I have one. I hated the stock skin. I like having the apps I use regularly groups together by purpose on my home screen so I can get to them quickly. I immediately re-skinned it.

Allow encryption.

I don’t want to talk on open air with anyone and everyone able to listen in.

Windows 11 LTSC

I’m using Window 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC; the biggest issue I’ve had was that I couldn’t get my video card installed. I had to wait until there was an updated driver, a few weeks after I assembled my computer. Every time I tried to install the driver that was supposed to be the correct one, I got a BSOD.

Honestly, I like 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC better than I liked the 10 Pro version that I had. And–compared to the only Linux distro I’ve used, Tails–it’s fairly straightforward. And yes, I know the Tails is kind of a pain in the ass, and it’s not fair to judge all of Linux against that. But i’m old, and cranky, and just want Win 3.11 back.

Moving to platforms that they don’t control and can’t monitor is likely deeply troublesome and worrying to fascists.

The laws for incitement of violence are supposed to be pretty narrow; see Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969). OTOH, prosecutors tend to overreach frequently, and fighting it in court is expensive, even if you would otherwise prevail and have charges dismissed.

Curious how the numbers for people that do CC–where you have to actually pedal up hills–compare to those that do downhill or free-riding. The CC riding I used to do was all very slow, technical trails in the midwest; the limited riding i did in California was mostly bombing down fire roads.

That’s not entirely accurate. Yes, it was more than the GDP of the entire planet at the time, but that’s not the value of the entire planet. Unless they meant the amount of physical currency that existed, in which case the amount was considerably less than the 62T that the article cites, since most money is never physical.

It’s still patently ridiculous though.

These leaks frustrate labels and artists and not just for financial reasons. Many musicians work months if not years on their tracks; seeing these being paraded on pirate sites, before their official release, stings.

I dunno about this. Most of the artists I give a shit about have their music up for free on Bandcamp. The ones I’ve asked point-blank about it have said that they don’t care about piracy; they see it as free advertisement for their live shows, which is where they make most of their money (and on merch sales). This might be true of some of the largest acts, where sales might make up more than a few hundred dollars in total annual revenue, but probably a lot less true for most mid-sized or smaller acts.

OTOH, given that the labels are the ones making money off sales of music, they probably care quite a lot.

I’ve personally found that I can hear a sound difference in 320kpbs .mp3s, depending on whether or not it was encoded with a constant bit rate, or a variable bit rate.

You really need a critical mass to break Adobe’s stranglehold. I hope that someone can, because I hate their software-as-a-service model. But for now, I have to suck it up and deal with it.

Their refusal to pay to integrate PANTONE colors has really fucked up my workflow. :(

Nothing is going to effectively hurt their bottom line, because they own the market. There are no other viable alternatives to Adobe if you are working in the graphics profession. Everyone, and I mean everyone, in graphic design/visual communication uses Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. If you do any work with designers and receive files from them, you’ll need to use Adobe products in order to access the files and all the information in the files.

This is the sector I work in. There is absolutely no getting away from it, and until someone comes up with a product suite that is better right out of the gate, and is completely compatible with Adobe, no one is going to switch.

Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably get an Apple device.

Sadly, I also don’t like spending money. :P You used to be able to make Hackintoshes, but Apple tends to break them with every software update.

I had been thinking about getting an IoT Enterprise LTSC release of Windows and manually adding the components that I needed. Might still do that with dual boot.

There are a lot of ways to get around that, such as:

I’m doing all of that except the last one already. As has been noted in many other places, Windows itself is now in the business of serving ads directly, and it looks like that’s getting harder and harder to disable. I managed to mostly lock down the Pro release of Win 10 that I’m on right now, but Win 11 will make that much, much harder. If it weren’t for security issues surrounding end of product life, I wouldn’t switch versions at all.

C’est la mort.

But yeah, I’ll def. look for a user-friendly version of Linux when I build my next system in a few months.

I have to use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro every day for my day job. I have to keep up-to-date with my versions, because clients send me files that use features in the latest releases, and not being up-to-date means that things don’t render correctly. (I’m super-pissed that I have to update since Adobe dropped all support for Pantone colors abut a year (?) ago.)

I use Corel Painter 2022 and a Wacom pen display for fun. My guess is that a pen display might get a little weird in Linux, but the one I have is not cutting edge at least.

Yeah, don’t use that for regular work, that’s an uber-paranoid distro that’s intentionally locked down, which means things are likely going to be more difficult to get working.

I know, I know, but I liked being functionally untrackable online, and not getting ads shoved down my throat (…despite working in advertising…) all the time. It’s neat, but almost everything online seems to have privacy-invading features so deeply embedded that the browser built into Tails just can’t use them at all.

Allow me to piggyback on this a bit, s’il vous plait.

Is there a Linux distribution that will run Adobe CC out of the box, games from Steam, and VR headsets? I need a new desktop badly, but I need to be able to use Adobe products as part of my job. (No, I can’t switch to GNU products, because I get files from clients, and I have to be able to work to industry standards.) I’ve used Tails before, which is not a user-friendly product, and it doesn’t play nicely with any other software.

Create a multi-part archive (…probably about 250 parts…) with a strong password, upload each part to whatever the current equivalent to Megaupload is, and let them download it at their leisure.

With no accounts on either end, should only take about three months for each to be complete.

Alternatively, you could put it on a thumb drive and drive it over if they live fairly close.

It is, yes. They do a ton of really small updates all the fucking time now, sometimes breaking critical shit, sometimes fixing things. (I don’t remember which version it was that ended support for PANTONE; now you have to pay for a subscription to PANTONE also, and the plug-in is trash and buggy as hell.) Since it wants to be always connected to the internet now, it’s more of a pain in the ass to pirate, although it’s likely still possible.

I have to use it for my job, so my company pays for it. But TBH, if you’re an industry professional, there’s really not any viable options on the market. Half the stuff clients send to me are in proprietary formats.

720p? Pfffft. 240i. Rip them in ‘2014 YouTube over 2G’ quality.

It’s super-complicated to figure out how much revenue each stream earns musicians, but unless they’re already one of the biggest names in music, it ain’t much. Which means that, either way, pirating the music isn’t harming them to any significant degree, unless everyone was pirating their music, and no one was attending their live performances.

I you want to talk about how they got to power, well, fascists usually got there by votes, and communists by revolution. It’s rare–but not unheard of–for a communist gov’t to be voted into power.

But the end results end up being remarkable similar; they’re both dictatorial, and both use state-sponsored violence to suppress or eliminate competing political ideology. (I want to be clear that I’m not talking about Marxism specifically; Marx was opposed to the existence of a state. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, et al. were authoritarian.) As long as you are part of the political in group, you’re golden. Once you’re out, you’re an enemy of the state.

…Dude. Do you want to, I dunno, read about the purges of loyal communists by Stalin in the 30s and 40s? Can you explain to me how that’s significantly different from the Night of Long Knives?