I don’t think magic is objective; I think it is in the eye of the beholder.

If the audience don’t understand it, or can be distracted from seeing the truth of it, it’s magic or a miracle or whatever to them. And the magician - if they know what they’re doing - can wield power over the rubes.

So before you understand - say, magnetism - better, lodestones can be seen as magical or heaven-sent.

There’ll be physical phenomena today like ‘spooky action at a distance’ or something where even quite learned observers might not 100% know the laws of physics. Some exploit of that can appear as magical until the laws are figured out and well communicated.

If it turns out that the underlying laws are stochastic rather than deterministic, then there’s always going to be some grey areas i think.

Are there any flies buzzing around?

The ifixit toolkit has it - well with a hex shank.

But the last time i actually opened that hatch, i had to split a sliver off a wooden stick (coffee stirrer).

TFW you seg fault youself today, just to see if it is real.

More likely, skynet already happened, you’re probably the cpu.

Even more likely, You’re the dream inside of the brain of one of skynet’s electric sheep.

yes

You can try the android netflix app via Waydroid(with widevine).

Maybe not as resilient/convenient/stable as a browser, but i think you can set up waydroid app as a single icon.

Of course then you’re just swapping MS for gooogle.

Like Exodus 21:20-21?

Windows: I refuse to shut down because of a, b , c

Me: But I already clos. . .

Windows: No you didnt’t, stop lying!

Me : Well, I pressed the X and the window dissappeared.

Windows: Lol, noob. Did you never even heard of a task managers?

That’s not something that I’d think is any of my business to want or not want.

I can’t really answer the last question, I’d need to know a lot more about all thendifferent things these microsoft users are doing; what’re the alternatives; and, how disruptive might the transition be. On balance, given the uncertainties, I’d have to say probably not.

I mean if i stopped using Microsoft entirely (i.e. at work) I’d have to find a new job, probably one I’m less experienced at. And likely I’d end up working for a bigger bunch of scumbags. Likely no net gain and a load of botheration in the meanwhile.

Also i might miss the regular BSOD inspired tea breaks . . .

Haha market cap, market share , they’re still all about selling stuff so dont really apply./ Market share is normally measured in share of revenue in most industries.

There are lots of webpages, tutorials, youtubes and stuff like that for these people already. I’m sure they can also pay companies like canonical for more dedicated support if that’s what they need.

If you want to welcome people, go ahead and do it, nothing stopping you. Create the webpage or forum or youtube channel, distribution, or write the book whatever is missing. Just make sure to moderate it to remove CLI based answers and block users like me.

“I” exist and I’m sure I’m never going to be part of your “we”. The current situation of linux home user base seems just fine to me without pandering to a load of windows users. I think you should work on your desired subculture and keep me out if it. Leave me out of it - i can stay over here under my bridge in linuxmemes wearing my new programming socks.

For the home market maybe you can look at valve and steamdeck or something as an example of an acessible linux sub-culture. Valve doesn’t maintain and support that for free though. It’d be interesting to know how many full time employees they have on steamdeck OS just for the one device (and maybe a few gaming perpherals) and one GUI. Then expand that to all esoteric hardware and all GUIs . . .
I guess chromeOS and a few forks of that is another similar example - i think that’s still linux kernel based - some limitations on hardware i think.

What I’d actually like to see is B2B growth (for user ) - but I don’t think linux will ever be bought by employers like mine - I know how the procurement department operates - and I can’t see that changing. There are plenty of people who don’t need my support trying business sales, redhat, canonical, suse etc and more power to them - but microsoft didn’t get big in B2B by being usable, nor by nor having “no CLI”, nor by having a supportive community to home users. They just packaged it in a way that ticked all the boxes for the corpo procurement types - though most B2B customers do need their own dedicated user support.

It’s open source, they can just make their own distro.

Haha that would be awesome/softwaregoresome. I’d pay money (well not much money) to see it just to troll MS-GUI fanatics with it.

All I can find is some mention of libreoffice doing it. and yes I did try ddging with ‘safe search’ off.

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=407404

Oh shit - I turned it on in my LO writer and I can’t find the button to turn it back . . .

GNU Terry Pratchett

Fucking terminal, in many of them ctrl+c and ctrl+v don’t even work. and don’t get me started on how they implement ctrl+z. I’m waiting for a terminal to have the ms-office ribbon menu bar before I’ll use it.

Yeah built in user screening process. Screwed by endeavourOS though.

It could be a form of bundling, tacit veritcal integratation, magin squeeze , price discrimination, tie-ins etc.

Various tricks oligopolistic companies use to prevent competition from bidding prices down - trying to extract a bit of extra profit. The harm is that people are paying more than they might - or for extra features they cant opt out of than they would in a free or open market. Likely the harm is very diffuse and no one person is all that bothered to be paying 10% more or whatever, but it all adds up.

Anti-trust regulators are so weak they don’t really have to try though. TBF it’s very hard to prove this stuff in court even if there was a political will to improve competition to benefit consumers.

Similar just the impact of dust over a large enough distance.

Try going up to the top of, say, a 50 storey building in a moderately polluted city during a fairly still, warm, dry spell of weather and look down at the ground.

It’ll likely look a lot more dusty than from street level.

Urgh, when you forgot to check the fool-performance charateristic curve on the datasheet and it was on a log scale.

noobuntu vs arch-hole