Original from Arcade Rage.

Issue #1 or 5? You decide!

This got a bonus chuckle from me.

The anti-Israel crowd

“Harris is the better choice in this fucking awful dilemma the US electoral system gives us” is not pro-Israel. It was a pragmatic option to reduce the damage a little, to lead the US down a better road domestically, and to leave the door open to later activism to stop the genocide where there was no viable third voting option.

Please don’t conflate a Harris vote with a pro-Israel stance.

No one with any intellectual honesty thinks that Harris is a communist.

Voting for a fascist makes a person categorically a fascist. And by accepted measures of fascism, such as Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism, you’d have to do some major rhetorical gymnastics to conclude anything else.

I’m yet to see a convincing, authoritative historical source on the “whale killer” factoid. Follow the trail on asesina-ballenas and Basque fishermen and you get nowhere.

Succinct and accurate. Really wish people were more objective and less polarized on software.

25th or 26th October seems likely to me based on the first announcement (Twitter link).

There’s a ton of history on Wikipedia. Most of it is the council coming up with new reasons to demolish it or plans to change it, with no convincing motive.

The most notable things for me were:

• An allegation that they want the bridge demolished to remove the trams that mar the modernity of the waterfront regeneration project nearby.
• A mention of Chinese lenders bankrolling the demolition and construction a Chinese construction firm being awarded the contract for constructing a new bridge.
• A mention of a Russian construction and design group submitting plans for transforming and relocating the existing bridge.

Mark Gurman, who’s normally dead on the money when it comes to Apple, thinks they’re unlikely to keep up annual releases (though I should note the linked article suggests the new iPhone model schedule is unlikely to change for now).

It was a joke, but the article itself does explicitly conclude this as one of its observations:

The findings raise big questions about the limits and future of polling, which relies on voters giving responses reflecting their real-life political behavior.

“Significant minority of people lie in polls, a poll reveals.”

Not everyone speaks English as their first language.

There’s a definite industry problem, but that doesn’t excuse Spotify.

Apple Music pays artists 50-100% more than Spotify do per play, and Tidal pay triple to quadruple. Even Amazon pay artists more than Spotify; only YouTube is worse.

It’s been a little while since I used a KDE or Gnome desktop in anger; I can’t remember how they tackle issues where user attention is needed on an inactive app. What do you figure the best solution is? Make the taskbar/dock icon visually distinct (flashing, jumping, a badge, or similar) but don’t permit focus switch?

Curious about this - you mean in Windows? What’s the solution as you see it?

Good list! We differ on some of them…

I take issue with the settings menu still relying on the old menus while having shuffled things around so I’m forced to look for settings

This is still an issue, but I feel it’s diminishing as they (annoyingly slowly) do move all of the functionality to the new app. It was much worse in Windows 10, I think.

I can say that the start menu is horrendously slow, it can take up to 5 seconds for it to load.

“Works on my machine” is a profoundly unhelpful answer for me to give, but I’m fortunate enough not to have experienced this. If you’re looking for a workaround and don’t mind a further Microsoft app, the launcher in Powertoys is pretty solid.

Sometimes keystrokes disappear in the start menu only to magically appear some time later.

God, I hate the search from the start menu - but I would say that it’s been profoundly broken since Windows 8 and is marginally better in Windows 11.

They made the right click menu worse and only changeable in regedit.

100% agreed. I do think Windows 10 and earlier had a growing issue with the context menus getting unwieldy (Visual Studio is a great demo of how this can get really out of hand) but the solution Windows 11 have brought is annoying more than useful. I suspect at one point I made the registry change and forgot about it, because I’m back to a big Win10-style list.

They made RDP credentials only saveable using CMD.

Agreed again. That said, you’re a masochist if you’re not using an RDP manager like mRemoteNG! I wish Microsoft had a decent RDP app that wasn’t tied into Azure.

They removed vertical taskbars.

I found vertical taskbars incompatible with hotdesking on desks with different monitor configurations, but I do agree this one sucks.

how to unfuck up windows 11 so it works how you expect it to.

I think “how you expect it to” goes to the core of my point - needing to adapt to change isn’t inherently bad. But I’m not pretending Windows 11 is a wholesale improvement, and I do concede many of your arguments.

Agree with all of those points, I just don’t love the reductive notion that every change is a bad change and nothing’s been for the better. In several ways it’s a better OS - but as you say, they are also getting more contemptuous of the end user with things like privacy, anticompetitivity, and ads.

At the risk of being unpopular, I think a lot of what people perceive as unintuitive or worse in terms of settings and OS features is just change. I’m on Enterprise Windows 11 at work and I wouldn’t willingly go back to Windows 10.

I think because it’s Enterprise I’m dodging a lot of the worst of it - ads, telemetry, surprise updates, etc - but the unified settings are better once you learn them, tabbed File Explorer is better, dark mode switching is way better - there’s plenty to like.

I want to see the rise of the Linux desktop as much as anyone, but implying Windows 11 is all bad isn’t that fair an assessment.

The EFF have a bit more general information about location data brokers. Well worth a read.