Flatfire

Everything is lovely. Fences is definitely user preference though. I'm too generally disorganized to make use of it

Microsoft's design philosophy in any of their products has gone from well organized menus to relying instead on a search bar. Copilot is a further addition to that design, with yet more pushes to never use a menu, but instead just tell it what you want and have it spit it back out. They want everything you make to go on OneDrive as well, so it can also be indexed this way. Teams works the same way. The big search bar at the top is unavoidable.

Windows search is complete garbage, which you might think is a counterpoint, but instead it's just that they only put work into having it serve results for cloud-indexed items or web results.

The selling point for me right now with Plasma is how well rounded it is. It's also currently the only desktop env offering HDR support, which means it's basically a must for me.

That's literally the whole point of GIMP 3

It is also worth considering that yes, MS and Google have definitely dominated the market through superior products, but the standards they've pushed for and established have also made it difficult for other players to enter. If we wanted to say that the federated nature of email is dead, I think that's a fair argument still.

Hosting your own email server is quite difficult. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to land in anyone's mailbox without assistance. If you want to make a mailing list, you basically need to use a mailing service, lest you get blacklisted by major systems owned by MS and Google. Much of this is a byproduct of spam, by which I don't blame Google and MS for doing their best to protect against, but at the same time they have more or less neutered some core aspects of what made email accessible.

Makes sense. I've always heard about it being taken a while before finishing highschool so I figured it was engrained in that curriculum.

Wild. We just have pre-requisite courses that typically qualify you for University programs. You overall grades matter, but there's nothing like an SAT

Schools in the US have tests on Saturdays? We don't really have an equivalent to SATs here in Canada, but I figured it was just a summary exam or something you took like anything else.

Ah, my bad. I think I misunderstood your point and took you to be gatekeeping rather than just attempting to defend against misinformation or poor comparisons.

You're right, it's not a Windows replacement. It shouldn't be expected that it's analogous to Windows. My previous statement was coming from the expectation that people moving from Windows to Linux as their primary OS of choice was that they were explicitly looking for the advantages offered by it, rather than simply expecting to get away from Microsoft while needing to adjust to nothing new.

This is...kind of stupid? There's such a plethora of options in the Linux space for desktop environments, workflow customizations, configurability, etc. nothing is locked down by taking a Windows-style approach to a DE. Instead it follows a tried philosophy that's only really been hampered by Microsoft's decision to funnel users into an frustrating hole that removes the choice to disable or modify features you don't like. KDE in particular has always been a Windows-style DE, and it's currently one of the best options for modern features and extensive customizability. Hyprland is literally designed for linux enthusiasts. Gnome is the Mac analog, Xfce is your light-weight but functional, etc.

You're upset because people are looking for more options? That's bizarre. I came from Windows, but I guarantee my setup is different than someone else who comes from Windows because that's the flexibility that's offered. No one coming from Windows wants it to be exactly like Windows, they just want to be able to use their computer in a way that allows them to work, to play games, to watch media, etc. It's a computer. It's your computer. It should be able to do what you want.

Nah, this is just what it's been like from the moment Lemmy got momentum. The fediverse is pretty fundamentally aligned with the goals and interests of the same people who are part of the FOSS and Linux philosophy. From where I joined more than a year ago, it's been more or less the same.

I don't know about the latter half of your statement, but my main reason for its use is pretty simply just that there's more music available, and it doesn't take all the time it normally would to get invited to a good music tracker. If anything, specialized Torrent trackers that could offer the same volume of music are a much bigger pain go deal with.