• 7 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Windows’ UX is shit.

    Windows 11 still has its settings splattered across multiple applications. The Settings application has all the shiny new gimmicks they added, yet still lacks any way to change some basic settings. If you need to reset a local user’s password, you’re stuck going back into the now-gutted Control Panel to do it. And if you want to change something that Microsoft feels the average user shouldn’t be allowed to know exists, you’re using the group policy editor to do it.

    Or, how about the way that there’s at least two applications installed by default that do the same or very similar things? Windows Media Player or Videos? Paint or Paint 3D? Cmd.exe or Windows Terminal?

    How about the design language inconsistency? The Run dialog was left looking like a Windows 7 dialog and didn’t get a dark mode until the mid 2020s. The Event Viewer and Windows Firewall UIs are still something right out of Windows XP, but with Vista-smeared paint applied on top.

    Or, if that’s not bad UX, then how about the ads in the start menu? Or how OneDrive tries to trick you into uploading your desktop to the cloud? Or, maybe all the telemetry services running in the background and slowing shit down?

    If you’re using a distro with a worse UX than that, then that’s on you. There’s plenty of options that provide a more cohesive UX than Windows







  • Foreword: I am not the person you replied to, and I also don’t agree with killing anybody.

    That being said, I have to comment on this:

    Killing them is just a waste of talent and experience.

    I would argue they have neither. The people they employ are the ones with the talent and experience.

    Take Elon Musk, for example. He makes big claims that sound plausible, but anybody who actually understands what he’s talking about knows that he’s only pretending to be knowledgeable in the subject. It’s the engineers and designers at Tesla that do all the hard work in bringing products to market, yet he gets the absurdly high pay package for doing little more than lying to consumers.








  • Yep. When talking to Russians who emigrated away from Russia, you will find plenty of stories just like your sister’s friend’s one.

    What the tankies idolizing the country seem to not realize is that living there as a national is oppressive. Your standard of living depends on staying in the good graces of the government—good graces that can quickly be lost by appearing to go against them.

    The United States government is working its way towards that at an astonishing pace, but saying Russia has more freedoms is a complete delusion.



  • Agreed on both points.

    If it was GOG and not EGS, the reaction would probably be very different. But, because people already hate Epic (for good reason), writing an article that appeals to schadenfreude makes for some easy ad revenue.

    People also shouldn’t be idolizing corporations. They’re not our friends; we’re only a means to an end for them. The best case scenario for us is mutualism, and the worst case is parasitism. All it takes is a change in leadership or a change in circumstances to go from one to the other, and a constant need for growth encourages the parasitic enshittification we’re well acquainted with.


  • But you’re all rabid to hate on epic

    If I had to pick between buying a game on Steam or Epic, I would pick the one which did some good things for consumers over the one that stuck their middle finger up at us.

    There’s no denying that Valve’s contributions to DXVK, WINE, KDE, and Linux are a self-serving way to ensure Steam remains relevant after Microsoft locks Windows into a walled garden. Even so, the end result was an overall benefit for consumers. We would have had something like Proton eventually, but it would not have come nearly as quickly without their financial backing.

    What has Epic done? A bunch of free games that I still don’t have enough time to play and would not have picked up anyways, great. That doesn’t make up for the rest of their wannabe-monopoly, anticonsumer practices like making exclusivity deals to railroad people into using their store by making sure consumers are denied a choice.

    Fuck Epic, and fuck Tim Sweeney’s self-aggrandizing attitude. If he actually gave a shit about anything other than his ego, he would have spent his time leading Epic Games to challenge “the Steam monopoly” by providing a better customer experience, not posting on Twitter acting like the messiah of PC gaming.