Then make the machine try to keep people talking for as long as possible...
That's probably a huge part of it. How many billions of dollars have been spent engineering content on a screen to get its tendrils into people's minds and attention and not let go?
EnGaGeMent!!!
I like your kart...
~ Peach
My employer has the usual setup of M365 enterprise shit running on Dell laptops.
Fortunately we devs are able to "dual boot" to run Linux on our machines, since our product is an embedded Linux system. (has anybody seen my Windows partition btw? I can't even find anything NTFS formatted, whoopsie!)
All that background info is just so I can pay Microsoft a compliment, even if it has asterisks all over it:
The entire Microsoft suite works just fine in a browser, and in LibreWolf too! I do typically add some permissions for those sites for convenience, since librewolf is privacy/tracking hardened (firefox fork) out of the box. I use Teams and Outlook every day, and occasionally will drop a file into OneDrive or edit something in MS Office. I don't write many office-format documents though, so I'm more likely to be in LibreOffice or a PDF viewer just reading a doc.
You know how in media streaming and gaming there's that balance of whether it is more convenient to be a paying customer versus pirate everything?
Microsoft's stuff is literally better to use in Linux. Even if I need to test the Windows build of something, a VM is SO much more convenient. And I'm not even logged into the microsoft shit on that. If I need something from OneDrive, I go to the browser there too.
If these are just little low-powered PCs where you can pop in a USB drive and install a real OS, I could see some uses for them. Hopefully we aren't entering the wonderful world of phone-like locked down firmware with these things.
But I already have old PCs that are great at, you know, running software on their actual hardware. So realistically I'll never consider one of these unless they do something awesome like subsidize the cost and sell them as normal little x86-64 PCs with some janky stripped down version of windows installed.
I think it's more of a way for those of is in the US to hang on to some shred of optimism. Surely somebody somewhere will continue to make nice things for normal people, right?
I've spent just a little bit of time in Europe, with most of it in Sweden. I have seen with my own eyes how civilized societies can have nice things in shared spaces!
Excellent! It's hard to believe how much easier the Linux experience can be than Windows. Take your PC and boot Linux Mint from a thumb drive. If you like it, it can be installed in like 5 clicks. (assuming you already prepped the machine, backed up, etc. I dual booted at first but that only lasted about 2 weeks before I wiped windows)
I have personally since moved to Debian KDE Plasma. It's a target platform at work, and it's more of a server machine at home. Plus doing a few more things via CLI or via finding old forum posts or documentation is fine by me.
I might try Garuda on the new PC we've been putting together, though. It looks like a well polished gaming-focused OS that is also Arch-based to get me into that whole family of distros. (because Valve went that way of course, and in the future I'll always want a PC that can seamlessly run SteamVR. Plus computers are fun.)
Hello, friends in civilized lands, especially those of you who work at financial institutions...
Some of us in the states are excited to watch you do some damage to the entrenched middlemen that have been skimming from all of us for so long. Please do consider letting us sign up for the new stuff. Our money is still worth something, for now!
I personally might not use a headphone jack or SD card slot very much, but for the market that a GrapheneOS phone would be targeting they seem like OBVIOUS things to include.
The crowd getting excited about this partnership is pretty much the same crowd that complains about features like those going away.