I think 12h is a big deal, for business travelers it makes the whole trip pointless. And for leasure travelers it means paying for a really expensive sleeping cabin or “sleep” in an uncomfortable seat.

I agree the privatisation was a big mistake, also in healthcare, energy etc.

Yeah that search bar, so useless because the start menu itself is a search bar if you simply start typing.

Yeah and also, many of the drawbacks of windows don’t really apply to companies. All the AI and MS account crap? Just switch it off in intune and M365 portal. Telemetry you can minimise with group policies. Crapware you can simply not install. It costs money? Sure but at a corp level so does Linux because they always want to pay a vendor so they can blame them when something goes wrong.

In Holland it seems to show them all but it probably differs by country.

One thing we are really really bad at in Europe is homogenising rail systems. Every country does its own thing, like voltage, signalling systems, sometimes even with their own gauge (e.g. spain). Only the high speed lines are fairly commonised.

There’s some projects going on like the ETCS safety system but they go at a snail’s pace because there’s so much installed base and design by a 25-country committee that are all trying to rope in their own industry ties is a slow process.

Also I read that in the US Amtrak gives priority to cargo trains even though laws exist expressly forbidding that, so that a 200km trip with no stops ends up taking 4 hours.

And still here in Europe they are not a meaningful alternative to the plane. Taking for example an Amsterdam to Barcelona is an exhausting 12-14h deal (almost 10x as long) and 5x more expensive.

What we need is express trains that go from A to B without stopping anywhere, avoiding city centres and constantly running max speed. If I’m going to Barcelona I don’t want to stop in Schiphol, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, and various cities in France. There should just be a dedicated departure just for that (and judging by how many planes go back & forth daily these trains could certainly be filled). This would cut down on that exhausting travel time a lot. But we lack the high-speed network capacity for that. And won’t have it for at least 15 years even if they decided to build them now :( So planes it is.

Seriously? :) It was an ok story but the guy was so annoying and the QT events soooooo frustrating. Just make it a real adventure.

The shaun shaun thing reminds me a lot of this character in lost that had nothing else to do but run around shouting WALT WALT all the time :P

With you on this one 🫶

I work in IT (security). The reason they are so adamant on Windows at least in our place, is because it offers so many opportunities to go BOFH and lock everything down so much so the user can hardly do their job :) No other OS offers that, even Mac.

They think they need this to be secure. I beg to differ but unfortunately Microsoft is constantly feeding them with ‘best practices’ and other BS.

For Years, you had the Option to use Linux. Since the release of the win 11 beta, Linux has not made any relevant big steps.

I would argue it doesn’t need to. It’s pretty perfect these days as it is, especially with KDE (and the great thing about it having so much control over how your computer works and feels, Windows can never offer that).

Yeah this is just a weird tangent that will die off.

“Zorin Group” never heard of that. Seems to be a shop that just wants to lift along with the Windows 10 discontinuation tbh.

And if their selling point is running windows apps then they have no chance. You can’t get better at being windows than windows already is. You’ll always be one step behind the real thing.

And really you don’t need to, most linux apps are much better now that windows apps are more and more dumbed down. Look at the “new outlook” for example. It doesn’t even do local storage anymore, you must import all your email into the microsoft cloud overlord.

• Ads all over the place (and a start menu full of crapware)
• Telemetry you can’t completely turn off anymore (the only thing I’d respect is a license check)
• Constantly putting edge back
• Forced MS account and removing ways to bypass it
• Cloud upsells
• Forced updates “do this within the next 2 days or else…”
• “Copilot copilot copilot”

Gaming for me is the only thing I don’t use Windows for. But for gaming I still do. Because I mainly game in VR and that’s still so far behind on LInux :(

But I have 20 odd computers in the house so it’s easy to have one with windows around (two in fact, another old one with Win 10 LTSC for programming some old radios).

I love KDE for all the options it gives 🫶 I don’t like Gnome, Systemd and all the other redhat influences but they are easy to avoid these days.