Technology

slow menu

Dude of all the things I hate about modern tech, I think the most obnoxious one is that it STILL takes multiple seconds for a simple text-based menu to load. On my one TV, sometimes it takes so long to load that I actually forget that I've opened it and am annoyed when it finally shows up. Gotta save all that precious compute power to load ads and shit, I guess.

Devil's advocate here: switching to Linux wouldn't help.

I recently had to set up a public web server for a org that I belonged to. The idea was that I would set everything up in the most secure and unbreakable way I can think of, write documentation on how to do everything, transfer ownership of all the "break glass" credentials and lock my own account once I'm done.

This turned out to be a huge mistake. What was supposed to be some free work for a hobby group turned into a massive pain every day at 3-4am (due to time zone differences)

The person in charge of managing access control couldn't figure out how wg-easy works. She managed to give her own credentials to EVERYONE who needed access, which obviously didn't work due to IP conflicts. When pointed out, she modified the IP in every config file, which of course, still didn't work. It took forever to tell her NOT to share credentials and create new peers for each user.

The biggest problem is some how NOT windows or mac users. There is a single Linux user that is causing the most headaches. When I set up wireguard, I tested on both Linux and Windows, with Linux being what I used. I ran into some minor hiccups with getting split dns to work correctly, but it was relatively easy to fix in Network Manager. I assumed if there are other Linux users they would be able to fix it themselves. Obviously I was wrong.

Said person had DoH enabled in their browser that they didn't know how to disable, running varieties of "I don't know" for their network stack, DNS resolver, etc. almost every question for dig, cat /etc/resolv.conf descended into "what's that?" or completely incorrect commands (e.g. resolving a http url in dig). I could not figure out what the person was running, the person themselves had no idea what was running (I think it was systemd-resolvd, but I still don't know as of now). Eventually, after 3 workdays of trying to help fix this at 3-4am, I gave up. I can't help with a personal device belonging to somebody that has no idea what they're doing.

As for why I'm mentioning this story: switching to Linux wouldn't help this lady with her problem. There are similar issues on linux that would prevent a login or a graphical session (there was an old work machine that ran VLC, where VLC threw GBs worth of QT errors, eventually causing systemd to crash on reboot when the drive was full). The problem here isn't just the system, it's the user. A lot of people seem to be allergic to providing more details than "it's not working", "I don't know" and "I didn't try anything". If the general mindset is "I don't know what's wrong with no details", there's no savings the user from technical problems.

On a side note for "why the hell did I knowingly volunteer to set up a web server for someone else": the whole project was already 5 months overdue. It was beneficial for everyone for the server to be up asap. Said person in charge didn't think of anything (dns, hosting, software stack) other than ask a bunch of CS college students to design a Web app for her. Needless to say the students bailed on her (which is probably the best scenario? In terms of maintainability and security concerns). It also only took me 2 weeks to set everything up (lamp stack, K3S, crowdsec, openappsec, wireguard, etc)

But the shareholder value!!!111

With Windows you simply have much less problems to solve. Normal people don't care about jumping through hoops to create local accounts, they'll just register.

Windows interfaces are designed for easy learning and are backed by real telemetry data from millions of systems, like Ribbon menus. On Linux power users run the show so even blatant violations of basic principles tend to stick since the development version is the shipped version and is what they are used to.

I use Linux and Mac and windows and Linux is definitely the “hardest” to use for most people day to day. I think most people on this site are in tech so they underestimate just how tech illiterate the average person is.

People should really consider if the mental models they have in their heads about different operating systems are actually based on reality.

These people's reality is: they are familiar with Windows, and anything else is scary and perceived as even more difficult to learn to use. 20 years ago a colleague asked me about changing to Linux, I told him he could do all the same things he was doing, just use Open Office instead of MS Word and Excel, GIMP instead of Photoshop - he didn't even dive as deep as the differences between GIMP and Photoshop usage, his response was: "You mean I'll have to learn all new icons and names for my software?" "Well, yeah, that's part of moving." "In that case I don't think Linux is for me." "I have to agree with you there."

It "can" be ... it's just what people are more familiar with sometimes and new terms that seem native like: "control panel" "command prompt" "regedit" can be strange to people that haven't. It's not that they can't learn it, it's just a bit of an uphill battle.

Hell, Bazzite confused me for a bit because I didn't know wtf an immutable distro was.

When she does buy a new PC it'll be an Apple.

an apple? Because of this? why? why is it not an option to use a computer without an online account?

That’s for OpenAI, not Microsoft

Yeah I did the same and thought I was about to read an extremely dark conspiracy theory blog post

Yes, all of that happened but it happened because Samsung uploaded the photos without clear authorization and Microsoft downloaded all of the files without authorization after One Drive was automatically reinstalled after the user deliberately removed it.

Well, I found some nice blogs and enjoyed reading a few articles today on my weekend and I though "maybe, others enjoy those, too", so I shared 3 of them. They got around 900 upvotes in total, so I think, that was not a bad decision (for me, it's not about internet points, but about discourse / seeing what others think / strengthen lemmy).

I also couldn't find past posts of this article in @technology@lemmy.world, so it shouldn't be a duplicate -> https://reddthat.com/search?q=dark+patterns&type=All&listingType=All&communityId=9232&page=1&sort=TopAll&titleOnly=false

What's up with the Gestapo investigation on the calendar?

You actually think you decide to use one drive or not when you use Windows? So naive.

I believe the last time I had to do a Windows re-install, I was nagged THREE times to enable OneDrive. Each time, the opt out button was increasingly difficult to locate, and the verbiage more & more resembling "you're an idiot if you don't enable this".

Even after refusing to use it x3, once Windows was installed, OneDrive was still sitting down in the system tray, ready to fuck shit up.

They weren't using OneDrive either