patrick.net

The browser can do pretty much everything now, and the OS is mostly irrelevant.

I don't like Google, but they proved you can do word processing and spreadsheets in the browser.

And when something works in a browser, it works on all operating systems, whether mobile or desktop.

It's nice that there are at least 3 alternatives to the far-left editors at Wikipedia who started locking all political articles as soon as they got massive and mysterious donations.

https://en.metapedia.org/
https://infogalactic.com/
https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page

richwicks says

This concept that "Apple is more stable / easier / etc" is a myth. It's not.WookieMan says

Yes, Its not.
I spent few hours on one of the Macbooks last weekend to clean up all virus and spyware after finding that google search results returns from yahoo!! (Why is my Google search going to Yahoo on Mac?)
I didn't know Apple Macbook is really this bad!
I went through all of the places mentioned at https://macsecurity.net/view/259-yahoo-redirect-virus-mac and cleanup. Now I am still not sure that I can trust this junk particularly for a student user.
Found one very obvious suspect was Adobe flash player. Unbelievable.
If the user base grows to as large as Windows and Mac, may be Linux may experience the same but until then Linux distros like Ubuntu is still the best bet for even average user.

WookieMan says

Coming on 2 decades and I've never had any crash or failure of any type.

My MacBook Air crashes about once a month. Not bad, but that's once a month more than Linux does.

WookieMan says

richwicks says

This is the most annoying thing with Apple, the fucking thing doesn't interoperate with anything.

I can do anything I need/want to.

Copy a music file from your iPhone to your computer or from your computer to your iPhone.

I listen to a bunch of people on the internet but they are presented on video sites. I use a program to strip the video, and turn it into MP3. I then use FTP to copy the files to my phone which places it on an SD Card. If I'm going to be stuck on a plane (which I soon will be), I'll dump some books onto my tablet the same way, or maybe a film or two.

Basic things like this, are just about impossible to do on a iPhone, or iPad.

WookieMan says

No complaints here and it works. Like I said I'm not programming software or doing engineering work. 100% works how I need it to. I'm an A to B guy. Cars, computers, anything. Apple performs in that realm extremely well. More technical, I get how one wouldn't like it as a work machine. Coming on 2 decades and I've never had any crash or failure of any type. I'd take that with any product even if it isn't perfect.

So I'm not going to criticize you, I'm just pointing out that if you only have a hammer, all you see are nails.

With Linux, I have a HUGE toolset.

I'm running a webserver on my computer (this computer) right now. It's just me that can access it for the most part, but if I need to access files from my computer, I have it setup so I can. I can even remotely log into this machine, and mount the drive as if it was local, no matter where I am in the world.

Linux is a very powerful system, because it's just Unix for the most part. Everything and anything people wanted to do with the OS was kind of solved by 1995 - but it has no marketing, and it's engineers that improve it. Android is just a dumbed down version of Linux. You can run Android NATIVELY under Linux with 2 kernel modules. Linux refuses to incorporate those modules into the OS though because they SEVERELY compromise security - or that's the excuse anyhow.

Still, just because you have an extremely powerful system, doesn't mean you need to know everything about it to use it. I've been using Linux for 30 years, and I still find new capabilities of it every now and then. I only discovered SSHFS (secure file sharing through network mounts) 7 years ago. I was so pissed off because it's been around for 20, and I was futzing with NFS (which SUCKS). I was like "why don't they make it possible to share remote drives through the Internet through an encrypted connection??" - and they had, 14 years prior.

There's so many tools under Linux, it makes your head swim. Ytalk is interesting as well. It's in between an Instant Messenger, and a phone call. When you type, people see what you're typing as you type it. So you start completing their thoughts and they complete yours. It's not persistent either, it's a conversation, not a log. It's got more bandwidth overhead, but in some ways it's BETTER than a phone call. If you're working and you need to talk to a colleague, it's just data and you can ignore them for a bit, and they can ignore you, it's more intimate than a instant messenger, and less involved than a phone call.

That was around in 1989, at least. There's nothing like it today.

Here's another thing to think about - any PROGRAM that I need to run, that only runs on Windows, I'll just install a virtual machine. I can run a PC on top of a PC. There's is literally no conceivable reason I'd want to run Windows as a base operating system, EXCEPT for video games. Running a video game on a virtual machine, there's lag in that - gives you a considerable disadvantage in the game. I haven't run Windows as a base OS for 20 years. As soon a virtual machines became a thing, I moved to that.

And - Apple... I was an Amiga user...

We
Are
Enemies

:) Amiga was a better OS and computer, but they are dead. I used to use ShapeShifter to run MAC back in college, for the novelty of it. The fastest MAC of that time was actually an Amiga emulating a MAC, but it was only slightly faster, but several hundred dollars cheaper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI

richwicks says

Copy a music file from your iPhone to your computer or from your computer to your iPhone.

Lol, Apple does deliberately make it very hard, though not impossible if you put enough work into it and have some tech background.

Hell, just try to get all of your own photos off of your iPhone into a directory on your non-Mac laptop. Really hard.

Or try to get the home directory on your mac to be like /home/patrick Also very hard, though I did manage.

And try to get the Mac to stop creating stoopid litter in your home directory, like the Movies, Music, and Public directories.

Patrick says

richwicks says

Copy a music file from your iPhone to your computer or from your computer to your iPhone.

Lol, Apple does deliberately make it very hard, though not impossible if you put enough work into it and have some tech background.

Hell, just try to get all of your own photos off of your iPhone into a directory on your non-Mac laptop. Really hard.

Or try to get the home directory on your mac to be like /home/patrick Also very hard, though I did manage.

And try to get the Mac to stop creating stoopid litter in your home directory, like the Movies, Music, and Public directories.

It's been a long time since I've had to deal with a MAC but when I did was "well, how the hell do you do this super trivial thing?" "Oh you can't!"

My feeling with MAC is that everything you put on it, you don't own or control. I actually give a damn about my privacy, and I don't feel I have any control over a MAC in that regard.

MAC is for a different personality than mine, even Windows is. I want to at least believe I own the entire system and entirely control it.

My main frustration with the two other operating systems is they just make shit difficult. For example, if you own a DVD or a BluRay you CAN copy it. You can copy it by looking at the digital output from your HDMI cable, to copy it bit by LITERAL bit, an exact duplicate with no errors, but this requires quite a bit of technical expertise. DRM is stupid, and Linux realizes it's stupid, but Windows and MAC, they make it as hard as possible but there's somebody out there that will crack it. You know how BluRay was originally "cracked"? Somebody did a playback, frame by frame of BluRay, did a screen shot of every frame, and then pieced it together to make a film, and then ripped the audio through SPDIF. They did this ON THE DAY BluRay was released. The people that made BluRay spent YEARS developing the anti-piracy. It's impossible. It's not just a really hard problem, if you can see it, you can copy it. You cannot prevent physical media from being duplicated, and anything that enters your machine can be duplicated.

richwicks says

The flipside is that I can detect if my linux box has been compromised, good luck determining that with a Windows machine or a MAC.

I think you got Microsoft triggered and didn't read my full OP. I am not singing the praises of what Microsoft is now, compared to Linux or any other OS.
It sucks like any other OS could suck, there's not much to tout about the virtues of the MS world anymore. It's been dumbed down so extreme to the point, that you're just an end user, no matter how technical your skills are.

Windows 95 and 98 for the most part were secure as they were not so intertwined into the internet, as Bill Gates lamented at Comdex 1999 through 2003, you could even say Windows 2000 was some what more private and secure than anything since Windows XP. What I liked about those older OS, was drivers were a breeze to write for, because the IRQ, comport, and other settings were all configurable. Today any meaningful peripheral connected to a windows box, will have it's own OS, processer, and network connection communicating between the company that sold the unit and your computer.
I got far more done on a lower level with VB 6 making API calls and invoking active X objects. Who fucking cared that's not how the butt hurt Nerds were doing it with Unix/Linux .Bill Gates should have ran a huge campaign pushing back on the Sour Grapes that were out to sink his OS. They wanted him so bad, they ended up buying him out, and inviting him into the World Domination club. If he would just let go of his OS and let it became the huge Bad Actor backdoor foreign and domestic, criminal and administrative, just a big fishbowl, displaying your personal digital life to the world. Spire what they claimed, your ActiveX vulnerabilities did not pose no where near the risk to your privacy that subsequent MS offerings intentionally put in for exploitations.

Microsoft should have left the Windows Subsystem with the VB programing OCX and Active X and low level API access OS alone. For business and desktop.
Then made a totally different OS designed for graphics, audio, science and engineering from scratch. Independent from any Dos logic. Which is still tied into the Windows 10/11 OS. Try creating a file call Con.txt or Con.jpg and see Windows tell you that you can't. Even though "Con" has not been a valid Windows command in 30 years or more.

richwicks says

LibreOffice is (mostly) a replacement for it and has been for nearly 2 decades.

I'm not talking just about Office production. In fact, if web browsing and spread sheets were all one needs, then they could get by with Chrome Book.
And do everything in the Google Cloud.

What is a Database management system made for Linux, that has a reasonable GUI? I know there's MySQL but a MS analogue to that would be more like Access and not something like Oracle or Microsoft SQL server. Or I guess I'm looking for consumer quality full featured supported applications. At best you get these open source half assed attempts that many Windows and Apple users try and want to like. But in the end they fall short. They are a huge convoluted mess.
LInux drivers are hard to get for hardware you buy, it's been unnecessarily flawed for so long, because people that use Linux don't have an understanding of what Windows user's needs and expectations are. .By now the binaries between builds are incompatible, they've had decades to sort that out. If Microsoft(and this is the best thing they've done in almost 20 years.) can run Core binaries and libraries to run on LInux, then these different Distros should all be able to run the same binaries.

Tenpoundbass says

richwicks says

LibreOffice is (mostly) a replacement for it and has been for nearly 2 decades.

I'm not talking just about Office production. In fact, if web browsing and spread sheets were all one needs, then they could get by with Chrome Book.
And do everything in the Google Cloud.

What is a Database management system made for Linux, that has a reasonable GUI? I know there's MySQL but a MS analogue to that would be more like Access and not something like Oracle or Microsoft SQL server. Or I guess I'm looking for consumer quality full featured supported applications. At best you get these open source half assed attempts that many Windows and Apple users try and want to like. But in the end they fall short. They are a huge convoluted mess.
LInux drivers are hard to get for hardware you buy, it's been unnecessarily flawed for so long, because people that use Linux ...

Agreed on the lack of good client software, windows always had the best, but for servers Linux is unmatched. Though I haven't really liked any windoze OS since windows 2000, their last solid release. Mac os x is now going the path of windows with every upgrade making things worse. But since all OSes are mediocre now it's not that big of a deal.

Tenpoundbass says

And do everything in the Google Cloud.

You can't trust Google. A Chromebook is compromised, out of the box.

Tenpoundbass says

What is a Database management system made for Linux, that has a reasonable GUI? I know there's MySQL but a MS analogue to that would be more like Access

Look Access had a bug in it where rollback corrupted the database. This is what the REGISTRY is based on. The registry is the fucking dumbest idea, ever. The reason a Windows machine "gets slow" is because of that shitty fucking file and it's designed to do that. Give me a 15 year old laptop, let me installed Windows, I dunno, 2007 on it, and it will run like silk FOR A LITTLE WHILE.

Tenpoundbass says

LInux drivers are hard to get for hardware you buy, it's been unnecessarily flawed for so long,

I've implemented drivers for Linux. Getting full specifications for the hardware is pulling nails from toes. Wifi adapters are CONSTANTLY (and unnecessarily) being changed so drivers stop working. It's mostly sorted out because they can only fuck with it so much.

Tenpoundbass says

If Microsoft(and this is the best thing they've done in almost 20 years.) can run Core binaries and libraries to run on LInux, then these different Distros should all be able to run the same binaries.

Microsoft is poison. They ruined Kerbeos, spent years trying to sabotage Apache and Samba, their Ubuntu interface under Windows 10 was SHIT, you simply can't trust them.

Microsoft keeps fucking over their partners, and they won't stop. Dr. Doss, Stacker they fucked, they fucked Spyglass, they fucked IBM, they fucked Borland, after a point it's like "I won't make a deal with your fucks, because you fucks will fuck me".

Dr. Doss was a pre-emptive multi-tasking DOS it allowed users to have the computer do multiple things at one time. Microsoft put in a poison pill in Windows 3.11 which SPECIFICALLY detected that Dr. Doss was the base DOS, and would crash intentionally for that reason alone. The code was highly obfuscated and was self modifying to prevent detection.

Stacker was a driver that did compression to the HDD back in the 1990's, it basically doubled your disk space, at the expense of slowing down access and increasing the need for CPU power. Microsoft made a deal with them, and incorporated it, then refused to pay for it.

Spyglass was a small company that spun off from Netscape. Microsoft made an agreement with them that if they could have their code, they would share the sales of Internet Explorer - instead Microsoft said "it's free" and therefore they owed Spyglass nothing.

IBM went to Microsoft during a DOJ anti-trust investigation to make a partnership. Microsoft eventually told IBM to fuck off, and when IBM made OS/2 Microsoft would MONTHLY modify their system ONLY to be incompatible with OS/2

Borland SAVED Microsoft, back in the day, Microsoft couldn't write a compiler that was reliable about allocating NON-allocated memory in Visual C, but Borland solved the problem and as a result the OS survived. Microsoft purchased all the top programmers of Borland to remake Visual C/C++ and bankrupted them.

You can't work with Microsoft. You just can't trust them. They are, by far, the most predatory company in technology. They just can't be trusted to not violate contracts, not to go after you to bankrupt you, you can't trust them. They're radioactive.

But now Google is too. Facebook is too. Twitter is too.

The reason I use Linux is that I know, EVENTUALLY all this shitcanery is going to catch up with these mother fuckers. EVENTUALLY people are going to realize that Youtube is nothing but propaganda, that Google doesn't give actual search results, but propaganda, that they can't actually talk with friends and family on Facebook without being authorized for EACH message, that you can't hear what people think on Twitter, unless it's approved.

Hardware is simplifying, software is too - we can't be dependent on these shithead companies. It's death.

You'll be spending $1,000 a month (in today's money) on MS Office at some point. But you don't want to use LibreOffice...

You're being led to a slaughterhouse, and the only reason you're not there right now, is because of Linux. This would have happened 15 years ago, if there weren't alternatives. Microsoft's goal in the late 1990's was to make the Internet ONLY accessible by MS Windows, that was what the push in IE was for. Websites would refuse to load in Netscape and Galeon and Konqueror, etc back then. You know how you fixed it? There was a hack in Linux flavors that allowed you to MISREPORT your web-browser, and it would work. IIS wouldn't serve webpages to anything other than IE, and Microsoft PAID companies to do that. It was entirely compatible.

Microsoft undermines technology, they hold it back. Vaporware was their big thing. Some company back in 1995 would announce a revolutionary advance in something, and MS would be like "oh, we're doing that too!" - and all funding would dry up. The company would go bankrupt because of no funding, and then Microsoft would never produce what they claimed they were also doing. They did this over and over and over again.

They are total fucks, and they haven't changed. You can't trust them.

Just checked. Still says “fringe notion”. It keeps getting changed to “concept” then reverted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Great_Barrington_Declaration&type=revision&diff=1116823785&oldid=1116823574

Crazy. Whatever happened to the principle of “neutral point of view”? Did they change the definition?

Is this a valid concept dishonestly applied, or is it simply a bad concept?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fringe_theories

Check out this thread: Leftoids defending Wiki and saluting Wales for "Standing Up" to Elon Musk
https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1600566993274421253?t=8-rcGfMeCxB_XFgb12oazw&ref_src=patrick.net

Never forget what San Fran Freako Wikieditors did to the all-but-universally accepted definition of a Recession:

richwicks says

richwicks   ignore (9)   2022 Aug 29, 11:37am    email   ↑ like (0)   ↓ dislike (0)   quote   flag      
WookieMan says

I'm locked into Apple's ecosystem

It's not an ecosystem.

It's an electronic prison.

I agree with @richwicks in that apple is a prison. I can't even send "vax" critical emails to a friend of mine's apple email - it is scanned and rejected. I can only share this kind of stuff via text message, which "they" are already trying to de-anonymyze and censor.

stereotomy says

I can't even send "vax" critical emails to a friend of mine's apple email - it is scanned and rejected.

This is definitely Soviet-level oppression.

And all the "liberals" are now on the side of authoritarianism, corporations, and violence against dissent.

Patrick says

Muskipedia alternative!

stereotomy says

richwicks says

richwicks   ignore (9)   2022 Aug 29, 11:37am    email   ↑ like (0)   ↓ dislike (0)   quote   flag      
WookieMan says

I'm locked into Apple's ecosystem

It's not an ecosystem.

It's an electronic prison.

I agree with richwicks in that apple is a prison. I can't even send "vax" critical emails to a friend of mine's apple email - it is scanned and rejected. I can only share this kind of stuff via text message, which "they" are already trying to de-anonymyze and censor.

Agreed, it's actually far worse than Android.