What are people ordering so much of from amazon? I apparently haven’t ordered from them since late 2024, and those were a handful of small orders.

Setting up a windows VM at my old job took like a few minutes, but I already had virtual box (I think that’s what I used)

And I needed to see some software running in a Windows box while editing the code that talked to it.

Depends on what you need to do. You could mount a folder to get files in or out, for some cases.

Have you used virtual machines before? Done software development?

You think making a VM takes two weeks? I’m pretty sure Microsoft provides images you can just pop into virtualbox, but it’s been a while since I used VMs.

Also if you need to use the windows software alongside your regular workflow (eg: reading info out of the windows software with your eyes and then typing into your IDE or terminal), rebooting the whole thing is going to suck.

Yes but if you dual boot there’s no VM needed LOL

You want to reboot the entire system when you need to use a Windows only application? Instead of just opening up a VM?

…what? How are you going to do any modern day work on the host machine with no Internet access? Are you going to air gap your windows machine?

Still happy I switched to Linux. Been playing divinity original sin 2 without any problems. (It’s one of those games I’ve started a hundred times but only finished once.)

You can restrict network access to the VM and still do normal network stuff on the host machine, for one thing.

Still happy here in Linux.

If you have a machine that runs Windows and the hardware is still good,

Linux is often more forgiving on hardware requirements. I recently put Mint (with xfce) on a like 2013 laptop and it’s fine. That’s not even an especially lightweight distribution.

I think installing Linux exposes you to higher severity issues, like “now it won’t boot”. Once you get over that initial setup, it’s not much different than windows or apple.

If more computers came with it pre installed, it would be even easier for folks.

I think about half the time I’ve installed Linux it was fine. The other half were problems with esoteric solutions.

Still glad I made the switch.

Linux doesn’t really have the profit motives that lead to enshittification.

I guess a bigger entity could try to start charging for… something… Support, maybe, but that seems unlikely to take off.

Other people have good answers already. Chiefly to ask questions and talk through your reasoning.

But also I’ve noticed the difficulty of interview questions varies wildly. Some places would give dynamic programming problems I’m terrible at. Others would give trivial "find the largest number in this array of integers, in python. Don’t worry about efficiency. " problems.

I think there’s a certain kind of user who doesn’t really learn concepts, but rote actions. They click the start menu and then excel to open excel, but they don’t really understand that the start menu is an application launcher and Excel is an application that can be opened in other ways. It’s very one dimensional.

Then when something changes, like the application launcher is moved, they freak out. They don’t have a mental model.

That’s how my mother is, anyway. It’s all magic with no underlying coherent anything. Not sure how to fix that, because it usually comes up when they’re mad or scared, and that’s not a time anyone will learn.

Deadfire was great. Good characters, good gameplay systems.

Loved my chanter with the heaviest armor and shield that popped out summons and sang until the enemies died. Or my cipher that would disintegrate enemies.

That’s DND 5e for you.

The designers originally wanted people to do like 5 fights per rest, but players rightfully said that kind of sucks, and they want to use their cool powers. DND designers keep trying to make this work. It’s especially bad in video games where players hate timed quests.

If they had done something like dark souls “get from here to there on one rest” it might have worked better, but that’s a much harder game.

I tried to play it with someone I was dating. She spent like an hour in the character creation menu. Had a lot of fun making her ranger look interesting. But as soon as we got to the actual gameplay, she checked out. I think we got to the druids and she was done.

Turn based I think is kind of double edged. There’s a lot of waiting, that’s bad. But you also don’t get overwhelmed when you’re trying to figure out how to move the camera or whatever.

DND 5e is a shallow system that you have to go out of your way to make a weak character. That helps. But it also makes it kind of boring for people looking for more depth.

I went back to windows for a few months on the newer desktop. I installed mint and discovered it had a lot of problems with the hardware. HDMI, Ethernet, WiFi, and various downstream things didn’t work. I fixed some of it with help from forums and such, but eventually I went back to windows.

But a couple months later, I tried Pop!_OS and that has worked perfectly out of the box. No regrets.

I decided I was done with reddit. I never used apps so I just signed out of my account and never went back.

My old desktop couldnt update to 11. But for my newer computer, Windows recall was a deciding factor. Fuck that shit. Also fuck their “ai” nonsense.

It’s nice that it’s free and doing little to nothing contrary to my interests.