Mozilla’s recent blog posts explicitly highlight that they are investing in ads for short-term revenue growth. So when they go on to remove the ToS statement about not selling user data, that suggests to me that their strategy is in fact to collect and sell user data.

Perhaps they aren’t doing that yet, but signs are pointing in that direction. So that does make me reluctant to share any data with them.

It’s like Moore’s law. The number of bytes for a basic app doubles every 2.5 years.

When I was young, we’d get a few different games games on a single 1.4 Mb floppy disk. The games were simpler, sure, but exactly the same games now would be far bigger in bytes.

The Orange Box 2; featuring Half Life 3, Team Fortress 3, and Portal 3.

OpenTTD is a good game.

Fair enough. Thanks for the info.

The winapps link in my post says it is a hard-fork of the one you linked to (and my one has updates as recent as yesterday). So it isn’t abandoned.

Is there a reason why you’ve suggested qeumu in particular for the VM? (winapps suggests two different VM options)

I’ve never heard of OnlyOffice before. The wikipedia page seems to imply that they are web-apps; and the OnlyOffice website talks about pricing for businesses and personal severs or something, listing team collaboration features. So I’m not yet entirely sure exactly what OnlyOffice is - but I suspect it isn’t really what I’m looking for.

Maybe so, but then there’s still Excel and OneNote.

Regarding OneNote in particular, I’m not using that for any collaborative work; but I do have extensive notes and useful past work there. I reckon OneNote is pretty good - but I regret using it now because of the lock-in effect. And there doesn’t seem to be any Linux analogue at all. (What I need is xournal++ integrated into Joplin. I sometimes fantasize about trying to hack that together myself; but that’s just a dream really.)

I haven’t bothered to try it myself, but my internet sleuthing tells me that the latest versions don’t work.

I’d be happy enough to move to Libre Office exclusively; except that I need to be able to collaborate with others who are using MS Office - and that’s a battle I don’t really want to fight right now.

In my experience winapps doesn’t work well enough to use for work. I had almost constant issues with it.

That’s a disappointing to hear - but it’s exactly the experience I hoped to avoid myself by asking about it. So thank you!

Your setup for getting nice *nix stuff on Windows sounds good, but for me it isn’t so much that I want to use *nix stuff but rather that I want to avoid Windows stuff. For example, today I got a popup notification from Microsoft suggesting that I should install an xbox app. … I said ‘no’, and quickly disabled those kinds of suggestions. Easy - except that I’ve disabled various ‘suggestions’ in Windows countless times. Its a constant chore keeping up with new anti-features constantly being added. So that’s really what I’m trying to avoid.

I’d prefer not to rely on browser based versions if I can help it. (I don’t like having a weird hybrid of browser UI and app UI. Also, the browser versions are not as responsive, and are not feature-complete.)

🍷

What is Wine anyway? All I can work out is that it definitely is not an emulator… (probably it’s a fermented drink made from grapes, but implemented in Linux.)

Yeah, I agree that OP’s attitude is unappealing. But it’s not like OP is an official spokesperson or ambassador for Linux or anything like that. It’s just a person giving their opinion. And in any large group of people there’s always going to be some that you don’t agree with. (and often they are the loudest most visible ones…)

I feel some sadness in seeing Microsoft’s slow sludge of enshitification oozing forward and gradually engulfing github. There’s still a way to go before it become totally crap, but it is definitely getting worse and will continue to get worse as Microsoft does their best to mine whatever value they can from everyone passing by.

Knowing this, I think it is wise to start looking at alternatives.

I’ve stopped using github because I hate advertising and nags. Probably most people don’t care much about it, but for me github nagging and ‘reminding’ me about copilot is just so off-putting that I immediately want to leave the site. I don’t want my attention stolen like that.

My computer has a problem where occasionally it will become completely unresponsive. (Mouse cursor doesn’t move. Keys have no apparently effect. Whatever app is running freezes. I think its a hardware problem with the graphics card, but I don’t know what. Logs at the time it freezes say “the GPU has fallen off the bus”.)

Anyway… I recently learnt about Magic SysRq. And I’ve been able to shutdown the computer from this unresponsive state with SysRq, R E I S U O. Where as I understand it, the “E” tells processes the end nicely if they can; and then the “I” just ends them by force.

(At this point, I’m realising that the E is SIGTERM, not SIGINT - so that screws up the relevance of my story; but I figure I’ll keep going anyway.)

The point is, I’ve been using key combo with a nice pause between each key, thinking there was some chance that processes might be ending gracefully. But when I tried it while the computer wasn’t frozen, the computer was able to inform me that the E and I commands were disabled. (I don’t know why.) So even though I wanted to give a nice “please end” signal, in the end that just wasn’t happening.

I’ve been happily using RSS feeds for many years. I mostly use them for webcomics. I’ve got a bunch of different webcomic feeds. But I also use RSS to follow a bunch of low-traffic sites that I care about the content of but don’t want to have to manually visit just to see if there’s an update.

Also, I don’t have a google account, but I use RSS to follow a couple of youTube channels that I find interesting. (Again, stuff that rarely updates. eg. hbomberguy.)

I’ve found that a lot of blogs do have RSS feeds even if there is no visible link or mention of RSS anywhere on the website. I often just throw the blog URL into the ‘add feed’ box on The Old Reader, and it turns out there is feed info hidden in there somewhere.