Okay, totally off topic…what is it with this annoying trend of censoring a company/name with an asterisk when it’s a subject of ire? It just bugs me - and not in a way that focuses my anger to Microsoft.

What makes me angry here is, I am 90% sure the browsers could code against this.

If the user clicks a control on a webpage one time, the stack can declare “One user click! You have earned yourself One (1) navigation.” Then, the click activates some JavaScript that moves you to a new webpage. That new webpage has an auto-loader redirect that instead runs a 300ms timeout, and then takes you to some other page. The browser, meanwhile, has seen this, and establishes “We are still only operating off of that One (1) click. So, instead of adding a new page to the user history, we’ll replace that first navigation.”

I have yet to hear a satisfactory reason as to why that’s not possible.

They’ve learned some important lessons from past games, and now must fit dat ass into the thumbnail.

So, anytime people say this, I’m compelled to remind them: Unlike movie depictions, malware is generally incentivized to not be apparent.

You install something, they infect, and then they do their best to ensure you don’t know that for the next few months, if ever. Meanwhile, anything as subtle as key logging or checking wifi-connected devices can give them info for some other attack.

So, I can only say I hope I don’t have a virus right now - but I don’t really know. And I’m pretty sure those pirating groups have profit incentives beyond littering their sites with ads.

The emulators are generally easy to get. The struggle is in getting the games themselves.

Even if you’re unafraid of Nintendo’s stasi, you aren’t the one assuming risk. Takedown notices tend to go to the hosting / discussing sites, not individual users. It’s not very brave to order Lemmy hosts to battle those notices in court on your behalf.

You talk about convincing people into emulation, but can you even do that on moderated websites? I mean, helping them get ROMs without going into “wink wink nudge nudge” communication or risking Nintendo’s lawyers invading that site.

Speaking plainly, I still buy games and hardware the normal way because I don’t want that complication. It’s not worth the effort and hassle just to risk putting viruses on my computer.

Oh, no argument from me on that. And it’s horrible that Microsoft is starting to make people choose between having a secure system and avoiding their adware bullshit.

Much as I always feel Microsoft has made some horrible missteps around automatic updates…I also think many many users are vocally and unabashedly following horrible update policies.

The biggest one is “Fuck you, Microsoft, I don’t ever want to update.” A simple truth about Windows is that it is currently the most popular operating system in the world. If that OS was Unix-based, the resulting truth would still be true: The most popular OS is going to be the most common target for vulnerabilities, hacks, malware, and exploits. Far more than an antivirus, keeping that computer up to date is the most important step for keeping it secure.

This is true not just of computers used to manage your bank account and nuclear launch codes, but of the swarm of “convenience” computers sitting inside a campus network that could spread a virus to everything on the Wi-Fi.

So, looking at this image, it’s a shame on Microsoft moment if this update came from nowhere, or they once again blatantly ignored the configured update time. It’s a shame on the campus moment if someone was repeatedly closing the “Time to update” popup.

If you want to support that, a good first step would be to improve TFM, because much of it is far too dense to actually read. Technical writing, knowing how to summarize things through human knowledge, is a critical skill for tech businesses, and most open-source programmers lack it.

I guess a better metric might be the Steam Hardware Survey?

I get the impression “opening a file” is treated as a different action in Linux from “executing a file”. They don’t want the user request of “Oh, I guess I’ll look at this image” to accidentally result in a system takeover - so any “run this file” actions are more manual.

Most people would be fine with this in the case of a home user duplicating one or two copies for his kids to watch and as backups. But we have seen whenever a rule permits something, someone will work out the MAXIMUM way in which they can abuse it for profit. Give them an inch, and they take a mile.

Ideally, we could have laws that are really finely built to be specific to that first scenario. But I honestly don’t know how you write those.

I would argue there are facets to many people’s life that they leave “at default” because they “don’t care enough to fix it how they want”.

Take random Linux User XYZ; They still have to nudge their front door to get it open after unlocking, because they’re not a home improvement afficionado that wants to look up door repair videos on YouTube and attempt to put a stabilizer of some kind on the hinge. Or, they might accept the terrible interface in their car because they don’t know of easy ways to get it replaced with something simpler. Or, they don’t have their money invested anywhere because they don’t like/trust researching investment tips.

For us, it’s just that computers are something we’ll always tune to our preference. For others, it’s other things.

While that has been a nice feature on mine, I’ve definitely been more frustrated with the KDE interface than I am when using my Windows desktop - even when my Deck is hooked up to monitors. Much of that could be familiarity, but familiarity is a very real, very important thing.

Most people have at least one other app that most people don’t use, that they use religiously, and has little UI foibles they don’t want to change. For some, it’s a native-app E-mail client they’re familiar with where they have 20-year-old messages backed up. For others, it’s a photo management app.

It often doesn’t matter if AltWinMintbuntuXYZ has those capabilities. If it doesn’t handle them in the exact same way, it’s an anxiety-producing shift.

See that’s the thing, I’m decently experienced at the game, but mostly in a PVE context. I feel like that’s not so satisfying to play if I’m never showing someone less experienced the ropes (Deep Rock Galactic, meanwhile, maintains that satisfaction - and it doesn’t have PVP allstars popping in as competing mining teams to dominate us)

I guess I might like to play Sea of Thieves again if it’s going to have a wave of newer players. It became boring when the only people playing were PVP fanatics, and all the casual players had been scared off.

Amazon Prime exists for me to run a 30-day trial around Christmas, when I happen to come up with a few gift ideas I can’t find elsewhere, and then to let it expire and never use it the rest of the year.

It’s going to be interesting to see if this is more about the chase, and getting the other to admit their feelings, or contending with the challenges of a long term hedgehog relationship in a world that still exhibits homophobia.

It’s very easy to achieve that security as a user, in a non-circumventable way. Just refuse to install anything made as a Win32 executable.

You’ll be unable to do most of what people do daily, but you’ll be secure. And, Windows even offered that as a potential OS setup - and it was instantly seen as “Microsoft’s effort to lock down the operating system to only apps they approve”.

Users DID have that mindset shift once before. Back in Windows 2000, EVERY app worked off admin permissions. In Vista, everyone started getting annoying permission dialogs on their old apps to access admin folders - and just started accepting them. But now that most apps are correctly designed to access user folders, sudden admin dialogs are a big point of user suspicion. In some reality, we’d do the same with “…What? You want me to manually run a .exe file I’ve downloaded in the browser??”