Also people who touch monitors.

And people who push the glass part of a door.

There are a lot of things that try to replace FancyZones but I don’t know that any do well. There are gTiles and Linux PowerToys if you haven’t seem those already. I’ve never searched for alternatives to VS or Teams.

I don’t know about games. Steam stuff is supposed to work but it’s something I do much anymore. I was referring more to casual use, Web browsing, streaming, emails. Ironically Linux now seems more suited than Windows to people who use computers for simple stuff.

It seemed odd to me that a Web site could write to or read from the clipboard without the user approving it. That would be a pretty obvious security and privacy issue. From what I gather, on Chrome sites can write to the clipboard without approval, but they need approval to read. On Firefox and others any access requires permission. Thus this exploit seems limited to Chrome users.

@SkaveRat pointed out that it doesn’t require permission, only interaction. So likely there’s a button that’s clicked that writes to the clipboard, and most browsers are susceptible to this.

I had an old computer and Linux is all that I installed. Not everyone is going to have an extra computer to do that with. However, this computer is more than 10 years old. It was quite good at the time, but it’s junk compared to modern ones. Yet, it is more responsive than my very nice modern laptop that’s running Windows 10. It’s not going to beat a new computer in a race to solve a computational model, but for streaming, browsing, and day-to-day stuff, the lack of bloat means things open quickly and UI elements respond immediately. There is probably a fair number of people with computers they think are useless that would actually work very well with Linux.

I can’t imagine wasting my time and energy caring about things that don’t affect me. Good luck with that buddy.

There’s always some post in here saying for people to use Linux. I find an admonishment to be pretty hollow, so I’ll share my recent experience installing a Linux distribution rather than simply saying it’s something people should do.

I installed one of the many Debian variants. Getting the installation media is certainly going to be a challenge for casual users. Otherwise, it was easy. It walked through the steps. It was different from installing windows, but I felt it was no more difficult. I am well versed in this stuff, but I feel like nothing in the installation process would be a problem for a casual computer user.

It offered several desktops programs at the login screen. This could likely throw off a lot of people. However, if you just logged in and ignored that you might never even know there were different options. The default was KDE. Everything worked. Nothing needed to be tweaked. This is in starck contrast to Windows, where once you get past installation, you need to get rid of a ton of crap it throws at you. The Windows 10 start menu is an unbelievable collection of weird boxes and shit and the task bar is similarly full of junk. The KDE start menu is just a menu. The task bar has your tasks. There’s nothing to do.

I did try Cinnamon too. I prefer the simplicity. I don’t think casual users are going to care.

Overall, I think for casual users, it’s actually easier to set up and use than Windows. Getting installation media prepared is not something most people are going to readily do, but I think it’s the same with Windows. They have the advantage there of having manufacturors install it. Otherwise, whatever issues there have been installing Linux distributions in the past aren’t there now. Conversely, installing and especially the configuration after installation is much harder on Windows than it used to be. If you’re slightly tech savvy, give Linux a try.

I’m pretty sure you meant this as a joke, and I laughed at the thought of someone making something as stupid as an app for a soldering iron. But then I thought I’d check. Ugh.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.eduardom.ironos_companion

I used a Logitech Master MX for years, and when that finally broke I got a Master MX 3S. I don’t know anything about gaming mice, but I know this isn’t one. I only use it for office work, and for that I think it’s good. It’s comfortable for me. It charges by USB C, and the battery lasts a long time - I’d guess at least a month of daily use. It can use a USB radio transmitter or Bluetooth. I avoid Bluetooth whenever possible, so I don’t use that mode, but I assume it works as well as an other Bluetooth device. I like the continuous scrolling mode on the wheel, but you can change it to click.

I think voters should petition their local officials to change their local election systems to use some sort of proportional voting. Then we’ll get better local officials and we can keep pushing this system to higher levels.

I don’t like NPV. I wrote about that in response to someone else, but in short, it’s the same mentality as allocating all electors to someone who wins only a portion of the vote, which is inherently flawed. It’s better than what we have now, but it’s a hard sell because people never want their vote to go to a candidate they didn’t support, so there will always be states that rightly don’t support it.

I don’t think there’s ever a case where the electoral college itself has ever been the problem. The problem is the same one that plagues local elections but in a different form: there isn’t proportional voting.

At the national level, states allocate all of their electors to the candidate that wins the popular vote in that state. If a candidate wins 51% of the state’s votes they get 100% of the electors. That has historically been the reason presidents win despite losing the popular vote, not because of the college itself. Even without the college, if states allocated their voting power that way, you’d have the exact same problem.

At the local level the problem is more confined in that an individual can only put all of their influence behind a single candidate. This forces one to choose the least bad option.

The solution at all levels is proportional voting. States should allocate their electors according to the proportion of votes candidate receive. This needs some thought to do because it’s impossible to allocate exactly proportionally, but it’s a simple problem to address. At least two states do this. For every election I’m aware of where the president won despite losing the popular vote, this would have prevented that.

At all levels, something like ranked choice voting (there are other possibilities) allows voters to support multiple candidates, letting them give the most support for the candidate they genuinely prefer, but giving a hedge to support a candidate they do t love but that’s better than their worst candidate. This could be applied on top of a state’s system for allocating electors.

This is probably a top 3 priority for creating a workable government instead of this shit show we have now. It’s gaining significant reactions with several states using some sort of proportional system, but there’s heavy opposition from the current policitians. They know if it gets through, they’ll lose their elections, and won’t be able to jerk around their constituents. If you’re sick of one shit party vs another shit party, do everything you can to support proportional voting at all levels, and to get your state to allocate electors proportionally (not like the NPV pact does).