I agree the “brain-rot” is real. I don’t even watch TikTok or Youtube shorts but even normal 10 minute Youtube videos now feel way faster and more condensed than a few years ago, and it’s definitely harming my attention span.
I’ve been going out of my way to get back into more long-form content I enjoyed before and not get suckered into watching hyper saturated media.
I haven’t witnessed it with keyboards yet but Razer required their software and an account to use their USB Mics & Headsets even a few years ago.
I haven’t bought from them since then and will gladly boycott any peripheral company requiring extra crap to be installed on my PC.
Man I wish, I kicked up a stink about it at the pharmacy and even phoned the doctors office just to be told the same thing.
I live in the UK if that’s any context.
It’s the stupid dares you’d witnessed on the playground but brought to a global scale. Bigger the audience, bigger the stunt.
As an older GenZ I’ve learnt not to underestimate the power of clout or what people will do for it.
Part of it depends on where you grew up. born 1998 in a rural English village, We had computer labs or a crate of laptops but they weren’t a focus for actual lessons and more of a treat between real classes.
Wasn’t until I got to college that lessons actually started requiring you to use a computer.
My pharmacy recently told me I HAD to get their app in order to get my prescription, despite the fact I could just hand them the paper copy up until a few weeks ago.
Ashamed to admit it took me way too long to realize smart phone keyboards were just built in keyloggers. I switched to OpenBoard a while back but phones in general are just built from the ground up to be a privacy nightmare.
Worse is went you’ve already paid for a lifetime license and they pull the rug out saying they’ll no longer honor it after a certain date.
That’s the quickest way to to get on my ‘Always Pirate’ list
My tech illiterate mother recently had a problem were her car wouldn’t let her access the GPS because a driver for the bluetooth (that she doesn’t use) failed to update.
First time in my life I heard about a car needing driver updates, let alone failing to do so.
I use my headphone jack everyday, I’m way more obsessed with music and audio than I am about photography. My phone camera is for taking pictures of my dog looking goofy 95% of the time, I don’t need multiple 4K cameras with pro grade lenses for that.
This is becoming a real concern for me even though I have no plans to replace my current phone, I already got slim pickings in the current market and doubt the trends gonna change anytime soon.
Most complaints I got from people were over gaming mice/keyboards or audio equipment that need additional software to fully function.
I do think it’s pretty stupid that some hardware requires extra crap in order to work right but I ain’t gonna convince my friends to throw out their sometimes $100+ peripherals because the manufactures a jackass.
I will totally agree KDE is probably the best DE out their for desktops and already way better out of the box than Win10/11, I’ve been using it for over a month now and not missing Windows at all.
Pop!_OS was also the first distro I tried and I had a lot of problems with it, I dunno why people keep recommending it.
I’ve been fulltime on EndeavourOS for over a month no with no issues, but I also don’t have any peripherals that require software to work correctly which makes me a rare case these days.
I got quite a few friends wanting to avoid Windows 11 and taking a serious look at Linux.
Sadly less than half who’ve tried it out have wanted to stick with it, Due to technical problems or some neche software not being available/having a suitable alternative.
I keep hearing this from people but as someone who plays a lot of multiplayer FPS the only game I’ve had to give up is Rust.
Even most EAC games seem to work if the developers allow Proton/Wine users.
I’ve noticed it more and more over the years how people will fight tooth and nail to defend a product for no other reason than self validation.
I’ve even had one person try to sell me on OperaGX as if they were reading off an AD, When I asked them technical questions about it they just pulled the conversation back to selling up the gimmicks. I finally straight asked them why they were advertising something for a company they don’t work for and they just got offended. Was kinda a surreal experience.
Corpo’s and social media “designers” who would throw out their own mother because she’s “outdated”
Honestly as someone who doesn’t use Gnome… I can’t really tell much of a difference, Seems like a strange thing to build hype over.
So my first exposure to Arch was from my one friend who used Arch Linux daily, He was also the type to mess around with and replace core system utilities which of course led to his system breaking a whole bunch.
I avoided using Arch based distros for a while when I first started getting into Linux because of seeing my friend have to rebuild his system every week, When I finally tried EndeavourOS it ended up being the most stable distro out of the box even vs a lot of “just works” distros people recommended.
I’ve finally been able to daily drive Linux for over a month without having to switch back to my Windows drive at all.
The main problem with all this is the average user doesn’t know or even care what DRM is, they just want their sites to work and they’ll take the easiest route to get there, which will be switching to google approved browsers/devices.
I’d argue even most “techy” people will just give up any real fight once they can’t watch Youtube anymore.
Thug Pro for Tony Hawk’s Underground 2.
Plutonium for multiple older Call of Duty games.
IW4x for Modern Warfare 2 (2009), IW4x was DMCA’d semi recently but the mod still works, it’s just no longer being maintained and the server browser has a few bugs.
Even for games I’ve bought off Steam I still use community run multiplayer mods a lot because they tend to either add more functionality or replace dead servers for older games.
As a 98 baby I feel this. I tried to get my hands on any piece of tech I could growing up and everything evolved so fast (but wasn’t always reliable)
But I got friends not much younger than me who will throw out perfectly good phones/laptops/etc over simple errors that couldn’t be fixed by rebooting…