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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Half of the time when I press the Windows key Windows does nothing at all, or pops up an empty box where the Start menu should be and leaves me wondering whether it will eventually fill the box with things. When I finally get to click an icon, half the time nothing happens, or maybe the menu disappears and then nothing happens. But programs are so slow to launch that you don’t know for sure nothing happened, so you have to wait half a minute before trying again. Then 2 instances of your app launch together. And then there’s the constant focus stealing in Windows, still unfixed after decades.

    I really don’t get how people can prefer that interface to basically any of the Linux ones. They’re all faster and more functional than Windows. I do understand the issue with specialist photo, video or music software though. I still need to keep a Windows machine (physical or virtual) handy for the Affinity suite, Ableton Live, and legacy projects in Visual Studio. But my daily computing experience has been so much smoother, faster and more relaxing since I switched to Linux, and I think most ordinary users would actually have an easier time with something like Linux Mint than with Windows.


  • It’s the first rolling distro I have tried, and I’ve been running it for about 3 years now without any real problems. I think maybe twice there have been updates that cause issues, out of hundreds of updates per week. It’s surprisingly solid, and everything’s up to date.

    Not everyone would want hundreds of updates per week of course, but it’s up to the user to decide how often to install updates. Unlike Windows, the updates don’t intrude, and they are fast.







  • I bumped into the CEO again about 10 years later at a funeral. He was thoroughly obnoxious and spent the time making fun of the deceased (a colleague of ours) and taunting my friend about how many hours he had tricked him into working for free. Then he bragged about his current business and its success. Really one of the most awful people I’ve ever met.

    That wasn’t the first deceased colleague of ours he had disrespected. We had a very skilled but very obedient guy working on our team - call him Jim - whose brother (also an colleague) was terminally ill in hospital. These brothers were good guys and popular with all their colleagues. One day Jim got the message that his brother had taken a turn for the worse and might not have much longer, so he asked his manager if he could take the afternoon off to visit his brother. Word came down from Mr. CEO: no, Jim was needed in the office so could not have the afternoon off. Being a loyal employee, Jim stayed. His brother died that evening and he didn’t get to say goodbye. I left the company soon after that.

    Miserable as this all was, it was a good lesson in just how self-centred and self-important some people are. This CEO is now very wealthy and still goes through life convinced he’s a success and we’re all losers who don’t know how to do life like he does. He’ll probably never figure out the truth.


  • I’ve never had a boss who didn’t do this. Promise, set timeline and price, get contracts signed, then come to the development team to ask whether it’s possible to do by Wednesday. Many years ago I had a boss who promised a major client that we’d provide an entire online advertising network to rival Google Ads, and gave us 4 days to design, develop and deliver it. Then when it wasn’t ready he threw one of the developers under the bus in a meeting with the customer. He actually used the words, “This is Dave’s fault.” Dave was professional and didn’t argue. Good look for a CEO. I’m sure he thought he had won. The project went nowhere because all the execs had different ideas about what it was supposed to do, and the dev team was oddly unmotivated to help them out.


  • Windows feels less stable today than it has been for a long time. I spend so long, on every Windows computer, waiting for windows that have turned white and say “not responding” in the title bar. I use Linux for almost everything, partly out of principle, but largely because the Windows experience is so slow and frustrating these days. For the most part, the friendlier Linux distros do a better job of just working.