Frustrating thing is it's hard to escape. It's petty, but one of the most infuriating episodes of my life was Apple forcing that U2 album into everyone iOS owner's existence and making it difficult (impossible at the time?) to delete. I'd forgotten all about it until, a couple of phones later, it reappeared as the first song played every time I connected my phone to the car. Petty, like I said, but enraging. Having some basic control over an environment you've paid for should be a given.

That is not petty. An entertainment device that doesnt follow orders, doesnt play what you want it to play, fails its primary function. It should be repaired (good luck) or dumped.

It also had weird cover art which, while artistic, was borderline NSFW and not what I wanted to have pop up every time I got in my car. Apple makes weird decisions sometimes.

I finally contacted Apple support to have the album removed, years after the fact, because I switched to Apple Music. And felt nervous about having, in my open floor plan workplace, a shirtless man tenderly caressing another shirtless man's crotch with his face every time I opened the app. There was literally no way to change this default behavior, because Apple are control freaks.

As an added kicker, I stressed over it for a couple of weeks first, worried about whether I was being homophobic or not.

My brother is gay. I have a gay friend. I am not homophobic. But I do not prefer homosexual images myself. I also stress over this. I don't understand why people can't accept that being okay with something, and wanting that thing in your eyes, might be two independent things.

My daughter is vegetarian. We always cook her vegetarian food for dinner. Her little brother likes to bug her about it. We tell him not to, because giving people a hard time about their preferences is rude and annoying. But we also make sure that the vegetarian can't get cranky when everybody else is eating real bacon and she's eating vegetarian bacon. That'd be just as rude and annoying. It's called "tolerance", kids. I don't understand how we've entered into this world where we aren't all supposed to try to tolerate (let alone encourage and support) one another, but that tolerance only goes in one direction. That seems very odd to me.

>As an added kicker, I stressed over it for a couple of weeks first, worried about whether I was being homophobic or not.

If you would still feel uncomfortable if it were a photo of man and a woman doing the same thing on your screen in your open office at work, then no. I personally wouldn't want either in my work environment. I have a strong separation of my personal life and work. It's a simple test really, just imagine the reverse and if you feel the same way about a naked man and woman on your desktop at work, then no, you aren't being a homophobe.

Though the U2 album has become such a meme, I'm sure people would have a good laugh at Apple over it.

I believe it was impossible. You could hide it but even that was a bit tricky to finding. They did eventually come up with a website where you could scrub it from your account. It wasn't even just iOS owners but everybody with an iTunes account.

As per the sibling link to Apple's support it's impossible again to remove it without contacting support.

> It sounds like you did some great research on this, and you're right. Customers are no longer able to remove the album on their own. You will need to reach out to Apple Support directly to have the album removed.

I had a problem getting my car to recognize my iphone, specifically constant USB "unsupported" errors. It turned out the problem was I had no music loaded on my device. I downloaded that U2 album and like magic the problem was resolved. Thanks Bono!

Had to install Windows 11 yesterday and the fresh install had Facebook, TikTok, Xing, Spotify and more on the start menu as shortcuts. No clue, if they are actually fully installed but I was able deinstall and remove them through the context menu. May vary for other contries as Xing is very specific and only relevant for German speaking countries.

Nobody forces anyone to install an OS, but he probably meant that he was pressured into, not by someone but by the very conditions of software.

My example: I had to return to Windows a while back because I rely heavily on Zoom Meetings, and Zoom in Linux is just near unusable.

Not that I care about zoom, but screen sharing is in a problematic state since the introduction of Wayland:

- If you use X.org, things are mostly fine because there are no security barriers and screen capturing has been done the same way since forever.

- If you use Wayland, this used to be impossible because Wayland doesn't allow it for security reasons. To get screen sharing to work:

1. A new protocol had to be invented for it (pipewire)

2. Every compositor (read: every major Desktop Environment like KDE or Gnome) had to implement the funcitonality. Among other things, the compositor is now responsible for showing a permissions dialog where the user authorizes an application to capture the screen (or _a_ screen, or a single window).

3. Every application that wants to capture the screen/a window/etc. has to request access through this new protocol and read the capture through it.

To make things worse, pipewire itself has been evolving, meaning that both compositors and applications may only support certain versions but not others. In the end, this means that if you are running the latest versions of all these things (wayland, de, browser) and enable all flags that say "pipewire" in your browser, it will work just fine. If you have older software it may work partially (e.g.: you can share a single window but not the entire screen and stuff like that) or it may not work at all.

Please elaborate. I've been pair programming on zoom for years (Ubuntu, i3wm). So had my colleague on Elementary and another one on Fedora. It's clearly usable.

EDIT: via native app that is

What I needed most back then was to remote control my peer's computer (as in, providing Tech Support) and that's where the UI/UX is not as polished as the Windows version.

I didn't use the web version, because it's not possible to control the remote host that way.

It was very quirky (taking control and giving up control + the keystrokes needed to be used in the remote host) and getting in the way of providing effective Tech Support (the meeting bar flickered several times). Anything else worked fine, like holding the audio meeting itself.

So, I had to return to Windows, just because of Zoom.

EDIT: Typo.

it’s dependent in your window system. with wayland zoom is using screen shots to create a video feed in lieu of using the actual api because it would mean zoom has to respect privacy so no go

I don't think Zoom's here choice has anything to do with privacy but rather incompetence. They didn't even bother trying to solve it until users intentionally flooded them with tickets.

I just launch zoom from Firefox and use the browser edition on Wayland. It will nag you to download a program, but you can skip that. Hasn't failed me yet.

People here willingly use Zoom over Jitsi Meet? How come?

Zoom works okay in Linux via web browser.

EDIT: I use Firefox.

Works in Arch fine whenever I've needed it (admittedly not used regularly but it never failed/became unstable)

I could never get it working on Firefox, but OK with Chrome

Maybe GP is required by its employer / an autoupdate.

My tipping point was not being able to figure out how to shut down the computer in Windows 8 (not 8.1). I've used Alt+F4 to shut it down for months because I legit couldn't figure out that the shut down button is in Charms.

They've moved it back to start in 8.1, but by that point I've already switched to elementary OS (beta of 0.2 Luna), and that's (mostly) where I've stayed for the past 10 years (there were a couple of attempts of switching to GNOME, they've all failed).

I'd definitely recommend checking out Arch or Manjaro if you're a developer btw. Ironically, I've had fewer issues with Linux since swapping. Simple things like being on the newest kernel tends to keep hardware issues at bay. (And switching to Pipewire has fixed all of my audio issues completely)

It's ironic that a "rolling release" OS is often more stable than a "mainstream" OS like Ubuntu. That's just been my experience over the past few years though, and I feel that it's important to help more devs realize that!

Seconding this, except Manjaro specifically seems to have a lot of issues that don't hit me on regular Arch. Void and Alpine are also good.

Similar reason to why I'm on Fedora. 6-month release cycle with a 12-month maintenance cycle. Which means I can frequently get on the latest kernel and other goodies such as Pipewire, yet I can also wait a couple months after release to pull the trigger in case there are issues.

I'm also seriously considering Fedora Silverblue once I get more of a feel for how it works under the covers.

How does that work with EOL for a release? Does everything break and you have to re-install?

My disk encryption is a little complicated so I'm happy that my rolling release means I only have to re-install when I swap boxes. That was my biggest issue with Ubuntu -- your were SOL when EOL :P

There's an in place upgrade process, as long as you haven't put a bunch of third party repositories/packages on the system they tend to go generally well

Some of the more drastic changes aren't adopted this way, eg: filesystem defaults

Eh, you could change your source repos/force upgrade etc — just couldn't expect the forums to support your borked system, afterwards.

Didn't Ubuntu have an Amazon link in the Unity start menu for a while?

Usually on Linux and Linux-like systems ("Free" ones I guess), you can easily change something that you don't like, or at least it's not impossible to change it.

On other systems, some things are literally (today) impossible to change, unless you have access to the source code, which you as a normal person don't.

That could be removed and never come back, on the other hand i think canonical is going towards the path of Microsoft nonetheless

I fully expect Microsoft to eventually acquire Canonical, and if you pay attention to behind-the-scenes interactions between the two, it seems very likely.

As the other replies, I also agree with you, I've been a bit upset by Canonical for their support to Microsoft in making WSL, I'm not sure Linux has anything to gain from the thing, if not a bad advertising due to the suboptimal experience, but also it is a Linux system that has to exist under the government of microsoft which is a bit scary for me, but yeah I agree with you, I also see them working together for WSL, and at some point I see M$ buying Canonical

I suspect something similar. They have a good partnership. While we're dreaming, I'd love to see a version of Windows with a Linux kernel. They could do what they did with Edge, replace the core with something better.

Eh, word on the street NT is expertly engineered. It's all the compatibility layers and crud that gives Windows it's bad name.

Link or two to get me started?

I don't want to generate unwanted interest or drama for specific people by pasting links to mailing lists.

You can Google for "microsoft (buy|acquire) canonical" and find points on why it's very likely.

Nah Ubuntu got rid of the Amazon link and app, I think they're doing well in the enterprise space these days so there's no fuckery on the desktop (although that means they've also given up on stuff like phones).

Yeah there were amazon search results in app searches for a time. It's part of the reason why I switched to PopOS, which has none of that crap but builds on ubuntu's base.

>Didn't Ubuntu have an Amazon link in the Unity start

You don't have to use Unity, and thank god for that.

I've used win 8 and win 10 exclusively for years but have never seen an advert. Is this because I have the business (enterprise) edition, not the home version?

I'm not sure how good or bad Bing, Edge etc are as I only use them occasionally, but it does seem concerning that Microsoft has changed these defaults during an update. Is this even legal, post anti trust etc?

Your company may have removed the crapware; that’s what our image team did.

Possible, in my experience it's always been the hardware vendors that add all that stuff, but it seems like Microsoft wants in on the action.

I doubt it, given that Microsoft now actually owns the Candy Crush IP.

No, the only "actually" is that a deal was announced to buy the company that has that. The acquisition won't be finished for months if at all (government may block based on antitrust concerns)

by months I think you mean years

not yet, the deal has to pass through a lot of regulatory bodies to become a thing.

To be fair, Ubuntu also has had advertisements in the menus.

And so does firefox