Most of the programmers I know (including myself) use Linux or BSD, but that all depends on who you associate with. A lot of companies are purely Windows shops and others just throw their programmers mac books and call it a day. At my last company I was only briefly allowed to use Linux until they decided it was no good as I couldn’t use whatever resource intensive corporate garbage security software of the year they bought.

It worked as of six months ago, but it is possible that was patched in this recent “fix”.

The W11 installer sadly doesn’t allow that anymore with the current versions. If you have that older installer, keep it safely archived.

Most of the newer CPU’s have an NPU already, Microsoft just set a higher performance requirement for NPUs to be officially labeled an “AI PC” which they are pushing hard.

Agreed

For real, how is it that Brother makes the only printer that everything from my phone to my servers can use without problems. Bonus points for not gouging on toner.

Irssi. It’s extensible and stable, been using it for years.

Even though I wasn’t a fan of their modified Gnome DE, I really like the distro as a whole. It made it seamless to use both AMD and Nvidia cards, Steam worked out of the box, and I had no issues with using Ubuntu or Debian repos. I’m not sure whether I’ll use Cosmic or not, but I’ll probably give it a fair try eventually.

Untrue, they also work in Nethack and other rogue-likes!

Our sister company had their VPN broken by this and we had to switch to another system. Even though it wasn’t a particularly secure VPN (IPSec), the builtin Windows VPN was extremely reliable and convenience compared to shit like Pulse.

Probably a bit late, but I really like Quod Libet. It is very extensible, runs light, has excellent tagging and filtering, and just feels similar enough to how I set up my foobar2000.

I have always loved FB2K, but I didn’t like using it in linux. It was slow to start (which is snap’s fault) and was tough to get working in a stable state once I started trying to use components that I prefer (probably wine’s fault, but who knows).

I’ve lived through this one. Fixing it required me taking a full day off to suffer.

I switched from Win7 to Linux, but you are right, few stuck to their guns on that threat. My only Windows machine now is a work laptop that I have to use for some tasks. Admittedly, even Win 10 is looking good now compared to Win11. MS is doing a bang up job as being consumer antagonists.

12 hours isn’t really even that long, could probably bring just about anything, but I think Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri would be a great way to spend that time.

I have several perfectly working mechanical keyboards from the 80s, so I’d say, yeah they last long. That being said, I don’t necessarily think you’ll get decades from $40 mechanical keyboard like you can from an old school IBM, Alps, or Cherry MX keyboard. I mean, you may, but these keyboards were most than $40 back then and adjusted for inflation they’d not be cheap these days.

None of my PinePhone owning friends say it’s “quite there yet” to be a daily driver. I have been asking them every six months if it’s time to take the plunge.

Sublimetext technically fits the bill for this I think, but its feeling a bit long in the tooth.

I am pretty happy with QuiteRSS. Has a built in browser with adblocking, but easy right click options to open tan external browser. Easy to set up feeds and filters.

Just a counter anecdote for others, I haven’t had an issue with Quod Libet with over 100k tracks and have been using it for years so YMMV.