Do you know you can set other search engine as default on firefox? Do you also know that the deal with google of using it as default search engine is the only thing keeping mozilla afloat? and that google is likely continuing funding them this way despite a dwindling user base because if firefox were to fail, oops, all chromium and incoming monopoly lawsuits?

I would prefer my web not being all chromium thus relying only on one big tech.

Did phone manufacturer finally decide to keep supporting their models after the first year/couple of years? Or did the “likely lifetime” of a smartphone dropped below that in the meantime?

If anything, my experience with “manufacturer support” on android isn’t particularly stellar, with the only outlier being my current Samsung XCover, which is kinda cheating due to the thing being a rugged phone targeting companies and not the average joe, so the thing is built to last, both hardware and software side.

On the other hand you do have a couple (maybe even three!) companies that offer linux pre-installed on their machines.

Having OneDrive wouldn’t help as you still won’t be able to use programs as a user, which is pretty much the reason we use computers in the first place, this bug effectively makes whole computers glorified paperweight in the meantime.

The boot process isn’t an user process, Windows would still be able to use the C:/ drive for itself, for every other user software though, that’s another story…

Ok, you’re either stupid or a troll.

In case you are just stupid :

My smartphone is brand new, thank you very much, doesn’t change the fact that android need 6GB of memory to just exist idly…

Yes I am adequating my device with the dislike of a company when said company provide the OS (an important part of the device) an no mean to change it, and said OS is a spyware.

No my PC isn’t a tool to spy on me, my machine, my OS, my rules. I run a Linux system : no Google, Apple or Microslop here.

You may also continue acting dumb.

“More efficient and less annoying than […] a PC.” talks about modern day smartphone

huh?

I’d like to know how a completely underpowered totaly locked down piece of crap I keep struggling with daily is “infinitely more efficient and less anoying” than my well oiled machine running mostly FOSS.

Google is talking about removing the ability to install software while Apple is busy reinventing Windows Aero 20 years later. Meanwhile both are spying on you and no you can’t have any alternative due to how locked down those things are.

Can’t access some parts of the storage of my device due to “security concerns”. Can’t disable some aggressive “optimisations” that keeps killing my apps to prevent OOM, can’t use anything less bloated than the stock OS that uses roughly all the available RAM, AI everywhere…

Add on top of that those fucking “all touch and swipe based” UI that are just a pain, virtual keyboard included. My fat fingers on a tiny over-sensitive touchscreen means a fuck ton of misclics. Bring me back Blackberry or Psion like physical keyboards.

Do you know which computing device I own that isn’t such a pain? My desktop computer, my ol’ reliable!

Bring me a smartphone that doesn’t attempt to dictate how I must use it, that I actually own and with buttons and I might end up liking it. Until then enjoy that corporatist hellscape without me.

Hardly.

The system drive (very usually C:/) is where the Users folder lies by default (and you can’t move it anyway IIRC), folder that contains stuff like the Appdata folder where… well… apps keeps their data like settings, history, backups… Most software will try to access it and would meet an “access denied” error.

This is also the default location for all the documents, music, videos, pictures,[…] folders (but you can change those though)

Basicaly you’d be limited to the “portable” versions of softwares located on other drives, which is not quite the norm on Windows.

Yeah, it is still a laptop in the end. More repairable than most but still a laptop. I just had a problem with the “ecosystem” wording as this is best used to describe unrepairable pieces of crap that refuses third party parts (looking at you, Apple).

What ecosystem? pretty sure the “ecosystem” is standardized computer parts for thinkpads.

Not that I know of, sadly.

Counterpoint : I can buy DRM free .flac from qobuz and actually own them, unrevokably, and store them on my jellyfin server. Absolutely no need for physical optical disks here.

KDE is incredibly “windows like”, the “bloat” you might be refering to are options. The only criticism I agree with here is the footprint, KDE is indeed heavy and not recommanded for old machines.

KDE? Lightweight? Even cinnamon is incredibly heavy next to xfce and lxde. Have you ever used a sub-4GB of memory machine?

I do second mint (LMDE) for a non gamer and non tech savy windows 10 refugee though, it’s debian so, stable, and cinnamon is an okay-ish middle ground between KDE usability and xfce weight.

My problem being quite package specific, it’s not impossible, the biggest offender being qt…

“User-friendly” and “updated” sadly sounds incompatible. In just slightly less than one year of using Fedora I’ve had 3 bad qt updates that broke kde’s softwares like kmail, 2 bad amd-gpu updates that made the gpu crash and 1 pipewire update that broke surround sound.

Those were all minor updates that were easy to revert though, just had to use the terminal for that and wait the next fixed version.

As someone in this category : wtf? I kept using the terminal all the time when I was still on windows. From 95’s dos to 11’s cmd.

I use kolour paint on kde, there are a lot of other similar FOSS softwares around too.

This used to be a thing, my first ever ubuntu install was made through such a tool (damn I might be getting old), a .exe that I ran on my windows 7 and that rebooted to a live ubuntu environnement.

Especialy nowadays with “features” like fast boot that removes the “press f# to access bios” prompt on startup to “speed-up the boot process”… Hell even when disabled (both OS and BIOS wide) some computers won’t ever show me the damn thing anyway.

Historically speaking, from what I’m reading is that gnome devs have a history of bad decisions birthing forks here and there “fine, I’ll do my own gnome, with blackjack and hookers” too, so I don’t know how much weigh such a decision can have to be perfectly honnest.