Yeah, but the original message sounded even more like BS. Like surely no one would think its a good idea to post on social media that you are firing your stressed employees to make a ‘supportive’ workplace. That makes no sense. So yeah, the explanation is bad - but I don’t think its untrue. It’s just that the original post was a bad idea.

I’ve recently discovered and made heavy use of xournal++; for stylus-based note taking.

We’re here in “no stupid questions”. The OP asked a question. So if you want to offer some of your knowledge and insight - go for it. But simply telling OP “you don’t understand” isn’t really adding anything of value.

[edit] I’d posted something to go into more detail. But I’ve decided that branch of conversation is not really the way forward.

I’ll just say that the software is not installed by choice, and it does things that people don’t want it to do… so it could be described as malware. But if you want it on your computer, then I guess for you it is not malware. In any case, it doesn’t look like we’re going to agree about this regardless.

Anti-cheat software is very clearly and explicitly spyware. That’s the entire purpose of it. It spies on how you use your software in the hope that if you cheat you’ll be seen by the spyware watching you.

This spyware is generally not something people want on their computer - as evidenced by people complaining about it. So effectively whats happening is that people are being spied on against their wishes. Spyware is a common category of malware.

So I think it’s pretty easy to see why people might describe anti-cheat software as malware.

I find Widelands to be slow and relaxing; but also challenging and engaging.

Nar. A statement and its converse are not equivalent.

The tides will turn though. I’ve been denouncing google for years, and I’ve find it quite striking how the pushback has disappeared recently. It use to be that any negative comment about google was met by a small army of google fans. That just isn’t the case any more.

Widelands is a great strategy / building game. The gameplay and UI style is a niche - but that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s doing something different to most games.

(The gameplay is similar to Settlers 2; before that franchise changed direction.)

[edit] But the open-source game I’ve spent the most time playing would be OpenXcom-extended, with xpiratez. That game is truly huge.

CrossCode is fantastic. But it is not an open source game.

In many ways, the silky-smooth convenience offered by modern computer software makes everything much harder to learn about and understand. For anyone that used zip files before this Windows feature, the problem is obvious - but for younger people it’s not obvious at all. Heck, a lot of people can’t even tell whether or not a file is locally on their computer - let alone whether it is compressed in some other file.

No only that, but people think about the products, and talk about them with others as a result of the ads. So even if an ad doesn’t lead to a direct purchase (or even a click), it still leads to an advantage over competing products and ideas.

Heck, we sometimes even see ads posted and talked about here on lemmy - because people sometimes think they are interesting, or annoying, or controversial, or whatever other reason. In any case, the idea gets spread around - which is the goal of the advertise.

To me it is weird that every day on lemmy I see new posts complaining about all tankies… but I never actually see any of the content they are complaining about. And outside of lemmy, I never see or hear the word ‘tankies’ used at all. I’ve asked a couple of people I know in real life if they ever seen discussions about it in their parts of the internet, and none of them people I’ve asked have ever heard the word before.

So… like I said, I find it weird. It’s like some kind of lemmy boogieman.

If we are separated from our parents shortly after birth, and grow up in isolation from other humans - then we would not learn to talk anyway. Note that that’s what happens with most pets that humans keep. Maybe we get to walk past some other humans in the park a couple of times a week, but that’s it.

Over the years, Microsoft has been quietly taking away control from the users.

There’s been a transition from normal settings that you can do whatever you want with, to “yes / remind me later” settings that Microsoft uses to badger you until you submit, to finally just no setting at all - just quiet compulsory data collection and surveillance; with various bits of mysterious software that you can’t uninstall or disable or halt - because you’re not the admin - Microsoft is.

It wasn’t always this way.

Yeah, it’s a minor annoyance… another minor annoyance on top of all the others. And another personal data leak (or siphon) to go with all the others.

This on its own is not worth switching OSs for - but as a piece of a larger picture it’s yet another reason to consider it. And for some people this may be what tips the scales in their evaluation.

I’m sure its different now from when I started - because coding is very popular, and the internet is a thing… But I can tell you, that it took a long time before I knew what a programming language was, or ‘coding’… these words were just not familiar to me.

I learnt stuff by just opening random executable files in notepad to see what they look like… mostly it was just garbage that no one can understand - but some of them were readable, and I replicated and learnt from them. (they were .bat files.) I became a bit of an expert in making very fancy batch files. I made customisable menus, and a little adventure game. Then my parents helped me out by buying me a programming book. It was about programming in Visual C++. I was pretty excited - until I quickly worked out that Visual C++ was something you had to buy before you could use it.

Anyway, my point is that it is easy to see what you need from the point of view of an expert; but from the point of view of a novice, you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know which words are important, or what anything is called. The first steps are not hard except that you don’t know which direction you are meant to be stepping in, or where the starting point should be.

Sure, but “grocery store” is already on the list - so I feel that’s covered.

I first tried Linux around two decades ago, and it felt clunky to me - so I didn’t stick with it. I tried again around one decade ago; and it was a lot better, but I still didn’t quite have enough reason to keep using it yet. … But now, finally, I tried again several months ago - and I’m definitely sticking with it. I’m currently using Mint.

There are still some thing that I think are worse in Mint compared to Windows. But there is a lot of stuff that’s much better. It’s more than enough that I don’t expect to ever switch back to Windows again. The main thing is avoiding all the anti-features of Windows, such as the constant nagging to switch to Edge or activate their search bar; and the ads & other cruft in the start menu; and the constant little popups and ‘reminders’ about new stuff; and the lack of control in when updates are installed; and the ubiquitous harvesting of personal information, including ‘telemetry’ of which apps you run and when.

For me, one of the last straws was when I clicked on a help link from Windows settings, and it automatically opened in Edge, and Edge then automatically imported my browsing history and bookmarks from Firefox and automatically uploaded it to my Microsoft account. I was horrified that it would do something like that without any interaction whatsoever. I didn’t even think Edge had access to my Microsoft account until then, because I deliberately avoid using one to sign in, or for any other reason - the only reason it exists is because I used OneNote. I wanted the account to be isolated to just the app I used it for; not to automatically be grabbed by the whole OS and then used to collect my browsing history.

So yeah. I’d spent years of maintaining an ever-growing list of little system tweaks that I used to keep as junk off Windows as possible. But I’ve had enough. It’s too much. It’s not even close to being worth it. Linux has some minor problems, and some things take a bit of getting use to. But at least it isn’t systematically hostile.

I don’t think you appreciate how strong chess engines are these days. Humans don’t stand a chance any more.