty much unusable as they always give up in the presence of a conflict. And unfortunately some comments i've seen (mainly on Reddit) from people working on the distro seem to indicate at least a minor hostility towards using packman, so i do not see this being solved any time soon.
For an experienced Linux user this is a trivial issue, something that i doubt most (long time) openSUSE Tumbleweed users would even think about, but for someone new to Linux it can be a larger issue they wont find in distros like Debian (though they may find other issues :-P).
There have been other issues i had with openSUSE Tumbleweed, like -e.g- at some point after an update every 3D game had some significant input lag regardless of vsync state. I never solved that one, i just rolled back updates (snapper is great for that, but again an advanced Linux user feature) until at some point -months later- the problem stopped happening. Though now i have another issue where the X server randomly starts not updating the screen for random numbers of milliseconds - essentially it feels as if the entire thing is stuttering - but weirdly enough there are no CPU or GPU usage spikes and it doesn't seem to be relevant to CPU/GPU usage at all. If anything, it does not happen at all if there is some OpenGL or Vulkan program running in a window (so it doesn't affect games at all, just regular desktop use) and sometimes i just end up running vkcube in another virtual desktop (it doesn't matter if the output is visible or not) to avoid it. My guess is that there is some sort of scheduling bug in the modesetting driver as i never had that issue with the amdgpu driver (my guess is the modesetting driver doesn't get as much testing as the amdgpu driver on AMD GPUs), but the amdgpu driver causes the X server to hang after i suspend and resume my desktop since i got a RX 7900 XTX (it did not happen with my RX 5700 XT, which was rock solid), so it is choice between the lesser evil.
Ah yes. The Linux user is always holding it wrong.
In my case it stems from having to deal with multiple distros (and multiple generations of distros, eg 3 LTS Ubuntus) professionally.
In other cases, distros give a choice on which tools to use, usually because the new one is better (but also happens to come with its own new bugs).
Unrelated, I love that any "why aren't you using Linux?" question is actually almost always just a thinly veiled "let me tell you why you're wrong" plant.
> The Linux user is always holding it wrong
That's actually the opposite of what I said. All those issues seem to come from the fact that the user didn't choose a distribution where it's "one-click install".
If you came to me and said "I tried Arch Linux and my installation broke after every update", I think it's fair to say that it's something you should've expected before you installed the distribution. It's unfair to make the comparison for stability between Windows and Linux if your only example is Arch Linux.
So yes, I maintain that the distribution choice is important and that if you constantly run into issues, it's probably a problem with your distribution (or your use thereof).
"You chose the wrong distro" is very much in the "you're holding it wrong" vein, in my book.
If there's one thing I'll admit to "doing it wrong" it's that I've been on a distro-hopping binge the past few years because I've (fortunately) not actually needed my laptop as a daily driver, so I've experienced a bunch of them and, so far, none of them have given me a compelling reason to stay.
Many have been interesting (particularly NixOS and Bluefin), some have been easy until you decide you want to get away from defaults (Mint comes to mind). All of them have had some quirks/issues.
I haven't tried a SUSE in probably 25 years so maybe that'll be my next hop.
Mind you, I've had Linux devices for 30 years and I was also a FreeBSD-as-my-main-desktop user for about a decade, so it's not like I'm not into this kind of tech.
I see. Sorry if I came off as trying to invalidate your experience. That's not what I meant.
I've tried about 4 or 5 distros before settling on openSUSE Tumbleweed (now on my 4th or so year). Linux Mint, Fedora, Kubuntu, Solus, Manjaro...
Ironically, I find Tumbleweed (a rolling distro) more reliable than all the others I've tried. I can't say it's stable per se, but if something breaks you can rollback very easily. Doesn't break often, though.
Because the ads are the devil I know and can be defeated. Linux for desktop has been the bottom contender YoY because it is still not reliable enough for daily use, especially on laptops.
> it is still not reliable enough for daily use
I don't know what your requirements are because I can say the exact same for Windows.
> especially on laptops
I agree with this but only if you have Nvidia drivers.
My requirement is not to have a random Linux evening. Whenever I try Linux, it eventually involves one or two of these Linux evenings to get something working or something fixed. I'm just done with those. Windows on laptop will sleep and wake consistently without bluescreen. Once the ads are removed, its great. I much prefer battling ad injection to battling critical functional issues. Ads can be ignored until I do something about them; Kernel panicking and locked up screen cannot be ignored.
Granted, I don't use the sleep feature because I'm on a desktop and seeding Linux ISOs.
But whenever I run into an issue after an update, I just rollback and wait for a few more days because it usually gets fixed. More often than not, it's not even an issue that deserves to rollback, let alone spend a whole evening troubleshooting.
Next time you try a Linux distribution, may I suggest openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma?
I exclusively use Linux on servers now. I'm not really trying anything for desktop anymore.
My time involved in making Linux work right mainly, there's always minor issues that take a lot of effort to solve. Like my audio interface has CH 1&2 working fine, but CH 3&4 are at half volume no matter what I do, and after waking from sleep it stops working entirely. And this is an interface with no special drivers needed.
Also Lightroom and Fusion 360 don't run on Linux, fusion kind of works through wine but barely, and lightroom does not work at all.
Half the time I woke it from sleep the lockscreen would be broken and unresponsive too, requiring a reboot.
Overall its just too much time to figure out these problems, windows just works with very little involvement on my part.
the games I play don't support Linux
Isn't dual-booting convenient for you? I've never done it myself.
Dual booting is the worst possible combination, given that any windows update will kill the linux bootloader (major update to be fair, but it will happen and then you have to recovery iso to fix the bootloader every time). Plus having to disable all boot optimizations on the windows side because of tainted filesystem that linux can't figure out without risk of data destruction. I'd rather just use a VM - but the same games that don't run on linux also dont want you playing in a VM.
Dual booting with windows running on the same box? Sooner or later windows WILL destroy the other system.
That or you'll get into an argument with UEFI/Windows/Bitlocker.
I've been dual booting windows/arch for almost 1 years now. Except the rare case that windows fucks my grub and I have to mkconfig again it'd been smooth sailing.
I like Linux, it's my laptop daily driver, but there's nothing I would do on Linux on my gaming PC that I can't do on Windows.
Linux just has no upside over Windows in a dual boot context.
> Linux just has no upside over Windows in a dual boot context
If you do dual-boot and don't care about the privacy of the data you put into Windows, I guess so.
If I dual-boot, I have to maintain both OSes no matter what.
I also personally keep no data on my devices, but if I did, having data that I need to reboot to get to would be friction I don't want.
> I also personally keep no data on my devices
Now I get your point. But still I would prefer to access my "personal" accounts from a device I trust.
Do you use a cloud service for your files?
Yep. I've been a paying Google Workspace user for almost 20 years now (in the various iterations of the product name).
Some stuff goes in GitHub, none of which I actually truly care about though.
I'm sure you'll groan. :)
But hey, if it's good enough for Cloudflare and Datadog (two past employers), it's good enough for me.
I also may be weird because I don't own any media and I'm perfectly happy with the streaming model. I enjoy not having the mental load of thinking about self-hosting and backing up terabytes of stuff.
I feel "lightweight" and I like it.
Yeah it makes it very easy to be OS-independant. I have backups of my whole home directory so if anything goes awry I can just reinstall software as I go and restore my config files from the most recent backup.
I have a Nextcloud instance for family to store files, though.
The Daws of my choice do not run on Linux.
Google used to proudly say "Don't be evil"... But they just forgot to add "let us take that part".
When tech giants start deciding what technical knowledge is too "dangerous" for users to access, we've crossed into a different kind of territory. Installing an OS on your own hardware is now physical harm? That's some creative interpretation of their policies. The irony is that this kind of censorship just validates why people want to bypass these systems in the first place, nobody wants corporations deciding what they can and can't do with their own machines.
Although the reason was absurd, videos were eventually restored.
The point is to prevent viral videos from getting widely viewed during their peak. To cut it off. It doesn't matter if the block is removed some days or weeks later and then there's a trickle of traffic. This is the status quo for corporations that wish to suppress content on Alphabet's platforms. Another well known recent example is Forbes attacks on Gamer's Nexus investigative documentary on the GPU black market that competed with their video.
Isn't the damage done though? Like if they were down at the time when people were told that win10 reached end of support and it's time to get on 11 does it matter that they are up now?
Anyway I doubt youtube did this intentionally, but it does show how vulnerable their system is to false reports.
But did someone on Microsoft's pay, a Google employee with elevated access, flag it?
DMCA has always been buried in false reports. Every system gets gamed, and this is a particularly easy one to do so with.
TBH the title is clickbait given the outcome.
Are you arguing that
And we see how many people here on HN don't read the article.
Bit beside the point but Windows 11 is the first version since Windows 3.1 that I haven't used.
Nuked my Windows 10 install and put Pop OS on it + a MacBook separately.
I've dual booted since the 90's and have run Microsoft OS's somewhere since the 80's.
I had Windows 11 (kept it around for gaming), I binned it a few weeks ago.
Don't game enough to justify it any more (haven't even tried gaming on linux yet).
Juice was no longer worth the squeeze.
Gaming on Linux is quite good these days, as long as you don't need any kernel-level anticheat for multiplayer.
Proton is an impressive piece of software.
Bazzite baybeeeee
I don't game much, but as a parent, we have both a ps5 and a xbox. Frankly, console graphics are good enough for me. I don't see much point in having a gaming PC.
Actually, I would trade visuals for better games. Most games nowadays are better enjoyed as movies than games.
If anyone at YouTube Trust & Safety is reading this article, I've got a real problem for you to solve.
There are channels that exist solely to pump out AI slop seemingly designed to trick gullible seniors into identifying themselves in the comments. I suspect the scammers will go after these people later in pig-butchering or related scams.
For example, the “Senior Secrets” channel pumps out videos such as “Over 60? Add THIS Powder To Your Coffee To Walk like You’re 40 Again! | Senior Health Tips.” (I won’t link to the video, but you can easily find it with a search.) The video makes bold health claims justified by citing what appear to be scholarly research studies, such as:
> University of California, San Francisco (2023). "Mobility Enhancement Through Nutritional Supplementation in Older Adults." Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences, Volume 78, pp. 445-453.
However, none of the cited studies and papers are real.
The deeply concerning thing is that the video’s narrator invites the seniors who are duped by these claims to identify themselves and reveal their age and locations in the comments. From the transcript at 1m44s:
> "Before we begin, tell us in the comments now your age and where you're watching us from. We're reading and replying to every single comment, so drop your comments below."
I’ve already reported this content to YT, but I’ve seen no apparent follow-up.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Google, but not in anything YouTube related. If you’re in YT and want to reach out, my contact info is in my HN profile.
Age and city isn't all that identifying, I don't see anything useful there that isn't already in census etc. They are just doing it because YouTube promotes highly commented videos, hence the old saying "like, comment and subscribe"
It's not the age and location that are concerning. It's that the seniors who are especially susceptible to being misled will identify themselves as such. Further, if you look at the comments from these seniors, their YT usernames often reveal their real names.
I’m curious to hear whether any YouTubians[O] take you up on that.
0 - idk. Can’t call employees “YouTubers”
They don't care. There's a ridiculous amount of AI slop on YouTube.
This isn't merely AI slop. This is AI slop that appears to have been designed to specifically target a vulnerable audience for the purpose of later running financial scams against them. It ought to be in a different category altogether.
I no longer run a Microsoft OS on any of the computers I own.
This type of behavior is the reason.
Linux is good enough for most everything I do, for the rest is MacOS.
Funny, because all the LLMs are more than happy to spit out the steps. Alphabet, if you want to get ahead, you need to be sure you're consistent. It's literally 4 clicks to get the same info from your sister product.
Maybe they mixed it up with mental harm from using Windows 11 and that's why they removed Windows 11 content.
This is a blessing in disguise.
Now more people will be motivated to migrate AWAY from Windows since they will have no bypass.
"Now more people…."
Yes, some will but unfortunately in actual per capita/percentage terms it'll be pathetically small.
Do you really think the marketers, economists and social scientists at Microsoft haven't got that figure off to a tee aready?
It's a certainty they have and they've figured it just amounts to noise in the grand schema of things.
.
It's often a mistake to think that companies are these perfect union of ultra rational agents, just because they have a lot of employees and money.
See: Windows 8, Windows Phone.
> YouTube eventually restored both videos
Okay, nothing to see here then. Just some sensationalism around a content moderation mistake.
Governments (we the people in general) have the right and duty to regulate corporations, non-human entities which exist at our regulatory pleasure. The US and the EU could easily rip Google/MS/Apple to pieces if they wanted to. Hit some other media conglomerates while they're at it. Vote or something.
It's like they want people to bypass Windows 11 altogether. I've finally bit the bullet and gone to Linux recently. Certainly dying by 512 cuts and counting, not for the faint of heart, but I'm surprised at how much of my daily usage I've been able to replicate. I'd say 80% of life works, unlike previous attempts.
In my experience 120% of my daily usage from windows works on Linux.
Where are the friction points for you?
As if people would not talk to each other or post such instructions elsewhere.... What a clumsy attempt to censor that. As if we now would love Microsoft for their shit and crap they produce since centuries. I only got a gaming machine running it here, all my private data will stay on another linux machine
I think this is the same story as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45744503 ?
https://archive.ph/K0tKm
> Claims 'Risk of Physical Harm'
Elaborate please YouTube.
Windows 11 attempts to remove local only account is the last straw. I have mostly moved away from Windows already but if they fully implement this will never recommend to anyone period. I manage 2600 computers where I work and am down to less than 150 running windows … could see this reaching 0 in just a year or two.
I forsee a lobby to the government for further restriction on our freedom of speech by google and others as these companies can't compete with open source and decentralized alternatives that are beginning to offer really well made alternatives.
That will only happen if we let it.
Observations indicate we're approaching a point of inflection. We've had about three decades of Big Tech running a serfdom, unless power starts shifting back to users we'll be locked-in serfs for good.
I reckon most of us don't actually realize how much trouble we're in already.
> That will only happen if we let it.
What actions could we take that actually matter here?
Stop using Windows 11.
There are a lot of videos on YouTube about things that have a “risk of physical harm” and this is what they choose to pick on??
I would think this selective action could / should open them up to litigation for all the other harmful things on their site
It’s all automated, of course there are false positives
If a company chooses to automate something that should not be a defense. They should still be held equally accountable for their actions no matter if they employ a human or an algorithm to do their censorship for them. If they know their software/automation is shit and keeps screwing up, they're still making the choice to continue using it.
The videos were restored, though...
[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45744503
YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45744503 - 9 days ago, 497 comments
Huh I must have just got in on time as I set up a local account about 12 hours ago following a tutorial.
Once the masses discover that KDE is just as user friendly as Windows these days, ...
... and that it is relatively easy to run (most) Windows apps they love through Bottles (https://usebottles.com/), and/or WinApps (https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps)...
... oof
Unfortunately for right now, KDE has recently released major version 6, which is also about as stable as Windows (meaning, very not). This is reminiscent of the KDE 4 transition and much worse than the KDE 5 one.
For example, half the time I try to log in or unlock the screen, it just ignores my password. Fortunately, I have discovered that pressing Escape triggers a crash, and I have to deliberately trigger a segfault by pressing Escape, in hopes that next time the password will be accepted.
Plasma 6 is nearly two years old, and is totally fine in my experience. The transition was more like 5.x to 5.y. The biggest change is Wayland by default (X11 is currently still available, so might be worth a try).
It sounds like your problem may be with SDDM (the login screen program) rather than Plasma itself. You could try an alternative: https://alternativeto.net/software/sddm/
As someone who's been bouncing back and forth between Arch and Tumbleweed for a while now I had a very different experience. The transition from KDE 4 to KDE Plasma 5 was terrible, plasmashell would crash all the time, tons of stuff would break between updates, and I had to switch to running awesome for a while (which is fine, awesome is pretty great). The transition from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6 was basically 'these 2 KWin scripts don't work any more' and everything else was fine.
Changing the KDE theme into something other than the default Breeze breaks the whole Plasma: black screen with a cursor instead of the SDDM login screen. Hit this while setting up an Arch system for my wife, spent hours rebooting with recovery USB image and tweaking configuration until it all worked again.
Wouldn't call it stable.
SDDM is garbage and I've switched to using lemurs now (for whatever reason graphical display managers are terrible. GDM doesn't allow changing the mouse cursor theme, SDDM doesn't show battery percentage, LightDM doesn't do fonts properly,... the KDE people are apparently working on a new DM, but the info I got was vague as anything and may as well have been referring to the KDE LightDM greeter).
I wouldn't say that SDDM is garbage. Apparently, it sets the environment variables & etc. needed to enable automatic HiDPI scaling that a shockingly large number of Wayland proponents insist Xorg doesn't support. [0][1]
[0] <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SDDM#Enable_HiDPI>
[1] Manual scaling (even non-integer scaling) works fine as long as you have a settings editor that will speak the XSETTINGS protocol, and a daemon running that can be queried. GNOME has both by default. KDE has the settings editor, and you might need to install xsettingsd or similar. The quirk I've found is that while GTK programs accept the display scaling changes immediately, QT programs must be restarted to adopt the changes.
> automatic HiDPI scaling that a shockingly large number of Wayland proponents insist Xorg doesn't support.
Assuming they know what they're talking about and not just parroting whatever they read others mention, usually when someone says that "Wayland does $THING that X11/Xorg doesn't do", this is really a shortcut for "X11/Xorg could technically do $THING, if enough developers and projects cared about it, but that would be a massive undertaking and it is easier to convince developers do $THING if we can control most of the stack to only do $THING in one particular way we want by working from a clean slate".
Since you mentioned environment variables, not sure what SDDM exactly is doing, but in the case of HiDPI scaling under Xorg the only method for HiDPI i'm aware of that uses environment variables is Qt's `QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS` which is a semicolon-separated list of per-screen scaling factors that Qt applications can use to automatically scale themselves depending on the screen the window/application is in. Considering SDDM is written in Qt, i'll guess that this is what it set.
But the thing is, this is far from enough if you want "robust" support under X11/Xorg. The reason is that a typical X application under a typical X desktop has multiple components: an X server (which i'm going to assume it is Xorg for now - other X servers are basically Xorg forks and sync with its features), a window manager, an optional desktop compositor and a widget toolkit on the application's side (not strictly needed as an app can use its own adhoc code for that but let's assume it uses one since this doesn't really matter in this case).
The behavior you need for robust HiDPI support is for the application to use the proper scaling for each of its toplevel windows depending on the connected output the window is in (note: this may or may not actually be relevant to DPI - someone may have bad eyesight and want their 27" 1440p monitor to be 150% scaled) and have that be done automatically - ideally, transparently from the user's perspective - as they move windows between outputs and/or add/remove outputs (e.g. connecting/disconnecting or turning on/off a graphics tablet with an embedded monitor would add/remove an output).
Now, technically, Xorg does provide the necessary core functionality to implement the above, however the issues begin when you start considering who is going to implement it and what part of the stack is responsible for which aspect of supporting window scaling.
Ideally, what you'd want is for applications should be able to scale each of their toplevel windows arbitrarily based on notifications from the underlying system as the user interacts with the application windows (note: this is not necessarily limited to just the user moving windows between outputs - a user could, for example, select an option from their window manager to scale a window at 200% or 300% - this could be useful when doing video streaming or recording videos for example).
So, in an ideal world, the following should happen under X11/Xorg:
1. Widget toolkits can scale their widgets arbitrarily (ideally not just at fractional level but also sub-100% level too - useful when using secondary screens with a low resolution).
2. Window managers can receive RandR events for output DPI changes and use that information to maintain a scaling factor for each output (the user could also specify custom per-output scaling too).
3. As the user interacts with the windows, the window manager sends notifications to the windows/applications whenever a window needs its scale changed. The widget toolkits use these notifications to scale their windows' contents.
Ignoring a few details, the above is basically what Wayland does since it started from a clean slate where they could dictate everything from scratch.
However X11/Xorg already has a lot of software already written for it and there are a few snags in the way:
1. Pretty much no toolkit supported arbitrary scaling, so they had to be extended for it. Since Wayland needed that, toolkits that need to support it added the functionality anyway (e.g. Qt and Gtk) though not without issues along the way (AFAIK Gtk didn't support fractional scaling for a long time). Though not all toolkits have support for this.
2. Window managers must be extended to monitor outputs via RandR and send appropriate notifications whenever windows move across outputs to those windows. This would also need some new notification protocol (most likely a new version of EWMH). However...
3. ...toolkits must also be extended to support these notifications - supporting scaling isn't enough if they do not know when to scale. This introduces a problem because...
4. ...window managers will have to deal with toolkits not supporting the notifications. One way would be to just ignore them, but another way is to do the scaling themselves. However, there is another issue here.
5. When using (and having enabled) a desktop compositor scaling can be easy (especially when dealing with edge cases like a window lying across the edge between two monitors :-P), but without one, the window manager needs to scale the window itself (there was a Xorg branch by Keith Packard that introduced server-side window scaling but AFAIK it was never merged) without affecting the rest of the desktop - and of course do the appropriate coordinate transformations for various events (e.g. mouse motion). Moreover since a desktop compositor can be a separate program than a window manager (many -if not most- X11 window managers are not desktop compositors), they both need to somehow coordinate with each other.
6. Since this requires all window managers (and desktop compositors) to be updated, the inevitable result is that there will be a lot of them that will not be updated for quite some time, so applications (or realistically, widget toolkits) will need to also handle HiDPI scaling themselves by doing the RandR queries and automatically sizing their own windows based on output. This is a subpar option because the application does not know the window manager's own state and you can end up with the two "fighting" with each other. Also the window manager cannot do desktop-wide configurations (it is actually blind to them).
7. Obviously whatever protocols in place (as i wrote above, probably a new EWMH version) are used, they'll also need to let the components (window manager, widget toolkit) provide information for when any of the above are in place so the proper action is taken (e.g. a toolkit should not try to do the output tracking itself if the window manager supports it and a window manager should not try to do scaling itself if the widget toolkit supports it - but both need to inform the other about this).
As you can hopefully imagine, the above require the developers of all window managers, all desktop compositors, all widget toolkits and applications not only to coordinate with each other but also handle various cases in case the user used something in the stack that did not support things.
With Wayland since everything was done from scratch, there were less people that needed to be convinced to cooperate - and in practice since Wayland originated from RedHat and the GNOME ecosystem, convincing the appropriate GNOME and Gtk developers to cooperate was probably a coffee break away :-P. Meanwhile Qt would already need to add (or already had, not sure when it was added) support for scaling/HiDPI anyway for Windows and macOS, so the infrastructure was there.
The current situation is that Qt, currently, supports the #6 i mentioned above since it can be implemented without needing support from window managers, desktop compositors or specifying new protocols (something that seems to be much harder than it should be - e.g. AFAIK Cinnamon implemented a very trivial X attribute for displaying a percentage for windows in a taskbar/icon overlay -think of download percentage- but despite the developers' attempt to have others adopt it, i do not think it saw much adoption). But this is really the "fallback solution" when everything else is just not there, it is not the ideal one.
That said, from a technical perspective there is nothing theoretically stopping Xorg desktop environments having top-notch robust HiDPI support. What blocks everything is convincing the developers of the various components of the desktop stack to cooperate, implement and support it.
Point of order: SDDM is entirely unrelated to the KDE project.
I've been using the Breeze Dark theme for approximately forever and I've never run into the problem you're describing. However, I've very rarely used SDDM... I find its default rainbow-colored background intolerable and use LightDM instead.
Do you happen to remember configuration that you ended up having to change, and is that computer running Nvidia graphics hardware with the closed-source drivers?
Gotta be something specific to your machine - for me version 6 is way more stable than 5 was. That line would crash doing sillies things like resizing task bar or applying settings. Now I feel as good with CachyOS and Plasma 6.5.2 as I was with W2K or W7
The only issue I have on my Plasma 6 laptop is also lock-screen related: About 20% of the time keyboard input is ignored/blocked after coming back from sleep. Closing and reopening the lid usually sorts it. Haven't seen what you describe.
I did have some earlier snags which all went away after switching from Wayland session to X11 session.
I've been doing my first journey w Linux as a daily driver and I'm not loving Mint+Cinnamon, what's the best distro for KDE?
I switched from Windows 10 to Nobara KDE plasma ~1 month ago. It's a Fedora based distro, so most of the Fedora documentation applies. I came from server Linux but Windows desktop (20 years or so) and I'm amazed how similar it is and reacts. It comes with Libre Office, Steam etc. pre-installed and while the Libre software is certainly different and needs getting used to - for me, coming originally from Wordperfect and Quattro Pro it was no challenge. There are some minor bugs which I attribute mostly to the Nvidia 580 graphics driver, like distorted fonts in certain mouse positions, but these are really minimal and I won't deep dive (yet) into that. Support online via discord which isn't optimal, but at least there is support.
OpenSUSE has traditionally done a bunch of work on making sure other software works well with KDE (for example patching Firefox to use the KDE file chooser). Much of that work is no longer needed with new tech like the XDG desktop portal stuff, but Tumbleweed is still a fairly solid system (up to date, stable, GUI system administration tools, automatically installs packages with AVX3 if your CPU supports it,...).
It would help to know what it is you are not loving with Mint+Cinnamon... My picks for a beginner-friendly batteries-included Linux dist for KDE:
- You can install KDE on Mint without switching distro or reinstalling[0]
- Debian (caveat: packages can be out of date if you need the latest-greatest of something)
- Fedora (caveat: two major OS upgrades per year can feel like a chore)
- EndeavourOS (caveat: Requires a bit more expertise and grease to properly maintain)
- Aurora (caveat: Still young project and I'd still consider it a bit experimental and adventerous)
- kubuntu (caveat: snaps. Accept them or learn how to disable)
KDE Linux is a thing and something to keep an eye on but it's still in alpha/beta and probably not ready for your use just yet.
[0]: Caveat: it's possible that some DE service might not be disabled properly from your old setup and conflict with KDEs variety if you keep the cinnamon packages around
The better question would be what is the best distro for you. Personally I like Debian. But I don't know enough about you and how you use your computer to say for sure what is best for you.
Devops-heavy development, but been a Windows desktop user up until now, with linux just running on servers.
I'll probably go with Kubuntu just because I want something as vanilla as possible with the largest support-base.
I'd recommend Fedora KDE, it's vanilla and well used enough to be able to easily find answers.
https://www.fedoraproject.org/kde/
Ubuntu based distros are fine too, but there are a few weird things to get to grips with like Snaps.
There's really not much difference between most distros these days so I'm sure if you like one you'd like the other.
I used Kubuntu for years, but ultimately moved away from the Ubuntu based distros due to Canonical cruft. I haven't really missed anything going with vanilla Debian.
I've found Gentoo Linux to be a good developer- and sysadmin-oriented distro. It requires a lot more work up-front than most any other distro but -IME- once you have it running, it just keeps running and upgrading just fine. If you wish, you can even subject yourself to systemd, as that's a supported init system.
As a bonus, if you don't want to build everything from source, there are prebuilt packages available. Instructions for how to use them are in the "Installing the base system" section of the Gentoo Handbook. I've not used the Gentoo-provided prebuilt packages, but I do use my own prebuilts. I've found the process of using them to be well-documented and fairly straightforward.
Don't worry too much about distributions, they'll mostly just affect package formats and default settings, but imo Debian is the best choice for stable desktop computing, with the best overall support and community.
kubuntu, kde neon, or mx linux kde version (which is debian)
The video in question does present a risk of death... to Windows.
(Nah, that wording is but a generic legalese sounding way of casting a huge net to get all sorts of fish.)
This happened to me when Amazon KDP's fraud prevention AI hallucinated that my Kindle version was plagiarizing my paperback (yes, it's the same book). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40992654
Unfortunately, I'm not sure a human ever really looked at my case, or was strongly disincentivized to go against the AI. I got nothing but bland, contentless denials of my appeals that got vaguer each time. And I was never able to go viral, so I'm banned from KDP for life for complete nonsense.
It wasn't wrong, there is no bigger harm one can do to self than using Windows!
I cannot recommend NTLite enough.
If it has to be Windows, just remove all the shit of Win11 yourself, set it to unattended installation with a local account, remove the hardware requirements barrier while you are at it, remove the games, controller add-ons, virus scanner and whatever else you would like to (the windows store?) and create your own LTSC.
This isn’t a solution to the problem and missing the point of the whole argument. But if it has to be Windows, I would recommend to try it.
1] ntlite.com
"Risk of Physical Harm" is the kind of reason Tony Soprano would say
> Then came the twist. YouTube eventually restored both videos. The platform claimed its "initial actions" (could be either the first takedown or appeal denial, or both) were not the result of automation.
The videos are back. It's also possible that a group of people "brigade" reported his posts for some reason. YouTubers attract haters, too.
Meanwhile AI products occasionally talk kids into killing themselves and that's okay.
They cant remove all the Ubuntu installation tutorials surely?
Risk of Physical Harm of losing profit.
So why shouldn't I use the windows 11 on the other partition that I use for games that don't run on Linux or run with degraded performance?
(Yeah, it's Nvidia, no, I didn't do my homework and bought Nvidia for a Linux PC).
While it may make sense for others, I don't find system that can lock up for 11 hours for updates suitable for anything other than occasional gaming. But why shouldn't I use it for it? I already think twice before getting any game that doesn't run on Linux and gave EA WRC Rally a downvote after they rug pulled Linux users. (A game that run on Linux on the beginning got borked with anticheat. A racing game, so you don't cheat your friends by having 1s less on that race you all compete on).
There is no worse usage of windows than the occasional one given the huge amount of updates it starts to download whenever you start it up after a long period unused.
I guess it might be useful if you only keep it offline but in that case you aren't playing games online and thus you would be fine gaming on Linux given the only downside is lack of anticheat support.
A Windows update will eventually overwrite your bootloader and you won't be able to boot into Linux without some fuckery.
My Windows "fun" was when it decided that the "unknown" space immediately after its little boot partition was free for it to expand into. (Imagine not being able to recognize an ext2 filesystem...) After repairing that disaster, I ensured it would never happen again by putting Windows onto its own harddrive. That's worked for a great many years.
Though, now that I've quite a bit of personal experience with how good Steam/Proton is for video games, I think I'll reclaim the surprisingly large amount of space that Windows is taking up.
Thanks Google and Microsoft, I am going to write a blogpost on how to bypass Microsoft's shits and archive the page as well.
But there is a harm. Just had to repair a pc of my family, because you are able to install windows 11 on a MBR Partition without EFI Boot. Has to convert it and fix some stuff, but it still starts only every second boot (srsly)
And how you would install a dual boot with some mainstream elf/linux distro?
Is dual boot still a thing with all the effort from microsoft to make that hell or impossible?
OBAY
The whole Windows 11 saga can be titled, "Dr. Bashlove, or, how I stopped worrying and learned to love the *NIX".
Hard to believe this is the same company that made Windows 7. Coulda just ported WSL and security fixes back to that and stopped there. But nooooo.
Risk of physical harm? Should I perceive that as a… threat?
Satya Nadella will kick in your door
Perhaps someone at Microsoft threatened physical harm to a Google engineer if they didn't remove the videos... and they caved into their demands rather than reporting the threat, or perhaps did both.
The sci-fi movies warn us about evil robots. Turns out the evil entity was Microsoft and other big tech companies all along
Indeed; those who are worried about the possibility of paperclip optimizers should take a look at the profit optimizers that exist today.
You see, Windows 11 has new, improved, patented prevent-the-computer-from-physically-beating-up-the-user technology. But this technology requires an online account; you can't trust a local-only account to prevent the computer from beating you up, because it's on the computer in question (duh). So we prevent you from learning how to bypass the requirement for a remote account for your own physical safety.
/s, in case that wasn't blatantly obvious...
Perceive that as being hit in szczepionke /s
Feels like AI going wild with censorship regardless of what they say lol
I wonder if this is because Windows 11 has been used in critical systems to a certain extent?
> Risk of Physical Harm
Yet ChatGPT is not responsible for having led to suicides.
Bullshit, horseshit, cows hot.
The whole win 11 thing is embarrassing.
They are this far in, pushing features nobody asked for and is there any wonder the numbers blow chunks?
None.
Massgrave...that is all...
Even easier, Schneegans
What's next? Utilman.exe tutorials removal?
CachyOS.
Oh this is going to get the Streisand effect.
This is what the crowd shouting misinformation and "protect X" asks for all the time.
You want nanny states and nanny corps and authoritianism through and through (remember covid policies?), you'll get this more and more.
You either start rolling back all that BS in the name of freedom (no, not freedumbs) or you can't really complain.
And now 'physical' becomes as hyperbolized as 'violence.'
A small step. Some of us have seen it weaponized in my lifetime, some think it's ridiculous until it's not.
No, "physical harm".
"to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"
Why is this allowed to occur?
Why is Microsoft allowed to operate in such a user hostile way?
Why aren't people like up in arms massively tanking their stock value, boycotting, reputation harming in every legal way possible en masse?
Like are people just careless and distracted 24/7?
Like surely this should just not be a thing?
I just don't understand how inhumane hostile behavior is just so rampant and like allowed to exist in our society.
Because the only mechanism to hold these mega corporations / billionaires accountable is government, and they're already powerful enough to have waged massive information wars convincing people to fight each other instead of them.
Eventually, enough is enough.
1789.
Because people like my mom don't know there is an alternative and people like my dad thinks OSS has ties to communism (really, I wish I was joking) and MacOS is for hipsters. Doesn't matter that I work for a FAANG company and we use and contribute to OSS or that my work laptop is a Mac.
Wait... OSS doesn't have ties to communism?
Then what have I been using and supporting it for?
Why should I care that much what Microsoft is doing? I sold my Windows 11 computer long ago and haven't looked back. In fact, more user-hostile they get the better that is for the Linux ecosystem which is better for me!
I think it will be better with a little bit higher marketshare, but once the masses come in they demand stuff like kernel-level anticheat, DRM and to never accidentally run things in a terminal and then it will become way worse. Linux is as user-friendly as it is, because it is used by professionals and power users and the masses use something else.
That's why we have different distributions. Let one of the distributions cater to those who don't want control of their own computer.
Yes, and this is how a healthy OS market should look like, but a lot of distros use the same kernel.
Can anyone provide any attempt at rationalizing their decision? Could your computer overheat and explode if you do this? Could hackers take over your computer and play a flashing light pattern that will give you an epileptic seizure?
You can watch the latest Hollywood movies for free on YouTube and they don't care about any copyright, but if it's for showing a genocide to the world or bypassing Windows tutorials, YouTube lost it's spirit.
This is meek and seems almost resigned. I don't understand how discourse and responses around these kinds of strange, bewildering, or stupid corporate decisions is always so nice. This corporate bullshit thrives in respectful environments where nobody needs to be afraid of being told how it is and publicly humiliated for their obviously disingenuous or stupid behavior.
When you're dealing with full-on idiots like that "support specialist" (AI?), all bets are off anyways. Might as well tell that clown that what he just said is the dumbest shit you've heard all week.
Take off the gloves and burn some bridges if you have to, the world will be better place for it.