Thanks. Both of those look interesting.

I had to set up Windows 11 on a new work computer yesterday and this was exactly the purpose of Edge. It’s incredible how hard you have to fight during the setup process not to be railroaded into accepting settings that work against you and for Microsoft. By the time I was done I felt sick and angry and there was no way I’d use Microsoft’s browser after all that. And then it turned out I wasn’t done, because it had defaulted to putting all my documents and pictures in Microsoft’s cloud even though I hadn’t asked it to, so as soon as I migrated my documents I got a warning that my cloud storage was full and I should pay them more money. So I had to undo all that, but Microsoft already got to see all my documents. Infuriating from start to finish. I am very glad to use Linux on my own machines. Windows feels like a hostile environment with traps around every corner.

Sorry for the rant. I have to go back to that machine today and I guess I’m still angry.

I see they’re promoting something called the Helium network. What’s the relationship between that and Meshtastic? Are they completely different things?

Bill Gates walked into the meeting “riding high” because he acquired patents for malaria treatments. Reality beats satire every time.

Bill Gates will never be a good guy.

Your posts are a bit confusing to read because you don’t capitalize Windows To Go. Capitalizing it would make it easier to understand.

I’d use a Kill-a-Watt or similar to check how much power it uses, before deciding whether it’s worth installing anything on it. Also check how much noise it makes, unless you have a separate room for servers. Enterprise servers aren’t always a good fit for home use.

This is the person who leaked the video of IDF soldiers beating and gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner. The Israeli government has been outraged, not by the abusers of the prisoner, but by the whistleblower leaking the video. So they have gone after her with full force while letting the rapey soldiers go free.

This all seems like good advice to me. I would make the same recommendations.

I’m not saying this is the ideal solution, but I’ve had decent performance from the house to a shed 60 feet away using Asus ZenWifi AX XT8 nodes in the house (with one in the window at the back of the house) and an Asus RT-AX56U extender in the shed. Most days I get decent speeds, good enough to use for work and watching videos. Very occasionally there’s a bad day. I originally tried with the dual-band Asus ZenWifi AX Mini cubes, but they were not powerful enough. Their bigger tri-band units work better.

There are probably better solutions though, using directional dishes. I just did this because, like you, I didn’t want to have to mess with holes for ethernet cables, mounting dishes to poles, etc.

Oh, and I once had bad signal so I put the unit at the back of the house at what would roughly be the focal point of a large metal kitchen bowl and pointed the bowl at the shed, and the signal improved dramatically

The Asus boxes are overpriced when new, but you can get them for cheap used.

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Mint or Fedora would be my first choices. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for my own computers but I think those others are better for people new to Linux. In my experience Fedora does a good job of combining up-to-dateness and stability. Mint is less up to date, but close enough to Ubuntu and Debian that loads of the help materials out there will apply to it.

That’s my thinking but I suspect it probably does this anyway.

I suspect “yes” comes with strings attached, which is why I’m sticking to the other option. But it’s likely I already agreed to the strings when I agreed to my company’s demand that we use Teams.

Also I don’t want to give some manager at Microsoft the satisfaction of adding my click on “Yes” to their stats.

Every single time I open Teams it pops up a dialogue asking if I want to try Copilot. There’s no “No” option, just “Yes” and “Maybe later”. If you click “Maybe later”, it asks again the next day. One day they’ll just assume “Yes” and not ask.

And this is at work for a company that has demanded we jam needless AI into all our applications.

https://archive.is/WC5IG

It usually works fine. If later you find something isn’t working, you can just install what you need. I’ve done this several times and had it just work, even on machines with very different hardware.

For now, Android is the best compromise between functionality and openness that’s suitable for daily use, especially GrapheneOS. Hopefully some of the Linux alternatives will develop to that point soon, but by all accounts they’re not there yet. So it’s worth fighting to keep what we have until we can use something more open.

Is that a compatibility layer thing, or a full Windows VM (requiring a Windows license) integrated into the Linux desktop environment? Being able to run the Affinity suite without having to switch to Windows is appealing.

Edit: There’s no GPU access so it’s unlikely things like Affinity Photo would run well.

Thanks. I’m giving it a try.

Are there any particular messaging apps fitting this description that you’d recommend?