Windows feels less stable today than it has been for a long time. I spend so long, on every Windows computer, waiting for windows that have turned white and say “not responding” in the title bar. I use Linux for almost everything, partly out of principle, but largely because the Windows experience is so slow and frustrating these days. For the most part, the friendlier Linux distros do a better job of just working.

I don’t think you can call landlines from it though.

I only used Skype for one thing: cheap calls from Canada to international landlines with no time limit and without having to pay a monthly subscription. Can anyone recommend a good alternative? A lot of the options out there look a bit scammy.

If it’s any consolation, my Dell XPS 13 with Windows 11 and a healthy battery gets about 40 minutes’ battery life and throttles due to heat when plugged in. It’s quite useless. Dell cares more about them looking slick than being actually useful. I also have an older XPS 13 with Tumbleweed and it runs cooler and lasts a bit longer, though battery life is still nothing special.

Linux as your main OS with a Windows VM for work is a pretty decent arrangement. Windows works without activation so you don’t have to pay MS anything.

Your taxes, straight into the pockets of Sam Altman and Larry Ellison.

Large chunks of the EU are hurtling rightwards too, unfortunately.

True. Not everyone needs to chase the latest stuff, apart from security patches.

Recently I’ve used OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, PopOS! and Ubuntu, as well as Mint, and all of these have comparable graphical software managers. Which ones are you thinking of that don’t?

Mint is not really for tinkerers. It’s a distro designed to work out of the box without the need to tweak anything, and it does that well. The downsides are that it’s not always the most up to date, and it bundles a lot so it’s not a slim distro.

It has locked me out for attaching a USB device once or twice. Seems a bit extreme.

I have stopped encrypting my drives, because if anything goes wrong and the system won’t boot it makes recovery more difficult. It’s a dual boot machine with Windows 11, and I had a lot of awkwardness with Bitlocker that led to me deciding to abandon encryption in both OSs. I save sensitive files to encrypted volumes in VeraCrypt.

The notes there say that everything works except that the canvas flickers. Sounds minor but probably makes it unusable. Probably best to install it in a Windows VM if you need it. The Affinity stuff is very good.

I don’t understand your comment. Steganography in computing is about hiding messages inside other media, but this doesn’t in itself achieve any kind of encryption. The current discussion is about encryption, and whether it should have backdoors (the answer is no). Even if you hide your message in an image or video file, you still face the question of how to encrypt it. So steganography seems orthogonal to the debate about encryption.

I wish there were some way to enable availability to persist even when torrents’ peak of popularity has passed - some kind of decentralized, self-healing archive where a torrent’s minimal presence on the network was maintained. Old torrents then could become slow but the archival system would prevent them being lost completely, while distributing storage efficiently. Maybe this isn’t practical in terms of storage, but the tendency of bittorrent to lose older content can be frustrating.

Does Steam ever deliver Linux-native builds instead of running games through Proton?

Are there any actual controlled comparative studies of filesystems, rather than just anecdotes from the internet?

The article doesn’t mention or recommend Tumbleweed as far as I can see.

Coming from Windows I miss the excitement and suspense of never knowing whether my click on an icon actually got noticed by the OS. And the thrill of never knowing exactly which icon you clicked on because the UI is so slow to draw and redraw itself that the icons move unexpectedly while you’re aiming. Oh, and the unpredictable surprise of focus stealing.

I second this suggestion. I have an old touchscreen PC from about 2001 with a Via Eden CPU, which is an incredibly feeble low-power processor that lacks some instructions that were common even in 32-bit days, and Antix was the only reasonably modern distro I could get to run on it.