I figured you were being genuine, but there’s usually a few people who point at Microsoft’s “embracing” of Linux as the first step in the “embrace, extend, extinguish” trope, and see any involvement by Microsoft as nefarious. When the reality is just that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services are a much larger share of their annual revenue than Windows, and Linux is a major part of their cloud offerings.

If you browse the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) for 5 minutes, you’ll probably see a bunch of microsoft.com email addresses, and it’s been that way for years. I understand why it bothers some people, but also Linus (and a couple others) approve everything that actually gets merged, whether it’s from a microsoft employee, or a redhat employee, or anyone else. Even if microsoft wanted to pay employees to submit patches that would hurt the kernel, the chance that they’d actually be approved is so low it wouldn’t be worth their time.

I’ll probably make the jump when Plasma 6.1 releases with their “real, fake session restore” functionality, was hoping that would make it in to Plasma 6, and I am daily driving Wayland on my laptop now, but I kinda need my programs (or at least file managers and terminal windows) to re-open the way they were between reboots.

Thanks to kscreen-doctor, I’ve been able to port most of my desktop scripts that I use for managing my multiple monitors to work on Wayland, and krdc/krfb have been a decent enough replacement for x11vnc or x2go for accessing the desktop on my home server/NAS remotely (I know, desktops on servers are considered sacrilege, but for me it’s been useful too many times to get rid of at this point).

Where Wayland currently shines for me is VR, Steam VR works better, and more consistently on Plasma Wayland than X11 at this point, which is probably more of a Valve thing than a Wayland thing. When I first got my Index, X11 worked fine, but there have been times when Steam VR on Linux being “broken” has made the news on Phoronix/Gaming on Linux, but still worked fine on Plasma Wayland (which seems to be where Valve is doing most of their SteamVR Linux testing as of late).

As an end user, I do wish that the Wayland specification was organized better, because as an outsider, it seems a lot of the bickering that goes on has more to do with everyone having different end goals. I think if they would split out the different styles of window management to have their own sub-specs or extensions and then figure out what of that could be moved into the core after everyone has built what they need would be better than their current approach of compromising their way through every little decision that doesn’t always make sense for every use case. Work together when it makes sense, but understand that there are times when that doesn’t make sense, and sometimes you can’t please every stick in the mud, and are going to have to do your own thing without them. I do get the appeal of doing things right the first time too though, even if it takes more time. But it seems like usability is always the thing that gets sacrificed when compromises are made.

$80/month for 300Mbps down/10 Mbps up, Southeastern US. Consistently get higher download speeds than advertised, currently around 350Mbps. Upload speed is never more than 10Mbps.

There is still a desktop overview that allows dragging windows between virtual desktops (Meta+G) unfortunately when they removed the old overview, they forgot to fully integrate the new overview, so it can’t be activated by screen edges (which is how I used to access the old desktop overview).

My vote would be NuTwo.

Source has been posted on Internet Archive (along with the latest builds for a bunch of platforms). Something will likely rise from the ashes of YuZu, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it takes a few years. Nintendo is probably gonna be extra litigious this year (even more than usual), due to them likely failing to have the Switch’s successor ready this year, and not really having a full slate of games ready, so with Switch sales projected to be down, best to lay low on anything that might get Nintendo’s attention for a while.

8.99/month seems mostly competitive to Incogni which is a similar service that costs 12.98/month (they’ll give you a 50% discount if you buy a full year at once, which works out to 6.49/month). Although with as many sponsor spots as I see Incogni buy from YouTube creators, they are probably flush with investor capital, and trying to get as many subscribers as they can, before slowly “raising” their prices by offering fewer discounts.

I just use public trackers and search for “VR180” - more than half the results are usually porn. If you want non-porn 3D movies “HSBS” is a good term to use as it’s probably the most common format for 3D Blu-rays.

A few do on BluRay, although that’s likely not going to last much longer, since the studios seem to really want to kill off physical media.

I like them too, there are still a few movies that get a 3D release (although live action movies now are pretty much all just 3D conversion). Wikipedia lists 12 movies released this year that got 3D releases, 5 of those are animated movies, and 3 are Marvel movies. I missed the window on 3D home theater, but with the right tools I can watch the 3D releases I do have in VR, which is admittedly slightly less comfortable, but works since I’m the only person I know that actually likes watching in 3D anyway.

Also, if you spend any amount of time around the Linux Kernel Mailing List, there’s no shortage of microsoft.com email addresses involved and contributing here and there.

When my mom was a kid, her grandpa would often watch/listen to the TV, while listening to the radio, and watch out the window and announce who was driving down the road in front of their farm by recognizing their vehicles. Nobody considered it brain rot, his family considered it a skill he had.

I daily drive Linux and dislike the way Windows works as well. That said, with the way Windows works, remember you aren’t getting an accurate representation of performance unless you boot it often, because Windows update is a pretty major resource hog until there are no more pending updates. Again, fully agree Windows is a mess of an OS, and it boggles my mind why so many people are okay with it, but it’s also significantly worse the longer it goes between uses.

There are some differences between distros as to whether TRIM is enabled by default or not (I’ve read Ubuntu enables it by default, but Debian does not). That said, depending on what file-system your ssd is formatted with it may be enabled by default at that level. The most-often recommended file-systems for SSDs are Btrfs and F2FS, both of which support and enable TRIM by default (as of Linux 6.2 for Btrfs, so if you are running an older kernel version you might need to manually enable it). I think most distro installers support using Btrfs as the main file-system, but F2FS is a bit more hit and miss I think. Safest bet would be to investigate once you settle on a distro, but support should be pretty standard, even if it’s not enabled by default.

Not sure how it works on Windows, but based on a bit or research, looks like it might. It is possible to connect a phone to the PC using the “Bluetooth Audio Reciever” app on the Microsoft store. Then the phone audio should play on the PC and should play through the headphones connected to the PC. Again, not 100% sure this is a viable solution on Windows, but considering I lucked into this solution on Linux without any effort, there’s probably a good chance you can achieve something similar on Windows. Might also depend on your computer’s Bluetooth adapter, so ymmv, but may be worth a shot considering the shortcomings of some of the other solutions.