“High performers don’t waste their time arguing with the void on social media. Congrats, you just burned the only free hour you had after work.”

Bro, you’re literally just like those you despise. Talking of badges, don’t prick yourself with that “Sheriff of Linux” badge you made it out that bottle lid.

Edit: Sorry, where the hell did that link come from!? I swear it wasn’t there when I last looked!

Oh man, most of those were in place during the so called “golden age” of America. Maybe this is what the red hats have been fighting for all this time! /s

And this is exactly why we see these sovcit crazies…

They see this sort of BS and then believe the entire world is built around secret codes and BS legal mumbo-jumbo. If you manage to crack the combination, you are set - and the reason this filthy scab didn’t get paid is because they didn’t have the correct paperwork - which in this case is basically true!

MS know who butters their bread. Businesses get given the tools to control windows properly. Even without needing to resort to LTSC versions, domain joined with group policy, you can manage all the shitty parts of windows to make it behave as you wish - even down to control over when you receive the updates

And a formatting-stripping tool

It seems to me that its the profits that cause the crisis

Phase one: force everyone’s data into their OneDrive account. OneDrive now at capacity, you must upgrade to ensure all your data is backed up and retained.

Phase two: MS secretly (or not so secretly) use all this data to train copilot.

Human generated content to feed into ai systems is the new good rush

Quite a few products allow for this home use. Aids with training, familiarisation and locking users into their ecosystem. I’ve been able to do this a few times to help learn complex programs.

Completely legit with Adobe as far as I’m aware - since there is only the one licence available via online check-in so can’t be used on more than one at a time.

Autodesk is similar - used to have an allowance for a training/home use licence (may have been extra), even the common Office 365 corp licence allows for up to 5 installations and doesn’t really care where you install it.

Corp data on a home device or using your own gear for WFH is another story though.

Got a well specced 4th Gen i7 that does everything I need so unless it blows up, I won’t be upgrading. Started working on the plan this week. Been using Mint on my secondary (non essential laptop) but never had the stones to take the plunge on my main rig.

Watching MS stepping into the enshittification trend and AI with Win11 means this is the last straw, particularly now I don’t need to rely on keeping up with windows for work. Currently bashing on Linux Mint DE in a VM to test what I need and have working to be happy:

Outlook/Office - Thunderbird is good but it’s been a while since I’ve used Libre Office but didn’t have much luck with it in the past - trashing the formatting when bouncing between LO & MSO. Hoping the more recent versions are better else office web will have to do for those documents that don’t play nice.

Steam - make sure I can get it going, several key games. This is the least of my worries after seeing what others have said. NVIDIA graphics may be a bit more painful.

RDP - I still have another headless win10 media box. VNC as backup. This box will be the next on the chopping block if all goes well.

Backup - this is the big one. Currently use Backblaze for unlimited backup and love the set & forget nature. No native Linux client so would require moving to their B2 platform with a third party interface - do-able, just need to get off my butt to work it out :p

File structure - always struggled with this in my playing with Linux, need to become more comfortable with where files live and general directory structure.

Will slowly pick those off over the next couple of weeks and then I should be good to go.