When it comes to installing stuff, I’m very trigger-happy. So, from experience…
Installing stuff on Windows (safely)
- Hope it’s on Chocolatey (
choco install) - If not, search for the website online
- Scroll past the AI slop and suspicious Softonic downloads
- Click the website
- Find the correct download button
- Download
- Scan with MalwareBytes (don’t want an STI)
- Run setup.exe
- Verify PATH and wanted feature set
- I do not want to bundle Candy Crush or McAfee
- skim the Privacy Policy to see if they’ll grind my bones to dust
- Install Microsoft C++ Redistributable 2014-2018 (wtf? I already have 4 of these)
- Wait
- Sort the installation shortcuts into my folders
Installing stuff on Linux (safely)
paru some_software- If on AUR, skim
PKGBUILD - If not packaged at all (rare),
git cloneit and either skim theinstall.shor Makefile - Done
- Hope it’s on Chocolatey (
Why in god’s name does it rearrange the order of programs on the taskbar?
‘contact your IT admin’
Great suggestion when you are the IT admin, lol
Ctrl+c not copying on rare occasions. Even if it’s my keyboard’s fault, it could be avoided with some visual feedback to confirm to me that ctrl+c was registered ans clipboard was updated, so that I’d immediately know that it didn’t work after pressing ctrl+c, rather than later when i switched to a different window/tab and pasted the wrong thing
The fact that i can’t route audio between apps (without 3rd party closed-source apps). Why is something so basic not included into the system?
Registry
As a c++ dev: winapi. Right away you are greeted by windows.h adding loads of macros with common identifiers without any prefix to your preprocessor. That’s a sign of things to come for anyone who has to use it. Maybe that explains lack of open-source audio routing apps: nobody wants to deal with windows driver development for hobby - and if that’s the case i sure can’t blame nobody for that.
Copy not working is becoming a frequent issue
windows.h without NOMINMAX be like
“hippity hoppity words min and max are my property”
Being told I should switch to linux
Sometimes friends, in their curiosity, come up to me and ask me, Jordan Belfort-style, “Sell me
this penLinux.” Why do I like it so much, they wonder?And I always tell them:
"Linux is like… the vegan OS. (bear with me) Mac and Windows people don’t really care about OSes. People who switch to Linux either find they couldn’t be assed to deal with it, or they love it, and those who love it love it. Then they always tell people lol.
A good thing though: because everyone’s such an opinionated nerd, the lateral set of problems you run into won’t be ‘solved’ by random Microsoft Forums
/sfc scannows or arcane regedits, but by a nut who debugged the entire thing 30 minutes after the bug came to exist to find a workaround. True story.Buuuut Linux is more of a lateral movement in terms of problems, it’s just a tool after all. You solve Microsoft Recall and start menu ads but run into new but tiny annoyances. I find Linux problems easier to fix than Windows ones because of the nerd army thing but if your Windows setup works for you, it works and that’s really all that’s important. If you do start Linuxing though you’ll learn a lot just by osmosis."
And they usually laugh and decide to keep their routines in place. Don’t hate me vegans.
My default browser at work is Chrome. Microsoft Teams and Outlook open links in edge anyhow. I wonder why!
Annoying little quirks of text highlighting and navigation. Oopsie, you moved an extra quarter of a centimeter to the left of the paragraph you tried to highlight starting from the bottom. That means you want everything, right? Yeah we’re highlighting everything. And so on.
Fortunately I’ve picked up some workarounds over the years:
Trying to highlight text in a hyperlink: hold alt
Methods of selecting text blocks (e.g., when normal mouse-select is doing bizarre stuff):
- Try highlighting from end to beginning
- Click point A, hold shift, click point B
- Double-click first word of desired selection to highlight it, or triple-click a paragraph, then highlight letters with shift-right, words with ctrl-shift-right, lines with shift-down, paragraphs with ctrl-shift-down. You’ll see that, for example, when you use shift-down, some text on the line following the selected line is also selected, corresponding to the length of the initial selection before the hotkey was pressed. You can use relevant combos in the opposite direction to de-select this. Or press shift-end to highlight only to the end of the line where your current selection ends, and shift-home to deselect to the beginning of the line. Ctrl-shift-end/home will do the same but for the entire page/document.
- Some other useful hotkeys are available during text input – I make heavy use of shift+pgup/pgdn to extend selections, but this seems to work in Excel, Notepad++, etc., not in this web browser text input field, for example. Holding shift while clicking also extends selections as in the read-only context; holding ctrl while clicking arbitrarily adds to selection just as in the file browser.
I don’t think that’s workarounds, you’re supposed to use your free hand for keyboard commands to effectively highlight and edit text.
My favourite combo is ctrl+z because it reverts the last action. Works in almost every application.
Ctrl+a marks the whole text.
Yes, these are documented features and not some kind of obscure off-label workaround. What I mean is that the use of these features serves as a workaround (or, if you like, an “alternative”) when simple mouse selection should work but behaves erratically.
The mouse issue you describe sounds like a feature as well, since you can mark things off screen by simply going over the edge on the left side.
This is extremely annoying on phone, but I never had that issue when it wasn’t some webpage with multiple elements like advertising and share buttons and scripts in between.
I don’t think that’s workarounds, you’re supposed to use your free hand and keyboard commands to effectively highlight text.
My favourite combo is ctrl+Z because it reverts the last action. Works in almost every application.
The 3 days of settings adjustments, debloating, de-spyware-ing, regestry edits, group edits, service edits, power edits just have a functioning OS that doesn’t bottleneck/ruin your espensive hardware you paid for.
Web browsers are beginning to feel that way these days.
Meh Firefox is very customizable but not a ton of settings really for critical privacy, compatibility or optimization.
Chrome and all Google services can get fucked for just the amount of sites, pages, sub-accounts you have to navigate thru JUST to turn off their tracking bullshit.
I think I have my android and PC as fully isolated from any Google account, software, service or operation short of going full Root of phone and Linux. Which, Linux is on my todo list to go daily driver-Linux and 2ndary boot drive-Windows.
For now tho, local user Windows account and all google accounts and apps either un-installed or disabled on the phone.
Settings templates with user.js are Firefox’s saving grace.
Best of luck on your 'nix journey.
Being unable to use local accounts without a ton of headache, and menus always trying to force you to use their services
Put my PC to sleep, then i go to sleep. 3am rolls around and my PC turns on and sits at the log-in screen.
This seems to be an issue only after windows 7 for me. It can’t be updating because there’s nothing happening when i check on the windows update, and it will do this all night until i unplug the damn thing. Then i get a couple months of this issue not appearing.
I can’t complain. works fine for me.
Nowadays it’s the online account centric shite and all the privacy implications that come along with it. But even before that it was annoying to just trying to do the thing
Doing the thing on linux: command that does the thing
Doing the thing on windows: click here, click there, click some more, second tab, submenu, click advanced, type in the info, save, ok, “yes I’m sure”, click ok, click apply, close 626254 windows, rebootAnd most people still seem to prefer that because terminal bad.
Keep your files safe with One Drive, are you sure you dont want your personal home files on our cloud?
Please sign into your account again, to save time, you can always stay signed in on this device (Lie)
Your mailbox location has moved, you can use a temporary mailbox, or work offline.
We need more information from you to setup phone-sign in. Sorry, an error occurred, please contact your administrator
Welcome to the New Microsoft ___!
I am so tired and this is only my 4th year.
Clicking on a URL in a non-browser app? Surely you want to see that in Edge and not your default browser.
I’m so sick of this. Didn’t they catch a lawsuit over this the first time and have to make it so you can uninstall it?
Yeah and every file type opening in edge for some reason? Annoying.
Eroding / taking away user agency. It’s always little bits they chip away but over the time those chips amount to a huge cut off edge of things you cannot do anymore, or only through very convoluted and potentially breaking third party tweaks & tools. Every Windows installation ended up with a growing shit-list of things to do. Disable this, tweak that, download tool X, Y & Z just to further disable & tweak shit, and whoop-de-doo several hours have already passed when you’re finally “done”. Then, in the middle of doing shit, Windows update! “No! Go away!” 10 minutes later… “Hey, I think you forgot about me?” - “NO, I UPDATE WHEN I SHUT THE DAMN PC DOWN, NOT IN THE MIDDLE OF THINGS! GO AWAY!” … “BUT HAVE YOU HEAR ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR, THE WINDOWS UPDATE?! OH AND BY THE WAY, WE RE-ENABLED OUR SPYING OPTIONS AGAIN AND WILL SEND ALL THE UNSENT DATA BEFORE YOU CAN DISABLE IT AGAIN!”
At some point I just realized that using Windows became more of a hassle than using Linux. And when you finally do the switch, you suddenly realize how fucking awesome it is that your OS is not constantly nagging you, not constantly spying on you, not constantly fighting you, not constantly changing its configuration to re-enable the things you purposefully disabled. I finally have an operating system again that does what I want it to do, a system that respects my privacy, as well as me as a user.
It gets to a point where it doesn’t feel like you have control over your own computer.
For me, a big one was how it would constantly wake from sleep for no reason or to update. If put it to sleep and most times it would wake before I even s stood up from my desk. And there are settings you can change to stop that, but Windows will just randomly reset them.
And this is a really small one, but Windows 11 dropping features that Windows 10 has. It’s very stupid that Windows 11 won’t let you have a vertical task bar.
I’ve been a Windows user for 30+ years and always loved that OS until recently. But now I love Linux. An OS that truly lets me own my computer and do what I want.
