This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
ChrisTitusTech's latest video on it... You're welcome. He has a curl you can use at any point in the installer to bypass the whole thing and land on desktop in a local account named admin
I am horrified by what computers have become, from expensive magical tools to solve real problems, to ubiquitous shit-shoveling malware appliances controlled by some of the worst elements of society.
Those kinds of computers still exist, it's called Linux.
I've never been more appreciative than I am now of the decades of effort that have gone into building this free and open-source operating system.
Imagine if we were here in 2025, with all the incumbent operating systems going to shit, but in a world where Linux didn't exist and there was no alternative that wasn't owned by a tech giant.
I don't even want to imagine.
Don't forget to donate to your favorite distro (and other open source projects) to help them keep the lights on.
Gotta do our part to fight the massive mega corps from devouring every aspect of our lives.
The alternative alternative existed before Linux and still exists today: BSD
In a world without Linus Torvalds, all those people who have devoted time and effort into Linux might well have found themselves working / hobbying in the BSD ecosystems instead.
I think it's almost certain that Linux's niche would have been taken by it. It worked for Apple, after all.
Or, who knows, maybe GNU Hurd might have become viable.
Sure, if it wasn't Linux then another project may have got the love and attention.
I'm not glad it was Linux specifically, just glad there is a credible FOSS alternative of some kind, and in our universe that's Linux.
You might think there's no such world where we wouldn't have had some credible alternative, and as reasonable as that is - because freedom and independence are things people intrinsically want - I'm sure if you flap the butterfly wings enough times there'd be a universe where we all just collectively decided that commercial operating systems were the answer.
Glad I don't live there.
Yeah. Look at the shitheap we had to settle with when Reddit enshittified beyond redemption. We're really lucky to have such a well-polished alternative to Windows right now, and I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that Windows was awful from the beginning. If a halfway-decent operating system like OS/2 had become the default then we might be really scrambling right now.
I mean, we already do live in that universe, just for the mobile space.
to ubiquitous shit-shoveling malware appliances controlled by some of the worst elements of society.
Hmmm, I wonder which background economical system we all live in that could explain why every single technology ends up controlled by the top 1% to make our lives more miserable and their profits higher...
The future was here, once upon a time.
🎶 The dream of the 90's is alive in Linux🎶
Lol it's been great getting off of Windows over the last few months.
I thought I would miss it, but Proton in Steam has been amazing on Ubuntu, with some exceptions (Stupid EA crap from skate. 2025).
Dual booting for now is OK, but gaming is pretty garbage anyway, so I will probably abandon Windows entirely soon. Definitely my last version of it. Feel so liberated having hobbies off computer anyway, and now using my computers with Ubuntu is actually enjoyable again instead of driving an expensive spy machine.
:)
This "subscription" mentality is ruining value for a lot of society but, holy shit, do you ever rake in those huge amounts of monthly cash, for very little work.
It's not our mentality, it's their strategy.
Wars breed new strategies.
Sometimes it's free trade as a carrot and embargo as a stick, like with, well, one can try to nail it to Napoleonic wars, but as old as life. Sometimes it's mass production and standardization and ergonomics and scientific industrial design, one can try to nail these to WWII, but also as old as life. And sometimes it's controlled escalation as a way to reach your goals without triggering nuclear response, which one can nail to the Cold War.
American strategy of the Cold War is being used against world markets, ladies and gentlemen. Together with the previous two strategies mentioned.
The Soviet one was the opposite, to try to make even the smallest transgression cause firmly the same response, so that controlled escalation wouldn't work, but unfortunately one is founded in human psychology (plus game theory) and the other in rational knowledge (just game theory), the latter always loses. It was called scientific-technical revolution and meant literally its name - instead of gradual escalation, which favors the stronger side, you should create technical means to punch a fatal wound, nothing gradual.
So - the subscriptions themselves matter very little, they are just slowly transitioning everything big to dependence upon remote components available over the Internet.
It's funny, actually, so much gradual work, and in the end it'll be just wasted time - even making computers is not magic. State of the art processes could as well be that for most of humanity, but for many purposes Pentium MMX is a good enough computer, and such are not magic.
And especially making computer software of the kind that's being "metropolized" like this is not magic. Most of it is complex simply because of legacy, backwards compatibility and as a barrier for competitors making alternative implementations.
I am never abandoning you, Linux
Linux, your time has finally come
All Microsoft had to do for Windows to remain the most popular home and office OS in the world for decades to come, was to just not fucking suck.
The problem is that they realized that they could do both.
Woahwoahwoah, let's not be unrealistic here.
But honestly I'm happy for the final push to Linux. I've been telling myself to make the change for a few years now but what's happening with AI training and side-loading / complete loss of privacy / general horrible vibes in the closed-source tech-sector..... Linux it is. I'm even ready for the learning curve. I grew up on dos, I'm sure I can find my way around it.
At this point they'll restrict access to the registry.
i wonder if they could make a read-only config partition like with macos
Well I paid for what I have, and no one is allowed to rob me of what I pay for so I'm good. Sorry Microsoft you don't get to rob people any more than the rest of us. All it does is send people elsewhere.
Do custom installation (ISO) creation utilities like NTLite still allow you to remove the requirement?
I'm going to give Google money by buying a Pixel to free myself from Google…
