There are plenty of options for personal computers; you have to make the choice to go private and personal.

I built my own desktop, which remains very common and is relatively easy to do. I have Linux and Windows on it, and use Linux nearly 100% as I agree I don’t like ads etc. I use a Firefox with ad blockers and don’t get ads; I use lots of open source software even to access services like Youtube (Free tube).

There are also even linux laptops, and the Frame.Work laptop which is fully modular and bring your own OS.

There are open source OS for phones.

You’re right about the corporatisation of the internet and services, but it remains up to users to vote with their feet and chose to take back their privacy and person computing.

Linux is at 4% of desktop users in recent months - that is many millions of people actively choosing to exist in a space where they control their personal computers. People don’t need to remove computers, just chose to set them up to be what they want them to be.

As others have said, gaming is thriving - AAA and bloated incumbants are not doing well but the indie sector is thriving.

VR is not on the verge of collapse, but it is growing slowly as we still have not reached the right price point for a mobile high powered headset. Apple made a big play for the future of VR with its Apple Vision Pro but that was not a short term play; that was laying the ground works for trying to control or shape a market that is still probably at least 5 if not 10 years away from something that will provide high quality VR, untethefed from a. PC.

AI meanwhile is a bubble. We are not in an age of AI, we are in an age of algorithms - they will and are useful but will not meet the hype or hyperbole being banded about. Expect that market to pop and probably with spectacular damage to some companies.

Other computing hardware is not really stagnating - we are going through a generational transition period. AMD is pushing Zen 5 and Intel it’s 14th gen, and all the chip makers are desperately trying to get on the AI band wagon. People are not upgrading because they don’t see the need - there aren’t compelling software reasons to upgrade yet (AI is certainly not compelling consumers to buy new systems). They will emerge eventually.

The lack of any landmark PC AAA games is likely holding back demand for consumer graphics cards, and we’re seeing similar issues with consoles. The games industry has certainly been here many times before. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 coming up - instead we’ve had flops like Star Wars Outlaws, or underperformers like Starfield. But look at the biggest game of last year - Baldurs Gate 3 came from a small studio and was a megahit.

I don’t see doom and gloom, just the usual ups and downs of the tech industry. We happen to be in a transition period, and also being distracted by the AI bubble and people realising it is a crock of shit. But technology continues to progress.

After being forced to standardise to usb c and be responsible for some of the e-waste it produces, apple has finally relented.

They fought tooth and nail against the EU regulations to force charging standards. I don’t care if they up sell cables to some people; most people will reuse what they have and thats the whole point of the regulations.

Regulation works.

Maybe he broke terms of service with the streaming companies but they should be pursuing him in civil courts. This feels like abuse of the criminal justice system to retrieve money for companies that were negligent in how they were running their streaming businesses.

This guy produced music and he alsp streamed the music even if it was bots at industrial scale. He seemingly met the criteria needed to get money from the streamers. I’m not a lawyer at all but on cursory look at the definition and elements of wire fraud, I guessing this will hinge on whether this was a “material deception” - but he produced actual music and he streamed it, so is it?

Also i wonder whether it can be proven that the intent was to “defraud” rather than take advantage / game a system.

It feels like the tax payer is bearing the cost of prosecuting someone for a dispute between a person and the multi billion dollar music industry.

Also the music industry trying to paint this as theft of money from other artists is a bullshit - the streaming fees are supposedly divided out proportionately from overall streaming. He caused more streaming so the pot was bigger, and he took a proportionate share of that bigger pot. And any disproportionate sharing reflects the shitty practice’s of the streamers and the big music rights holders who are essentially monopolies squeezing out the smaller competitors from the system.

The article is a bit vague on the pros and cons of reflective LCD screens.

It seems to be pros that it has a good refresh rate, can be used without a backlight so is good outdoors and indoors in a bright room, and maybe better for your eyes due to the lack of the backlight/blue spectrum light. It also may offer better colour depth than e-ink currently.

The cons are not clearly addressed but presumably battery life is worse than e-ink but better than a backlit display such as OLED or AMOLED, that colours are still not as good as other LCDs even if better than e-ink, and it seems cost (although that may be due to the small market at present).

Also there is no obvious innovation noted in the article so its not clear what has changed about these displays? It sounds more like some small companies are just using the displays in a new way to try and mimick paper. But maybe thats wrong or will change?

Maybe this would compete with e-ink if cost comes down. The battery benefit of e-ink with a static image is one of its big benefits, to the point that its being used for shelf labels in supermarkets. E-ink isn’t going anywhere but good to have more choices in the tablet space.

This is badly written and ignorant article. Fat32 supports up to 16Tb partition size (depending on cluster size - 2Tb -16Tb).

Its microsoft’s windows tools that arbitrarily only allow users to create 32Gb partitions, and it is this that is being changed. This is not a change to Fat32, this is a change to windows. 3rd party tools on Windows and other systems like Linux have long offered more options for partition size.

That its taken to 2024 for Microsoft to fix the command line tool (and still not fix the GUI tools) is ridiculous.

Firefox will support Manifest v3. However Mozilla will be implementing Manifest 3 differently so the routes Ublock and other extensions use to maintain privacy and block ads will still be available. Firefox will support both the original route and the new limited option Google is forcing on Chromium.

Googles implementation deliberately locks out extensions by removing something called WebRequest, supposedly for security reasons but almost certainly actually for commercial reasons as they are not a neutral party. Google is a major ad and data broker.

Apple will apparently also be adopting the same approach for Safari as Mozilla is for Firefox.

Yeah totally agree. The central premise of Mozilla’s argument is wrong: that we need to care about what advertisers want.

No compromise is needed as advertisers problems are not users problems. Mozilla has massively dropped the ball on this.

Well planned obsolescence is a good thing for the content maker - the customer has to buy it again if they like it. The ultimate DRM?

So you kind of miss the obvious long term application in this scenario: buy a totally realistic dildo clone of my penis, buy a clone of my boobs etc. A step beyond just meat but the more realistic application of this technology in the sex world.

I think they’ll be eating their favourite onlyfans creators, just not in the way you’re suggesting.

Then I’d definitely set up a test system in a VM on your own PC (I.e. not the actual server machines). Even if you don’t want to use Docker, you can set up a complete version of your new server and practice deploying Jellyfin and Plex, and then test accessing it “remotely” to manage it. You can then decide whether switching away from Win11 is worth it.

If you’re not familiar with the process of setting up a linux server then I’d actually suggest Debian instead of OpenSuSe. Looking at the Jellyfin guide for example it specifically covers the steps for installing directly onto a Debian host (while OpenSuSE set up means using the Fedora RPM guide). There are also straight forward guides for setting up a Debian server.

Personally I’m not a fan of Ubuntu (because of Canonical and Snap etc) but there may also be a good choice just because there are so many guides out there for setting up Ubuntu server.

Docker is pretty easy to use, and is easy to play with either on your own system (linux or windows) or in VM guest system. The learning curve isn’t that high and Jellyfin for example has a clear set up guide for docker on their wiki.

But radarr, sonarr etc can be installed directly within linux without docker. The Servarr wiki (that these projects use officially to share information as they’re so similar) has lots of straight forward guides for set up on Linux, Windows, Mac etc as well as Docker.

I have a Linux guest VM set up with a Radarr, Sonarr etc set up, VPN and torrent set up. It was easy to do and means its network activity is all securely contained away from my host system. The tools let me set naming rules and file preferences. The library is a shared n folder in my host system, and that is included in my Jellyfin library. So all I have to do is subscribe to something i am interested in and it will just appear in my library once downloaded. The servarr tools are extremely convenient and worth looking at if you’re adding to that 30tb library over time.

OpenSuSE is a good distro with nice tools like Yast that have a decent CLI interface, and has server releases. The leap edition is stable but relatively up to date.

But there are lots of viable alternatives, and if you’re going to use Docker then the host distro is probably not as important as you think.

Simplest route may be to set up a demo server within a VM and see which one chimes the most with your style of use and maintenance. You could have a functioning demo server with docker and deploy both jellyfin and Plex in 20mins.

I disagree - Outlook is a walled garden of closed standards, and it makes users vulnerable to the whims of Microsoft or dependent entirely on their office ecosystem.

The recent outlook hack with senior accounts hacked and only being informed by Microsoft of the hack 1 year later is a good example.

Outlook is superficially good but essentially big businesses and organisations are locked in to a proprietary system for email and calendars and entirely reliant on Microsoft to keep their data secure.

I’m actually surprised Antitrust laws aren’t used to break up the Office 365 monopoly. Only the teams integration is being challenged but the tight integration between Outlook, Office and OneDrive is monopolistic. Other services could integrate in the same way if Microsoft was forced to open up its APIs, which would be good for competition and customers.

At the moment you pretty much have to go all in with Office or forgo major integration benefits if you want to use different cloud or mail services. Why do you need 1 single provider for office software, mail and cloud storage?

Well they said themselves why there is not a focus on desktop apps: web apps work well. I use proton calendar for my personal calendar. For work I use outlook. For both I access via phone apps or web browser on my desktop.

The big problem with calendar desktop apps is not the apps, it’s how they sync and share. You have either ICS or caldav.

The biggest problem is Microsoft Office. It partially supports ICS and is a nightmare to work with Exchange calendars. Most Microsoft clients (84% apparently) are hosted in Microsoft cloud services, and Microsoft is removing EWS support in 2026 (which Thunderbird is working to support). Microsoft’s own Graph api for cloud access is limited preventing some basic desktop features.

So existing calendar software is fine if you use good services that support standards. Its bad if you’re locked into the proprietary Microsoft ecosystem. Mac calendar tools will hit the same problems in 2026 when EWS support is dropped.

There is basically no incentive to work on these tools with Exchange because its a deliberately walled garden. But Thunderbird and other desktop calendar apps are decent, they just don’t support Outlook/Exchange.

Its on businesses to challenge why Microsoft keeps their data walled within a proprietary system. Security may be an argument but that’s a little flimsy when you see how very senior outlook accounts have been accessed by hackers and Microsoft has been keeping it quiet. Theyve only started contacting people now to tell them their emails maybhave been accessed after a major hack last year. And were talking CEO level account access.

That is then not a technology ready for mass use. That would be McDonalds paying IBM to let it beta test (or alpha test it seems) its software for them.

And the only way to check the order would be to listen to each order and confirm the order is correct - so totally duplicating the AI’s job. It then becomes “what’s the point” for McDonalds?

AI tools at present are broken and not fit for purpose.

AI is and always has been a bullshit technology. Its no where near as capable as its proponents in tech industry have been claiming. Its all driven by greed to feed into a stock price frenzy but its the emperor’s new clothes. In the future it may be something useful but at present even the tools that exist are unreliable and broken.

Self Drive Cars is different, very much a Tesla issue rather than generalised. Tesla has a first move advantage but then Elon Musk blew it by forcing his engineers to cut back on sensors and tech to save money because he knows best. Other self drive manufacturers are doing well and even have licenses to test their fully featured systems in multiple locations.

AI is a generally crap technology (maybe in the future it will be something useful). Self Drive is a generally myself up technology, except at Tesla where they went for the crap unworkable version.

Batteries can be replaced. An EV that could run 1 million miles would still need maintenance - I think the point is that they could be designed to last.

Planned obsolescence is so wide spread we don’t even notice it, but lots of products are designed to fail either through cheaper components or deliberately flawed design. That means we have to go and buy a replacement. It is also generally cheaper.

So we either have cheap products that will break or seemingly expensive products but they last for a very long time. But in the long run the cheap products generally cost you more to buy than one expensive product.

If you look into the data Steam OS Holo s listed and it is 45.3%. Arch separately is second at 7.9% and then third is the Flatpak installs across all Linux versions at 6%.

The changes are more difficult to interpret as Linux is growing overall so changes between Linux distros are difficult. For example a small decline in overall share may still represent an increase in total numbers. While Steam OS is up another 3% points, other distros combined are up more - Ubuntu and PopOS combined are up 5% points. That suggests the Linux growth is split between Steam Deck and PC users rather than purely one or the other dominating.

Yeah wishful thinking but also a bit reassuring that this is then a meaningful if small shift. People are choosing Linux via steam decks or personally, and its been enabled via proton and wine rather than necessarily people fleeing win 11.

I do think win 11 changes contribute to people trying Linux more but I think it is Linux that is keeping people that is what has changed. I don’t see some huge move to Linux though - just its growing faster as it supports gaming well and is increasingly easier to use and maintain (which has been a long trend). But win11 being increasingly anti user can’t be a bad think for Linux long term.