I actually think there's some chance that linux has a lot of parts that were developed individually and thrown together and they don't always work great together. I think linux still has markedly worse driver support (especially for nvidia GPUs apparently) than windows, and that in terms of just working out of the box on a wide range of hardware and use cases that windows has it beat and it's not even that much of a contest. Yeah it can work, but it also seems to not work at least some of the time and then you don't have repair shops, tech support, etc you can call to figure out why. The best you can hope for is to trawl through old reddit threads and hope the answer is contained within, that it applies to your distro, and that the commands and files it tells you to run and edit are in the same places with the same name, which is frankly by no means as guaranteed for linux as it is for windows. When I tell someone to go into their windows/system32 folder and find foo.dll then 99 times out of 100 there is a file called foo.dll in the windows/system32 folder that does exactly what I think it does. Linux is too varied. And that's not a bad thing for most use cases, but it very much is for the widespread adoption use case.

Don't get me wrong, I hate windows and would love to switch to linux full time, it's just not working for me with some pretty bog-standard hardware on two different distros now with no indication as to even how I might go about fixing it other than 'lol buy an AMD GPU', so the odds are pretty good that I'm not the only person in history that that has happened for. I've never had problems like this on windows, I've never installed windows on normal hardware and had it just fail to work for no explicable reason, etc. I did IT for more than 20 years on both windows and linux computers and while I don't have statistics I can tell you that anecdotally linux was generally more stable and had fewer problems once it was running, but that was also on servers doing (often-headless) server things, not desktops playing games or doing stuff with sound or multimedia or running general software and shit.

I think that until most people can figure out how to install linux - and I would say probably 80% of them, minimum, lack the time, patience, or technical knowledge to do so because it's not just 'press button, receive OS' like windows is - and have it just work the vast majority of the time then it's not ready for widespread adoption. Preinstalling on known hardware is a different matter and could probably work for many cases until something goes wrong though.

You ever notice how it sometimes helps to read the whole sentence to understand what some part of it means in context?

A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is.

There's a comma after that second VPN so obviously it's related to what follows, which is the part where I describe exactly how a VPN is a VPN: in terms of getting a different IP address. This is twice now you've gone way out on a limb here trying to back the play of some fucking troll who didn't bother to explain themselves and I'm not sure if that's where you want to be. Picking through my comment and taking bits out of context to feed back to me as 'evidence' to back up your pedantry and assumption that the rest of the text of that same comment shows you to be wrong about is not a good look. If you're going to nitpick my shit to death then you should at least try to read the whole thing and understand how each of the parts relate to each other first, otherwise people might mistake you for some fucking troll too (albeit a clearly slightly more intelligent one since you can actually elucidate what your issue is with what I said, regardless of whether or not it's remotely accurate.)

If that's the case then both of you failed to read the part of my comment where I explicitly addressed that:

The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.)

I admit I didn't include the possibility of the VPN operator themselves being malicious, but it seems weird to call me out for not addressing the issue of record security re:governments/LE when pretty much the entire point of my comment was to address that specific issue because no one else was, no?

GDF is also wrong about Israel.

Oh, my bad, I didn't even notice the 'no thanks' button. Thanks.

Neat, I'll check that out, thanks!

Edit: Ugh, it looks like all of the book clubs that are tagged as 'sci-fi' are actually 'sci-fi/fantasy' (or sometimes sci-fi/fantasy/historical/romance, which makes no sense) which is not what I'm looking for. Do you happen to know of any that are pure sci-fi? Preferably ones that focus on big-idea sci-fi like Greg Egan or Peter Watts?

No doubt, but as a mechanism of applying pressure to get them to stop invading Ukraine, I think you'll have to agree that it's failed miserably. That's what I (and most people) mean by 'working': accomplishing the intended aim. Huge problems or not, the war continues unabated. Why do you imagine doing more of the same would be any more effective?

lol, k, I definitely respect the opinion of someone who drops a half-assed comment like that without bothering to offer what they believe to be the correct information.

I think they would. I tried Linux again for the first time in 10+ years and kept running into issues like my sound would randomly die or change to headset, when I tried to update the video driver it hard- locked the system, etc. I just installed Ubuntu the other day and whenever it boots the monitor just goes into standby with no signal. It's been nothing but trouble, and I have pretty normal hardware. Most people aren't going to know or care how to deal with those problems. As far as Linux has come, it's still not ready for widespread adoption by most people on the 'it just works' front.

A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is. The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.) I'm not familiar enough with either service to be able to speak to that, but everyone else seems to be talking about features, prices, politics, etc when none of those directly address your questions.

LOL, my best friend's mom had a little Shih Tzu and one time when we were over there for dinner she had just bought him this HUGE red stuffed bull-thing that was like 4 times his size, but man it didn't even slow him down, he just went for it right in the middle of the living room floor in front of everyone. Poor pupper kept falling off and having to roll over on him and shit. Friend's mom was mortified, but the rest of us were laughing so hard we couldn't breathe there for a minute.

Haven't Western nations already been applying significant sanctions to Russia? It's pretty clear that hasn't been working, why do they imagine that more of the same will work any better? Oh right, they don't, they just want to look like they're doing something useful.