I recently got a new work laptop with Windows 11. It’s just different enough from Windows 10 that it pisses me off to try to find the stuff I need. I end up hunting and grumbling and searching the web for answers to simple things.

If you’re going to do that anyway, just try Linux. It’s free and easy, and it doesn’t steal all your private data, sell it, and use that money to corrupt your government to steal your rights and give them to corporations.

I’ve been running Bazzite OS on my living room big screen gaming PC since May. It’s a really slick fedora-based distro that installs out of the box with Steam, proton, and graphics drivers ready-to-launch for gaming. It was really easy to use, and my games worked perfectly.

My high school age son got a new AMD proc/mb for his birthday, and I was surprised when he said he wanted to try dual booting Bazzite and Windows when we set it up. 2 weeks later, and he decided to kill the Windows boot and just use Bazzite full time. He has no linux experience and just figures it out.

Windows 11 is shit and Linux alternatives are prettier, easier to use, don’t shove AI down your throat, and don’t steal your data for profit. The time has come.

I have been part of a mass tech leadership exodus at a company where the CEO wants everything to be AI. They have lost 5 out of 8 of their director/VP/Exec leaders in the last 3 months, not to mention all the actual talent abandoning ship.

The CEO really believes that all of his pesky employees who he hates will be full replaced by cheap AI agents this year. He’s going to be lucky to continue to keep processing orders in a few months the way it’s going. He should be panicked, but I think instead he’s doing a lot of coke.

Fun fact: AI doesn’t know what is or isn’t true. They only know what is most likely to seem true. You can’t make it stop lying. You just can’t, because it fundamentally doesn’t understand the difference between a lie and truth.

Now picture the people saying “We can replace our trainable, knowledgeable people with this”. lol ok.

This isn’t a surprise to anyone except fucking idiots who can’t tell the difference between actual technology and bullshit peddlers.

1. Guess

2. Say “dammit”

The best time to switch was 10 years ago. The second best time to switch is right now.

I’ve been doing research into this because I want to degoogle. Looking for hosted and secure Mail, Calendar, Drive… maybe docs if possible. I don’t mind paying as long as I’m a customer and not a product to be sold.

My short list was: Mailbox.org, Zoho, and Notion.

Then there are the services I don’t understand as much because I don’t really want to self host or step into server maintenance… NextCloud, OwnCloud, LibreCloud, OnlyOffice. Maybe someone could straighten me out with those if I’m off base.

my concern is that I install a distro this year and want to switch to SteamOS later, but would have to start over with customizations, etc. in the new distro.

I wouldn’t sweat that at all.

I switched distros last week, didn’t like the new one as much as I thought I would, and switched again a few days later. It’s not that big of a deal. Install some apps, reload your files from a USB stick. It’s not a major commitment.

My first thought: If this ever ships, I’ll eat an outboard motor.

Without wires you have no permanent power. Also, it sounds like you want it to be wireless transmission without a network. That’s a challenge.

Lets Ignore the “no cables” part then. If you want this to be cheap, highly reliable, and non-networked… use wires. You can’t go wrong.

You can get 4 camera systems with local storage from companies like Lorex for a reasonable price for good quality. I got mine at CostCo for $299. It might support cloud storage (maybe?) but I never enabled it. It just records locally. It’s been running for years with no downtime or issues and the cameras still look great.

So… back when I used Pidgin, I aggregated AIM, YahooIM, GoogleTalk, and Pre-MS Skype. What is the use case today?

I don’t even trust that. Google devices hard-code DNS and IPs and… I have no evidence or knowledge of it, but I assume that they have some Sidewalk-like ability to communicate directly to other Google devices to get outside the network you want them to be on.

Why would anyone load an app from McDonalds? You want to give them elevated access to your most personal data for a few dollars of coupons?

What are they taking from you that’s worth more than the discounts they are giving you? Because they are definitely making a profit, or they wouldn’t be doing it.