pleasing about buying a Windows 11 laptop, and immediately replacing Windows

there really is! I just got a new laptop, and it really wanted me to go through the Lose-dows setup wizard crap. That wasn’t so much an MS thing, rather the laptop’s idiot-proofing. For instance, I had to hold the power button for a full 10 seconds to get it to hard power-off, and getting a boot menu so I could boot from USB was not as easy as it could’ve been.

But those initial frustrations were replaced by sheer glee once I did finally get to a linux prompt, and using fdisk was able to nuke all those horrible Win partitions from orbit.

well, maybe it helps to know that companies don’t actually want their brand name to become a generic term, even if it seems like a sign of immense success. The brand name loses its distinctiveness as a trademark. Essentially, the public starts to perceive the brand name as the name of the thing itself, rather than a specific brand of that thing.

For instance, in the UK, people still say things like, “I’m going to hoover the front room” to mean they’re going to clean it with a vacuum cleaner. Notice that the brand of vacuum cleaner doesn’t actually matter in this case - most people own non-Hoover vacuums, yet will still say, “love, get me the hoover out the cupboard”.

Other brands that this has happened to include Aspirin, Cellophane, Band-Aid.

So maybe we should actually start saying, “I’m going to google this with Qwant”. In principle, we’d be undermining and devaluing the brand.

if they hit you, you’re going underneath, not over the top

I don’t really understand American car categories, such as SUV, but anyway, older models of the Nissan Leaf have done well in the “Vulnerable Road Users” (VRU) part of crash tests, with the most recent model on the Euro NCAP site scoring 71% in the VRU Protection category.

That’s the 2018 model, so quite old. I wouldn’t expect this latest model to perform much worse than that though and I wouldn’t be surprised if it performs even better. Here’s the side view - it doesn’t look as low and angled at the front as the 2018 model, but you can still see that it’s been designed with not killing pedestrians in mind:

It’s an American study, not sure if you are or not. When the authors describe some of the study’s shortcomings, its clear they are not suggesting these results to be generalisable over the whole world, or even the whole USA:

“This study followed one cohort of people born in the late 1980s over time, providing fine-grained detail about their lives and relationship to religion,” Schnabel noted. “That zoomed in detail is great for some things, but ultimately it tells us about one cohort of people in one country rather than how religion is changing globally or even among other cohorts of people in the United States. We can infer some things and connect the patterns for this group to others, which could allow us to see potential explanations when we see similar patterns among other groups.”

We could… weigh them? And, if they weigh as much as a duck, then we know they are kiddie fiddlers!

alright, but is the world really as black and white as that? Is there really a clear Good Side, and a clear Bad Side?

Well I suppose there’s still no proof that there never was a so-called “divine Y-chromosome” as believed in by Christians, but before we knew about DNA, or even human cells, the ridiculous legends of religion were definitely harder to refute. The ridiculousness of those legends was a big part of their power - the more stupid and unhinged a religious story appears to us today, the more in awe believers would have been about it 300 or 400 years ago.

So while religion hasn’t become less real in recent years, it has become a lot easier to point out its absurdities.

If your religion leads you to hate, you aren’t worshiping God, you’re worshiping the Devil.

And this is how wars between religions start…

Maybe try to move away from that God/Devil thing. It’s a foolish, naive, human-centered worldview.

You’re probably right but there’s pretty stiff competition from all the other moronic stuff they’re doing in foreign affairs, like tariffs and threatening to invade allies.

They really are speed-running the death of the American Empire.

While true, why are you linking this comment in almost all the other comments?

I’ve been stuck repeatedly asking myself this question ever since reading your comment 😩 Please be careful about throwing infinite while true loops around! Now I need someone to Ctrl-C me.

Looks interesting - and ambitious. Who are you targeting this for? Non-tech people who do everything on their phones? What would attract such people to make the switch?

Anyway good luck. Do you allow people to use their own (or a third party’s) email domain? A lot of people would not want to give up their established email address.

(And a small thing - it’s spelt leisure not leasure! Otherwise it looks good and professional)

I’m probably misunderstanding as I rarely use word processing software, so I apologise if you talking about something more than the system’s own handling of touchpad scrolling! here’s the settings applet for XFCE, I think every DE will have similar options (it does even offer circular scrolling, but I know you aren’t looking for that):

Gesture scrolling? You mean like making clockwise or anticlockwise circles to scroll up or down? I’d have thought that kind of functionality would be handled by the touchpad driver, not individual programs.

The usual stuff here - Wero instead of PayPal for person-to-person payments (but only if your bank supports it), use Girocard in shops rather than Visa or Mastercard, threema as a chat app, make use of your library’s e-book services, try to switch to a European email provider. They give two German-based examples for email - both of whom charge €1 per month for the lowest tier.

In my view, it was the US tech companies willingness to offer their services without charge that led to their current dominance.

Apparently threema asks for a one-time payment of €6, which reminded me that WhatsApp at first was an independent app that charged a one-off 50p if you wanted to use it after the first year.

That was low enough that many people did pay, making the developers a lot of money. Not superyacht money but still a tidy income. They made the superyacht money when Facebook bought them. Facebook then got rid of the one-off 50p charge of course, because they were going for world domination.

So the question is, how much are the general public willing to pay for privacy and some kind of corporate accountability?

The relentless attempts by European governments to insert themselves in everyone’s private communications is more than a little concerning.

I can’t be the only one to look at how quickly the US gov has been taken over by a fascist autocrat who is carrying out purges on the population and conclude that it is imperative that us Europeans strengthen citizens’ privacy from government and increase transparency in government, and not the other way around?

I think @rmuk@feddit.uk said elsewhere that they come with a refillable cartridge which you can put your own detergent in?

Thanks, I’ve found that. So far I’ve created one of the built-in accounts (seems to be on the testrun.org domain) and added my own existing email. I sent a message to my dad using my email, let’s see if I get any reply! Also curious to see what happens when I get other email such as marketing spam. I suppose each one will show up as a new chat.

Cool, I’ve installed it so fingers crossed I’ll be able to get some other family members onto it. Thanks for the info!

I think I’m right in saying it was your government that put paid to the last 2 attempts to enable universal message snooping throughout the EU (called Chat Control in its most recent incarnation). Our shitty government - whether Labour or Tory - is one of the most eager to get its hands on such a draconian wide-ranging power.

I think what we’re seeing in the US right now should be taken as even more reason to prevent such brazen encroachment of government into individuals’ private lives. For that reason alone, I don’t think you should be so keen to allow the UK back into the EU; not without some kind of electoral reform at least (i.e. some form of Proportional Representation).

UK is one of the only countries in Western Europe (if not the only one) which doesn’t use some form of Proportional Representation. This does make our government somewhat rigid, and less representative. Is that part of what made us difficult to work with, in the eyes of other EU countries?