That rhymes!

With sed or awk, without a sample
is hard to give, a proper example

That's the thing though, they have been pissing everyone off for over a decade now, going back to the days when Facebook introduced the algorithmic feed/timeline thing, and then with the promoted posts, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the data harvesting and ads and blatant privacy violations. They're one of the scummiest organisations out there and yet you all keep using it's products and happily whoring yourselves out to Meta. Sure you can switch in theory, so what are y'all waiting for? There's plenty of reasons to switch, plenty of decent alternatives too. The truth is, you can't really switch. You don't have a choice.

If you think you've got a choice, I dare you to uninstall WhatsApp for a month or two, and see if you're able to get by without any issues. Then you'll know why I said they they have you by the balls - basically, you're a hostage, a slave. You really have no choice, no freedom, even if you've got other apps installed. You may convince your friends and family to switch, but do you really think the thousands of companies, government agencies etc will just switch for no good reason? Will they make new chat bots for the alternative apps? Will they develop new SoPs/documentation for their internal staff, spend time and money on marketing and advertising the new way of contacting them? Waiting for Meta to do something major to piss everyone off may never happen - Meta isn't that foolish, and as people get more and more used to Meta's products and their way of doing things, they get more and more entwined into the ecosystem and they'll find it even more harder to leave. If everyone's going to wait for everyone else to switch, then no one will switch.

Which means you can't really switch to other apps then, which means Meta has you by the balls.

I was there. It was fine. You didn't need phones to be able to function in a society. Phones were something like an optional convenience that you had only at fixed places, like your home or office. If you were out and about, you typically didn't have access to a phone, unless you were in the vicinity of a payphone, so you weren't expected to be available on phone. Whereas in the countries where Meta has monopoly over, everyone expects you to be on WhatsApp, and you don't really get a choice in the matter.

Do you require WhatsApp to contact certain government agencies? Do you require WhatsApp to get access to customer support? Do you require WhatsApp to get access to lecture notes? No? Then you're not from one of those countries.

In some of those countries, it's not really a choice. Like, WhatsApp is the only way of contacting a company's customer care (via chat bots that run on it), colleges and universities may have study groups on it and teachers may hand out notes etc in those groups, also apparently it's also the only way to contact even some government agencies.

Over-reliance on proprietary, closed-source products and services from megacorporations.

For instance, it's really absurd that people in many parts of the world cannot function without WhatsApp, they can't even imagine a life without it. It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can't do anything about it.

Also the people who base their entire careers on say Adobe or Microsoft products, they're literally having their lives dictated by one giant corporation, which is very depressing and dystopian.

Eh, as an IT guy, I love seeing computer screens on TV. They're either a good laugh, or they can be quite interesting.

Among the interesting/iconic interfaces:

• The 3D "Unix" system in Jurassic Park
• The Matrix
• Minority Report

I also love seeing vintage/fake-vintage interfaces in movies, such as SolarOS (a take on Solaris) in Tron: Legacy

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and all the hilarious ones such as the infamous "I'll create a GUI in Visual Basic to track the IP address" scene in CSI.

Also, here's a bonus link for you retro fans: https://www.windows93.net/

One of my favorite sites: https://www.windows93.net/

CrossOver is actually pretty good for Macs with Apple Silicon, where there is limited choice. But on Linux, you're far better off sticking with Steam + Proton-GE / Lutris + Wine-GE

[OC] Cape Palliser

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NZ here, I use it for online purchases. Credit cards have the advantage of extra fraud protection, as well as having a safety net of being able to do a chargeback in case the seller does fraud or something. I don't need to pay any interest on it either because I make use of the interest free days. I have a direct debit set up so the bill gets cleared on its own every month, so I don't forget and accidentally pay interest or something.

1TB on PC, 1TB on PS5.

I uninstall games I've played and only keep replayable games (eg: Path of Exile, Diablo 2, Age of Empires etc).

Ooh, this looks promising. Sadly nothing in Welly by the looks of it, but it's a start I guess.

If you like trying different things then I'd also recommend checking out BlendOS. It's a unique Arch-based distro that allows you to install and run packages from other mainstream disreos (making use of containers). You can even instantly switch between different DEs with a single command, which is nice for trying out various environments without polluting your system with tons of dependencies.

You can actually use it with your existing OEM license. You may need to copy the ACPI tables from your physical machine to the VM, but personally, I've never felt the need to do so, and I haven't had any activation issues.

Although technically speaking, you'd still be breaking the EULA... not that Microsoft cares or anything.

I used to use Arch (still do on some systems), but my main these days is Nobara, a gaming and multimedia optimized distro, based on Fedora.

No.

Surprised no one here answered with just a "no". I can't remember the last time I even held a pen for signing something, even my last job contract and rental agreement etc were all digital.

AMA, all you pen and pencil people.

You don't have to replace it completely. Dual-booting is a fine compromise, so is running Windows inside a VM.

I've been running Linux as my main OS for ~15 years now, but still run Windows in some form (and macOS).

Why settle for a single OS? Just use whatever tools are best for the job.

Driverless cars, VR and the recent NASA experiment where four people started living in a simulated Mars environment for an year, even conducting VR space walks - all of this makes me feel we're living in the movie Total Recall.