Good on them. The earlier they can shut down those coal plants, the better.

Daily driven Mint, OpenSuse Tumbleweed and Fedora. They’re all great, with their own pros and cons.

Also Microsoft products have become enshitified beyond recognition.

It’s some sketchy pre-cracked Jack Sparrow edition I torrented to run exclusively offline in a VM and will never let it connect to the internet because I don’t trust it. I’m not too worried about getting security updates for it.

I exclusively use it to run Autodesk Inventor for making 3D printable objects. Once the STL is created I just drag and drop it out of the VM into my Linux machine. It’s the only communication with the outside world it will ever have.

I have a copy of Windows 10 LTSC that I have installed on a virtual machine just in case I need the one last program that I use that I cannot get to work on Linux.

Lately I upgraded my machine and had to reinstall everything. As I was installing Windows on my VM, it started demanding that I create an account and wouldn’t let me proceed without one, asked me to associate third party accounts to my OS and was generally being extremely intrusive and forceful in ways I didn’t remember it being before, like opening Edge and forcing me to click through an introduction that I didn’t want without giving me the option to close it. I then realized that I had forgotten to disable network access to my VM and that Windows had downloaded updates during the install.

I immediately destroyed that VM and started over again, this time without allowing it to connect to internet. Suddenly the experience was far better.

The moment I had let Windows connect to the internet it had thoroughly enshittified itself. It let me appreciate how badly Microsoft has enshittified Windows 10 over the years ever since its release. We are far away from the Windows 7 days.

Install Linux

It is important to point out that it isn’t the brand that makes it good, it is the fact that it is laser.

I used to have a Brother “multi function center” printer/scanner/photocopier/fax that used inkjet and it was pure asshole design. Wasting expensive ink just by remaining plugged in and refusing to do anything if one cartridge was low on ink (but was actually still half full)

But if I had to single out a brand that should absolutely be avoided for printers it is HP. They do asshole DRM to a whole new level. They bricked a brand new ink cartridge because I didn’t put it in properly at first.

Now I have a laser printer and the nightmare is finally over.

Teams will die for Copilot somehow.