Windows UI has also gotten progressively more ugly, buggy and laggy. From a cursory glance, Win 11 looks a lot cleaner than Win 10/8/7, but just opening the Start Menu is a chore. Rather than fix the underlying issue, Microsoft started pre-rendering the File Explorer in memory to improve launch times. It might've started with letting go of their QA team, but the engineering culture there seems completely broken and clueless.
I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and seems to be getting better.
Microsoft doesn't just have a shoddy AI problem. Microsoft has a direction problem. I'm no fan of Ballmer, but his Microsoft seemed like they knew what they were doing, and were actually trying to be good at it. Nadella seems extremely clueless and seems happy to just ignore and later axe consumer products that don't generate immediate revenue.
And noone should actually be shocked about his ineffectiveness. Covid was a great example of how clueless his leadership has been. Skype used to be a verb people used in common parlance, and yet they dropped the ball and let Zoom take over both consumer and enterprise segments while focusing on "restructuring" Skype into Teams for no reason whatsoever.
Prior to Covid, he was ready to let Windows run its course and axe that too. The sudden demand for sub-$500 laptops during the pandemic showed him that people still liked Windows and wanted a good OS from Microsoft. But instead of capitalizing on it to give customers what they wanted, he just gave us an ad-filled spyware with AI slop.
I have zero hope in any product with a Copilot in its name (including GitHub). At this point, unless there's a change in leadership, it's only a matter of time before XBox faces the axe.
Given that we've already crossed the point-of-no-return, I think some form of geo-engineering is the only way to prevent rising sea-levels, inhabitable conditions and human extinction. But I hope there's a way to do some sort of controlled experimentation first before committing to a "solution" and statements like this aren't very comforting: "Once those aerosols were released, though, we wouldn’t have a straightforward way to recapture them if the plan didn’t work or had unforeseen negative consequences."
First term Obama was a horrible President - from drone strikes to deportations to dealing with whistleblowers... IDK if he was too concerned about being labeled a far left socialist in governance and risking his re-election prospects.
But in his 2nd term, he was a far better president. He eased off on drone strikes (still too much, imo), pardoned non-violent drug offences like crazy, he commuted Manning's sentence, and there were talks of him considering pardoning Snowden too (when he was a lame duck).
I don't think Biden will venture into territory that Obama considered to be too controversial, but given that Biden's pretty much running as a 1 term President, I don't think it's impossible.
Yep, as I said in my last sentence, Snowden's "sentence" cannot be commuted since he was never tried in court and sentenced. But he can be pardoned since there are pending cases levied against him.
Happy for Snowden, but I hope that if Biden wins, he'd pardon Snowden - following Obama's footsteps in commuting Chelsea Manning. Although it might be harder since Biden to the Right of Obama, and given how hawkish, war-mongering, neo-libs have cozied up to Biden, and commuting Snowden isn't really possible since he has never been tried in court.
One is plenty. Especially if "OS" is in the list. Microsoft in the 90s, and Apple and Google today have all used their OS supremacy to quash competition... quite often in extremely questionable ways.
I'm currently running Fedora on my gaming laptop, and while I do suffer some loss in FPS, it is relatively close to Windows and seems to be getting better.