Yeah 4% is big enough to get on Google’s radar as a threat. Especially if it’s trending upwards.

This is more than just a few tinfoil hats now.

And yes they’re working on locking bootloaders and also making AOSP less useful

Give them away? Not really, Samsung S series are the same pricing as pixels here where I live. The pixel a is different of course, it’s more like a Samsung FE.

It’s not, it’s easier to visualise one person out of a group of 25 than it is 4 out of a group of 100.

True but we were talking about Google here that’s why I mentioned Gmail. But yes with Microsoft it’s the same. And together they control most of the email accounts in the world.

Yes they are changing gdpr so that training AI on user data becomes “legitimate use” and won’t need opt in approval (though there may or may not be an opt out(

https://noyb.eu/en/digital-omnibus-eu-commission-wants-wreck-core-gdpr-principles

Also many other principles are being removed. It’s basically a surrender to Trump and his big tech buddies

Well yeah but then the mails your receive from Gmail users or the ones you send to are still captured unless they have opted out. Which you can’t see without asking.

And the EU is dropping its protection against unwanted AI training 🤬🤬🤬

Yeah I agree, Meta specifically bought meta because it is Zuckerberg’s obsession to own a mainstream computing platform. Microsoft own Windows. Google owns Android. Apple has their own platforms. All of them are deeply entrenched. But meta never did. So the emergence of metaverse was Zuckerberg’s chance to jump into that, this is why he went all-in on it. But this is also why there’s so much lockin on the Quest :( Even though it’s based on Android technically.

I totally agree it should be standardised and some movements have been made to that effect with OpenXR and the like. But nobody big from the industry really stands behind it. OpenXR is more a developer-side thing than a client-side anyway.

I think it will. I agree about Meta, though I’m too much of a VR fan to not have one 😳 And Pico isn’t any better (owned by bytedance). Vive is very focused on business (like large events with multiple people running around with headsets) these days.

Yeah that search bar, so useless because the start menu itself is a search bar if you simply start typing.

Yeah and also, many of the drawbacks of windows don’t really apply to companies. All the AI and MS account crap? Just switch it off in intune and M365 portal. Telemetry you can minimise with group policies. Crapware you can simply not install. It costs money? Sure but at a corp level so does Linux because they always want to pay a vendor so they can blame them when something goes wrong.

I work in IT (security). The reason they are so adamant on Windows at least in our place, is because it offers so many opportunities to go BOFH and lock everything down so much so the user can hardly do their job :) No other OS offers that, even Mac.

They think they need this to be secure. I beg to differ but unfortunately Microsoft is constantly feeding them with ‘best practices’ and other BS.

For Years, you had the Option to use Linux. Since the release of the win 11 beta, Linux has not made any relevant big steps.

I would argue it doesn’t need to. It’s pretty perfect these days as it is, especially with KDE (and the great thing about it having so much control over how your computer works and feels, Windows can never offer that).

Yeah this is just a weird tangent that will die off.

“Zorin Group” never heard of that. Seems to be a shop that just wants to lift along with the Windows 10 discontinuation tbh.

And if their selling point is running windows apps then they have no chance. You can’t get better at being windows than windows already is. You’ll always be one step behind the real thing.

And really you don’t need to, most linux apps are much better now that windows apps are more and more dumbed down. Look at the “new outlook” for example. It doesn’t even do local storage anymore, you must import all your email into the microsoft cloud overlord.

• Ads all over the place (and a start menu full of crapware)
• Telemetry you can’t completely turn off anymore (the only thing I’d respect is a license check)
• Constantly putting edge back
• Forced MS account and removing ways to bypass it
• Cloud upsells
• Forced updates “do this within the next 2 days or else…”
• “Copilot copilot copilot”

Gaming for me is the only thing I don’t use Windows for. But for gaming I still do. Because I mainly game in VR and that’s still so far behind on LInux :(

But I have 20 odd computers in the house so it’s easy to have one with windows around (two in fact, another old one with Win 10 LTSC for programming some old radios).

I love KDE for all the options it gives 🫶 I don’t like Gnome, Systemd and all the other redhat influences but they are easy to avoid these days.