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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Oh definitely

    There’s plugins for tons of things from customization (like custom boot and suspend animations) to tools (like mangohud for performance/energy monitoring) to quality of life (like kde connect or syncthing or teamspeak right in the sidebar)

    And it’s super easy to install and update, just go to their website in desktop mode and download and run the executable to install it, and then you can just install plugins and update without needing to leave game mode





  • AnExerciseInFallingto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    2 months ago

    Recently I had two major problems with Windows updates that needed manual intervention in a very user unfriendly way.

    Earlier this year one of the security updates for 22H2 broke my computer’s recovery partition and prevented the update to install and constantly fail. It took like a week for Microsoft to acknowledge the issue, at which point they said they would post a fix shortly. Then a whole month later they said they wouldn’t/couldn’t fix it automatically and anyone affected would have to manually delete the partition, shrink your main disk partition, and recreate the recovery partition. On top of that, there was no notification of the issue or how to fix it, one would have to notice the update keeps failing, look up the error, and dig up the instructions from their blog. And then go through the ugly process of editing partitions which I can’t imagine most users doing.

    Either that or just live with no recovery until the next time you reinstall the os.

    https://superuser.com/questions/1837245/kb5034441-and-changing-the-recovery-partition-starting-offset-in-order-to-be-abl

    The second issue this year was halfway through a windows update (when it just reboots a couple times) my computer just simply stopped booting. I could power cycle and everything and after the bios it would just black screen forever. The only way I got around it was to hop into the bios and change the boot order. Another thing I wouldn’t expect normal users should have to do to just boot the computer

    And I personally have seen all the ads in Windows explorer, the start menu, the lock screen, etc. and the massive pushing of Copilot being added to the toolbar even after removing it manually. And readding OneDrive. I’m in the US though so that’s probably why (it’s nice to know the only reason Microsoft does all this because they’re not legally pressured not to. Gives me so much trust in them to do the right thing with my computer and data)

    I’ve since moved to Linux (which I’ve used on my work machine for many years) and have had near zero issues. It’s very nice not worrying how my computer is going to make itself worse without my consent next

    edit: I definitely wouldn’t consider myself a fanatic that tries to convert everyone to Linux. For a lot of people Windows is the best choice, but in my case in particular it really has made things easier



  • The pinebook’s privacy switches (for WiFi/BT, camera, and microphone) operate at the firmware level, the operating system has no control over them

    https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro#Privacy_Switches

    The keyboard operates on firmware independent of the operating system. It detects if one of the F10, F11 or F12 keys is pressed in combination with the Pine key for 3 seconds. Doing so disables power to the appropriate peripheral, thereby disabling it. This has the same effect as cutting off the power to each peripheral with a physical switch. This implementation is very secure, since the firmware that determines whether a peripheral gets power is not part of the Pinebook Pro’s operating system. So the power state value for each peripheral cannot be overridden or accessed from the operating system. The power state setting for each peripheral is stored across reboots inside the keyboard’s firmware flash memory.


  • A couple of favorites that are different from what others already said:

    • I strongly dislike autorotate on my phone so I always keep it off, however it makes perfect sense in apps like YouTube/Twitch. So I have one task that turns it on when opening one of those apps, and off again when closing them
    • When I’ve got Bluetooth headphones, I can choose to have incoming texts read out to me. Very nice when walking/running outside and not needing to pull my phone out
    • Similarly, I’ve got a task that will (optionally) read out the name of the song that’s playing to Bluetooth


  • I could be completely wrong, but I think one of the first anomaly detection games was called “I’m on observation duty” which came out in 2018, but didn’t really get popular until late 2021 (when the fourth game in the series same out), about the same time “The exit 8” released funny enough.

    That game is a little different where the player flips around security cameras and reports anomalies as they come up, but I think exit 8 was the first anomaly detection games that is “looping” and you have to decide whether to go forward or back depending on if there’s an anomaly