“Hi! Your OS here! See that red badge demanding your attention?”
"What is it?”
"It's sports news! Isn't that great?”
"I don't give a shit about sports. How do I turn it off?”
"If you're not interested in sports, you can customize the alerts to show something you ARE interested in.”
"I'm interested in an OS that does what I tell it. One that works for me. That doesn't track me or try to ‘maximize engagement’ or sell me crap or nag me about using AI or whatever. Got anything for that?”
“…”
@angusm @ghostrunner I mean, to be fair, you completely did. You're on Mastodon; there was literally a less-than-zero chance someone would pass by this opportunity.
Including me.
@ghostrunner @angusm
Running LinuxMint XFCE on an Intel macbook from 2006.
The last Windows version I used in earnest was Windows 7 with the NT4 desktop theme.
My PIC has a laptop for work that runs Win 11.
It gives me the creeps.
@angusm
Ahh, then you want Windows 11. It will tell you what you want the OS to do. Further it knows that you really want it to track your activities, even if you tell yourself that you don't.
/s
@angusm
That's no easy life. :(
I am happy for not having such dependencies.
@khzimmer2 @angusm in that case I'm fairly confident you don't scan a lot of documents that require good OCR and good document compression. I run a Windows VM for the sole purpose of servicing a Brother ADS-1200 scanner.
Every single alternative I've looked at has less accurate OCR, _and_ generates PDF's over twice the size of Brother's otherwise atrocious software.
If you look up Open Source Zealot in any reputable source you'll find my picture to illustrate the entry. It's just a tough nut to crack. I sank serious money and time in this topic and just never found a way of improving scanning under UNIX-like OSes beyond the level of scanning using the Brother ADS-1700, which sucks as bad under Windows as it does under Linux. It's not as if Windows or Brother are the magic bullet.
I'd love the idea of open source leapfrogging the software for the ADS-1200, but there will be tons of isolated use cases that don't lend themselves to easy solutions.
Thanks for your report, I understand the problem.
Yes, you're right, I rarely need OCR, and when I do it's no big deal to manually fix some errors in the resulting one or two pages.
I would never advocate for using Apple products. Microsoft and Apple just aren't companies I trust.
Here's my way to see what OS I'm running:
$ cat /etc/*os*release
NAME="Fedora Linux"
VERSION="42.2025"(…)" (Kinoite)"
Of course, there are other cool OS, too.
I just love #FedoraLinux, but I'm not against other #Linux distros, and not against #FreeBSD, and not against …
You get the idea. :)
@angusm
It is honestly kind of surreal watching my professors trying to show us things and then have to deal with operating system and browser ads. especially when those ads are displaying news with decidedly controversial political news.
Some of my professors have even expressed frustration with all the things they have to click through each time they log in to the computer (not their personal one, the one setup in classroom). Heck I'm annoyed when I need to login to the uni computers too.
Ublock Origin on Librefox.
@angusm "I'm interested in Linux. How do I customise an alert for that?"
OS: 😐
@NudelnAlDente @angusm It took a lot longer for someone to mention Linux in this thread than I thought it would.
🐧
Ha! if only Windows was that kind...
"Hi Your OS here! See that red badge demanding your attention?”
"Yes"
"It's the security software!"
"What's the problem?"
"Nothing! It didn't find anything! Nothing at all! A complete non-event!"
@angusm I fully disabled Google's Discover on Android for this reason.
It was a shame too because it would also do useful things like tell me about exchange rates and appointments and stuff but I don't need additional distraction and clickbait wedged into my homescreen experience.
Even better when that sport notifications are US based.
Everyone on the world wants to be kept up-to-date on that, don't they?
Ohh, I see you turned off sports notifications, you must want US politics, US entertainment gossip and US finance news instead.
@angusm just add ENABLED=0 to /etc/default/motd-news
More info: https://canonical.com/legal/motd
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