You know. It's interesting. I've been trying out Debian 12 with KDE Plasma. It actually has been a joy and feels like what Windows 11 should have grown into, had Microsoft actually been designing software with the customer in mind.

...but then there have been times where things so easily critically break until you fix them. Don't get me wrong. I'll go mess with kernel code if I have to, so I'm comfortable, but... I just want my computer to work. Windows, for all its shittiness, still keeps working through it like a slow cargo train pushing through a park piled in millions of pancakes.

I had one event the other day where I was installing a Snap app for the first time. Decided rather than installing the Snap package manager because I wanted to avoid Canonical if possible, I'd just manually put it in /opt. Figured out how to edit the KDE "start" menu to add the app using the included GUI tool. Wanted to use the app's icon. The snap app had an icon embedded in it that Dolphin file manager recognized and displayed.

So I went, "ok, sometimes applications can parse out images from binary files. I've seen this work for decades," so I tell the menu editor to ingest the snap binary for the icon, to see if it will scrape the icon. No icon showed up, so I found a a svg online and assigned that to the icon.

Then I went and saved and launched another application.

GUI slowly started not working and eventually the entire OS locked, even the alt text consoles would not load. Ctrl+alt+backspace was dead, caps lock died, which was when I knew, "he's dead, Jim."

Tried rebooting, tried launching that program again, (bearing in mind, not the program I manually added to the "start" menu) and every time the whole OS freezes up. Tried launching apps in different order, launching from command line, etc. When the one app launched that wasn't the one I created a launcher icon for, same thing. Freeze. (It is possible that the bug is in fact time-based or boot-sequence-based, and since I was trying to reproduce the bug rapidly, the other app had nothing to do with it.)

I go remove the start menu link, hoping that, what I assumed was part of Plasma was trying to load this binary as an icon even though it should have checked the file, recognized it as "no I can't parse this," and done nothing or displayed an error or parsed it and showed the icon. Especially after I assigned it another image. I just hoped whatever screwed up would be connected to the code executing that app launcher icon config, and deleting the config for that application would delete whatever mess that was created, and hopefully was created discretely.

Shit you not, the computer became rock solid stable again after that and one more reboot. Hasn't glitched since.

It's shit like that that makes me proooobably give up on this experiment and end up on a commercial OS like MacOS again despite the cost and downward trend they are also suffering in a lack of innovative energy.

I would use Linux more if:

1: I could host my desktop with Parsec (client support exists, but not host support).

2: Sunshine/Moonlight actually worked, as an alternative. It is broken and janky and isn't a substitute. I've tried. A lot.

3: I could wirelessly link my Quest 2. VR support is a hot mess and I'm still waiting for a solution to wirelessly link my Quest 2 in linux that actually works and doesn't require a month of programming a solution myself.

4: Better compatibility with some stuff. Proton gaming works most of the time, but not for the titles I play.

As a linux user myself I don't care about Adobe or Microsoft hate how someone brings those apps I DONT USE THEM

my next laptop is going to be a thinkpad as soon as i save up. :)

You know what else is unsafe? Letting Windows force the auto-update and break your bootloader (and that's just their latest fuck-up).

i don't want to disable updates; i want to disable the random auto restart.

Because it’s his computer and he should be able to do whatever the hell he wants with it?

I would agree, but there's been at least two updates in the last six months that restarted my machine before I even got to see the pending restart warning. I use it every day and shutdown if I won't be. So the restart happened less than 24 hours after any warning if there even was a warning.

That has the potential to lose things I'm working on. Windows pathetic attempt to bring things back falls woefully short of functional.

Flash up alerts to say there's critical updates, but the action to actually restart should be a human interaction.

Because Microsoft is updating to add ads to the 10 start menu is one reason. Security probably outweighs that, but it's super annoying.

If CrowdStrike has taught us anything, it’s that blindly trusting automation can be equally (if not more) disastrous.

It’s one thing to ask me to update, but give me options; including to not update. There are machines out there in the world that still run Windows 95. They are vital to manufacturing processes, and cannot be updated because they run software that is no longer updated and there is no inexpensive alternative. It happens.

While that may not be the case in this circumstance, the point is that it’s up to the operator to determine when it’s time to update, not Microsoft.

Anecdotally, the only reason Microsoft does this is because people historically do not update their software regularly. Why? Because it’s burdensome and problematic. Whose fault is that? I’ll give you three guesses; the first two don’t count.

Hmmm, this comment should be higher, but, you know, lemmys want to hate on Microsoft, so damn the voice if reason, I guess.

Doing this gives big bow to the machine energy for me, I don't like it.

There is, pretty sure there's a GPO too. There is an option in this debloat tool for it too.

If you disable it make sure you install updates at least once a month