I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.

(tl;dr at the bottom.)

I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.

For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.

tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.

There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.

And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.

The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.

More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.

TLDR: Got the wrong internship.

Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”

Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.

Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.

Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.

Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.

I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.

Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.

... *sigh* ...

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

So I finally got my head out of my ass and decided to install some OS on that 500MB RAM legacy craptop from earlier.

*installs Tiny Core Linux*

Hmm.. how do I install extra packages into this thing again? *Googles how to install packages*
Aha, extensions it's called.. and you install them through their little package manager GUI, and then you also have to dick around with some TCE directory, and boot options for that. Well I ain't gonna do that. Why the fuck would I need to dick around with that? Just install the fucking files in /bin, /var, /etc and whatever the fuck you need to like a decent distro. I'll fucking load them whenever I need them, BY EXECUTING THE FUCKING BINARY. But no, apparently that's not how TCL works.

Also, why the fuck is this keyboard still set to US? I'm using a Belgian keyboard for fuck's sake.. "loadkeys be-latin1"
> Command not found.

Okay... (fucking piece of shit) how do I change the fucking keyboard layout for this shit?!
*does the jazz hand routine required for that*
So apparently I need to install a package for that as well. Oh wait, an EXTENSION!! My bad. And then you can use "loadkmap < /usr/share/kmap/something/something" to load the keyboard layout. Except that it doesn't change the fucking keymap at all! ONE FUCKING JOB, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!

That's fucking it. No more dicking around in TCL. If I wanted to fuck around with the system this much, I'd have compiled my own custom Linux system. Maybe I can settle with Arch Linux, that's a familiar distro to me.. I can easily install openbox in that and call it a day. But this is an i686 machine.. Arch doesn't support that anymore, does it?

*does another jazz hand routine on Arch Linux 32 and sees that there's a community-maintained project just for that*

Oh God bless you fine Arch Linux users for making a community fork!! I fucking love you.. thank you so much!! Arch it'll be then <3

My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

Storytime
A story about an Android TVbox which decided to become an iPad

Several years ago we've bought an android tv-box. 

It served me and my family well for several years.

Specs are not that important in this story, but there they are:

Android 4.4 
1GB RAM
Amlogic quadcore 1.4HGz
8GB memory.

This device served us well - online TV, browsing, music, file sharing and so on. But recently cheap Chinese memory deciteed to take a break and damaged ROM. Because of that device won't boot. The only option was to take it apart and "short circuit" certain legs on memory chip and make it boot from SD card and install new firmware. After such operations tv-box worked well again. 

Hoverer, memory glitched again and again and this algorithm was repeated for several months.

But that is not what is this story about.

One day memory went completely crazy and there was no way to install new firmware on it. It just hanged on install. (BTW, it was official firmware for this device)

But after countless attempts it finally worked! It installed the firmware and booted into launcher and connected to WiFi! 

But now comes the most interesting part. 

It was not android anymore.

It decided to became an iPad.

My dad logged in to his Google account via tv-box and got mail that someboby connected from our IP via iPad (we don't have an iPad) and using safari browser! Stock browser is not safari browser.....

"Ok, nvm, crazy glitch." - we thought.

But preinstalled play marked wont launch. Because he told us, that we're trying to connect from iPad.

And Google chrome page suggested to download chrome for iPad

And everything was acting like it is an iPad.

OK, downloaded iTunes, why not??? ._.

Tried to install elixir for android via apk from flash, but then memory glitched one more time, everything went black and tv-box had damaged ROM again...

After that we decided to not torment it anymore...

That's it. Poor Android TVbox that all his life dreamed to become an iPad. Rest in peace.

!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.

It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!

Continuation of the story with Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon on the old Core2 Duo with 2 GB RAM and HDD. The guy has had that PC under Linux for 1.5 months now, had never had Linux before, has no IT background, and is over 70.

Upon visit, I checked how the machine was doing. OK, he had forgotten to apply the updates, so I highlighted paying attention to the red icon in the tray. Launched the updates, all ran through.

Otherwise, he had managed to install Skype all by himself (network effect because of his family...) and had bought a webcam plus a microphone. Linux had just recognised everything without any fuzz. Even his Skype buddies were impressed, he said.

On top of that, he likes how much faster that PC is compared to his much more current Win 10 laptop and actually uses the old Linux PC more than the laptop.

He also enjoys that Linux doesn't do weird things all by itself all the time. That's not his experience with Win 10.

Not just another Windows rant:

*Disclaimer* : I'm a full time Linux user for dev work having switched from Windows a couple of years ago. Only open Windows for Photoshop (or games) or when I fuck up my Linux install (Arch user) because I get too adventurous (don't we all)

I have hated Windows 10 from day 1 for being a rebel. Automatic updates and generally so many bugs (specially the 100% disk usage on boot for idk how long) really sucked.

It's got ads now and it's generally much slower than probably a Windows 8 install..

The pathetic memory management and the overall slower interface really ticks me off. I'm trying to work and get access to web services and all I get is hangups.

Chrome is my go-to browser for everything and the experience is sub par. We all know it gobbles up RAM but even more on Windows.

My Linux install on the same computer flies with a heavy project open in Android Studio, 25+ tabs in Chrome and a 1080p video playing in the background.

Up until the creators update, UI bugs were a common sight. Things would just stop working if you clicked them multiple times.

But you know what I'm tired of more?

The ignorant pricks who bash it for being Windows. This OS isn't bad. Sure it's not Linux or MacOS but it stands strong.

You are just bashing it because it's not developer friendly and it's not. It never advertises itself like that.

It's a full fledged OS for everyone. It's not dev friendly but you can make it as much as possible but you're lazy.

People do use Windows to code. If you don't know that, you're ignorant. They also make a living by using Windows all day. How bout tha?

But it tries to make you feel comfortable with the recent bash integration and the plethora of tools that Microsoft builds.

IIS may not be Apache or Nginx but it gets the job done.

Azure uses Windows and it's one of best web services out there. It's freaking amazing with dead simple docs to get up and running with a web app in 10 minutes.

I saw many rants against VS but you know it's one of the best IDEs out there and it runs the best on Windows (for me, at least).

I'm pissed at you - you blind hater you.

Research and appreciate the things good qualities in something instead of trying to be the cool but ignorant dev who codes with Linux/Mac but doesn't know shit about the advantages they offer.

Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!

The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.

I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.

The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.

When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.

That's when the nerdgasm happened.

The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!

That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.

Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.

Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

My neighbor brought me her smartphone because it was too slow. Not only it was an old model with low RAM, but it also wouldn't allow her to install more apps due to that shitty thing of having to install them in the phone storage.

Now you will be asking, what is abnormal about this that I'm writing it here? IT WAS FULL OF BIBLE APPS, JUST WHATSAPP, FACEBOOK AND BIBLES.

What kind of person doesn’t install Windows 10 for a free pre-installation of Candy Crush Soda Saga thrown into the mix? I really enjoy it when my Operating System comes preloaded with bullshit. It’s almost as if I’m losing rights to choose what I want installed on my operating system. It’s really enjoyable when Candy Crush Soda Saga appears in the background in task manager despite never opening this “””game”””. I find it amazing that after building such a powerful computer I can know that my fast 16gb ram is being used to keep bloatware running in the background. Every night I dream of the people who buy new computers with a fresh copy of Windows 10 pre-installed on it to find it has a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga already waiting to be played! The joy and tears that must come to such a persons eye to know that Bill Gates was kind enough to bless the world with every middle-aged persons favourite game, Candy Crush Soda Saga, to be the first app that appears on their start menu. The thoughts running through every developers mind at Microsoft as they pre-load a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga onto every copy of Windows 10. They must really feel alive and definitely would not consider doing anything else for a living but copying the files of Candy Crush Soda Saga across onto Official Windows 10 Installations. The rush of blood into their mind as they know that thousands, if not millions, of users from around the world open their brand new computer for the first time to see that King managed to bribe Microsoft with more money that you’ll ever get your hands onto into making them add a free copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga onto their computer. As thousands of those users move their mouse over this work of art, right click it and press uninstall without a second of doubt in their mind, rendering Kings investment to be a waste of time, money and effort. This is a story we will tell for generations and generations in the future of how the worlds most popular Operating System was not preloaded with a free copy of McAfee, but instead a copy of Candy Crush Soda Saga for the entire world to rejoice. Good day to you all.

Happened last semester, due to lack of admin rights to us students on our computer in OS Lab, a friend wasn't able to start a program. So the OS teacher came and instructed the lab helper to install more RAM on the computer, so that programs cam run without admin access.
We lost all hope of ever understanding OS in class.

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

I fucking hate Electron, what ever happened to developing software natively? It's not like you have to stick to dot Net and C# or whatever, there's literally Lazarus or Delphi, which, at least Lazarus, not only is open source but also supports all major platforms.

Even Python has GTK, Qt and Pywin32 or whatever its called. While not exactly cross platform, it's still not eating up 1GB of RAM when you launch it.

I don't care if Bob from across the street uses it because he's too lazy to learn anything new, but when huge companies like fucking Discord (valued at 10B dollars) use it, it's insane.
More than once has Discord had a memory leak and was reaching upwards of 6.5GB of RAM usage.

Whats the most popular code editor? VSCode, Electron.
Chat client? Discord, Electron.
Wanna use something other than Discord? Maybe Matrix? Well guess what, while they do have multiple clients, the most developed and usable one is Element, yeah, Electron.
Slack? Electron
My crypto wallet? Exodus, Electron.

I genuinely don't think 16GB of RAM is enough nowadays. Thankfully I'm running a very minimal install of Arch Linux and do most of my work in a KVM, but it still hurts my brain.

By the way things are looking nowadays, We'll be using Javascript for Kernels soon.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Also apparently the filter on this site sees ". net" as an url.

I really love my mother but.

A couple of weeks ago she asked me for advice regarding a laptop. She wanted something cheap for office and stuff.
Since I know her I exactly knows she needs extreme fast boot and responsiveness. She'll go all hulk rage if the laptop doesn't boot in less than 30 seconds.

Told her to get something with ssd since storage is no issue and 4gb ram with an decent older I5. Took a whole day going through stores in my area and online to find good deals. Send her everything I found. Really good laptop for under 500€ I would've killed for.

Fast forward. She bought some 300€ shit laptop because it had 1tb memory. She didn't ask for advice just bought the cheapest that would read decently description wise.

Now she is raging all day and bitching about it being so slow and I should fix it for her since I'm an it guy etc.

Looking at the specs I nearly started to vomit. She seriously bought a laptop worse than she already had. Old i3 2gb ram 5200rpm HDD.

I told her she should return it because it is shit. But no. She insists that since it's newer it is better and I am only a lazy fuck who doesn't want to be bothered to do her a favor.

Offered the best thing I could think of. Told her I'd install Linux on it for her and teach her how to use it.
Explained it would run more smoothly since she refused to take that shit laptop back. But no. Of course she insists on using windows 10....

FUUUUUUUCK. I love my mother but seriously I'm about to explode.

TLDR; After my dad was lazy, I assembled the parts myself.

As far back as I can remember, if I think of my father he is sitting behind his pc playing games. It was like me, his escape.

When I was between 3-5 years old he upgraded his pc to one that supported windows 95. The most exciting thing I remember about his new pc is that it had a sound card or what passed as one anyway - think polyphonic ring tones in place of onboard beeps. It was fucking awesome.

He gifted his old 386 to my brother and I which we spent a blissful year or so playing DOS games on until it finally died. I wouldn't have access to a home computer again until I was 11 - touching my fathers computer was out of the question, never mind actually using it.

The reason I didn't have access to a pc was simply because he didn't replace his pc - he made minor upgrades to it until he died with a whopping 512mb of RAM. Seriously his pc specs were a bragging factor like geek porn - better than any else's I ever saw including his I.T friends (he was an electrical engineer), everyone knew this apparently aside from his boss...

Auto-cad started becoming a thing and my father for the first time ever had a reason to actually do work on a computer, he immediately used the opportunity to leverage his company into paying for a pc. To get better "value" for the company he ordered the parts in place of a pre-built machine - in reality he blew 90% of the budget on a new motherboard and graphics card to upgrade his own pc and the cheapest entry level components for everything else. The day they arrived he upgraded his own pc, threw the excess parts into a box and told us it was our new computer which he would put together over the weekend. He didn't.

After 3 months of nagging I was fed up and taking liberties with him that landed me more than one hiding, at some point he was over it and told me if I wanted something that badly I should do it myself. He walked into my room after becoming concerned if I had run away/hurt myself since he hadn't heard a whistle from me in 6 hours and I was battling my ass off trying to install windows 98.

He inspected my assembly gave me an approving nod and showed me that the hard drives physical jumper was set to slave and the rest is history. I hadn't used windows before, or built a computer let alone used one in years but somehow I always knew, it just clicked and made sense to me.

I didn't truly recognise just how much I had learn't watching him play DOS games over his shoulder and clean/upgrade his pc. It changed everything and thanks to only being allowed to watch him use a pc, once I finally had access to my own computer again I revered it and all it's possibilities. I knew I should use it to do something special.

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

I installed a linux distribution it's called Zorin, i installed the latest one (Zorin Core 17) for a client since Windows 7 was giving him a headache, it was a very old machine with 4GB RAM with a celeron cpu if i remember, i suggest i will install linux and you won't have more issues with wifi and the printer he said okay, I installed everything, printer was recognized immediately Libre office was installed wifi is connected, security updates are done

After 2 days, he sent me a voice message telling me hey what is this zorin? Zorin everywhere, it's like if I'm using someone else program,I have nothing to do with the espionage things, I want windows back, i was crying he made me laugh for a week, i enjoyed listening to his voice messages on WhatsApp, whenever i get upset i listen to him and get excited hahahahhaha espionage? Do you think he let it go? Every 2 days i receive a voice message complaining about Zorin and how i was spying on him hahaha I explained over and over how secure linux is and how Microsoft knows everything he does on his machine, after giving me a headache i sent a friend and he installed ms 7 back and i never heard of him again

I'm fucking tired of my computer having random
2 seconds latency on any basic action and being slow as fuck regardless of powerful processor, ssd and 32GB RAM. Music via bluetooth is basically unusable since every few seconds the music stops for a 0.2s then plays again. I installed this system (opensuse tumbleweed) in February this year and it's just sad that I have reinstall again (any ideas for distro) ?

I made a dummy mistake of buying a CPU without internal graphics and this resulted in having to buy a GPU. So I got myself Nvidia(another mistake) since i though i would be using CUDA on the university. Turnes out CUDA cannot be installed for some retarded reason.
With Nvidia GPU the screens on my two monitors are swapping every time I use a hdmi switch to use other computer. On AMD GPU this problem does not exist. AMD GPU pro drivers are impossible to install. Computers barely fucking work, change my mind. Shit is breaking all the time. Everything is so half assed.

The music player that i use sometimes swaps ui with whatever was below it like for example the desktop background and i need to kill the process and start again to use the program. WTF.

Bluetooth seems to hate me. I check the bluetooth connected devices on my computer, it says headphones connected. BULLSHIT. The headphones are fucking turned OFF. How the fuck can they be connected you dumbass motherfucker computer. So I turn on the headphones. And I cannot connect them since the system thinks that they are already connected. So I have to unpair them and pair them again. WTF. Who fucking invents this bullshit?
Let's say i have headphones connected to the computer. I want to connect them to phone. I click connect from the phone settings. Nothing happens. Bullshit non telling error "could not connect". So I have to unpair from computer to pair to phone. Which takes fucking minutes, because reasons. VERY fucking convenient technology.
The stupid bluetooth headphones have a loud EARRAPE voice when turning them on "POWER ON!!! PAIRING", "CONNECTED", "DISCONNECT". Loudness of this cannot be modified. The 3 navigation buttons are fucking unrecognizable so i always take few seconds to make sure i click the correct button.

Fucking keyboard sometimes forgets that I remapped esc key to caps lock and then both keys don't work so i need to reconnect the keyboard cable. At least it's not fucking bluetooth.

The only reason why hdmi switches exist is because monitor's navigation menus have terrible ui and/or infrared activated, non-mechanical buttons.
Imagine the world where monitors have a button for each of it's inputs. I click hdmi button it switches it's input to hdmi. I click display port button - it switches to display port. But nooo, you have to go through the OSD menu.

My ~ directory has hundred of files that I never put there. Doesn't feel like home, more like a crackhead crib.

My other laptop (also tumbleweed) I click on hibernate option and it shuts down. WTF. Or sometimes I open the lid and screen is black and when i click keyboard nothing happens so i have to hold power button and restart.

We've been having computers for 20 + years and they still are slow, unreliable and barely working.

Is there a cure? I'm starting to think the reason why everything is working so shitty and unreliable, is because the foundations are rotten. The systems that we use are built with c, ridden with cryptic abbreviated code, undefined behavior and security vulnerabilities. The more I've written c programs the more convinced I am, that we should have abandoned it for something better long ago. Why haven't we? And honestly what would be better? Everything fucking sucks. The rust seems to be light in the tunnel but I don't know if this is only hype or is it really better. I'm sure it can't be worse than c or c++. Either we do something with the foundations or we're doomed.

Okay, I hope a few people can help me with this; what are the benefits/reasons to use MS technologies? I'm talking about .NET, ASP, Windows Server, Powershell...

I've never understood it. I love Nodejs because you don't have any packages unless you ask for them. Alpine Linux is amazing! It runs on 8MB of RAM from fresh and doesn't need much more space to install.

You want .NET core? 140MB download. You're configuring database connection strings? Feel free to type in whatever you like, it'll parse and replace with some magic variables that have come from some other random file.

I was using Powershell recently, needed to set an env variable. Bash is happy with "export name=value". You want to do that in Powershell? I just googled it and found an entire 40-minute read discussing how to set env vars. Why?! It should be one command, and I don't know who thought that "Get-ChildItem" was _obviously_ referring to env variables.

It seems to me that everywhere MS has got their hands on development-wise, it inherits the typical sales bullshit. No no, you can't call them "websockets", they have to be branded "SignalR" and add tons of overhead. You can't say "disable notifications" it has to be "focus assist". I'm really surprised something as simple as a keyboard hasn't become a "varied user input device" or something of the like.

Am I alone in thinking this?

So a few months ago a broke screen of my laptop, currently I quite broke so I can't change screen and for some time I was using TV as screen, but ofc. Windows have to crash or do similar shit and know it doesn't send signal via HDMI, probably it's showing some info, but signal is only send when it boots windows or something.

So my girlfriend give me her old laptop (4gb RAM and I3 processor, bit touchscreen :/) and windows aren't updated for quite a long (it was still windows 8) and I tried to update it. Ofc it has to be problem, DISM doesn't work, downloading iso doesn't work, fml. I guessed I have to live with that, but later disc usage starts to be around 100% and freeze for few minutes (shitty Win2k PC at uni was more responding). Then I try to refresh windows, DISM starts working, updates semi-working. I left with 21 updates with error and there starts conversation:
Me: install 21 updates
Win: kk. Or actually no
Me: please
Win: the best what I could do is 8.
Me: it's something
Win: actually fuck it, only 4
Me: I'm done *typing Manjaro xfce*

So now I have dual boot with Manjaro which use 40% ram with Firefox open, when windows has 30% alone. I can't play anyway and DF is on Linux so fuck Windows.

I am noob when it comes to Linux and everything actually, but it makes me want to learn and improve.

This question might make you lose a brain cell because of stupidity in the question. Read with caution

Is there a way to compile a game for Windows from Linux in Unreal engine? I did google some posts but the answer was either use a Virtual machine which will not be done or use the the theoretical method of using mingw but the forum posts state that it will be tricky business or use a windows machine. I have dual booted windows with linux on my machine.

However since the machine has a 512 gb ssd most of the storage space is devoted to unreal engine which takes 47 gigs in itself and have a lot of programs installed I have a usable 20 gigs left out of 145 gig partition. Windows has around 318 gigs of storage to it but I have 100 gigs free at most. So after installing the windows sdk, visual studio with extensions, unreal engine and some other stuff I don't have much space left for myself. I need that much space since I install a lot of games to my ssd. So now I cant load my bigger projects for playing on my windows. I could use my hdd which is mostly used for backups and 100+ gig stuff. Though the hdd's are of course far slower than ssd's which shouldn't be a problem however last time I used visual studio it ate more than 2 gigs of ram for a solution meaning that the compiler has very low memory for itself to actually compile so for any large files the hdd has more of a bottleneck.

Oh and I can't upgrade my ssd's or ram because I don't have enough money.

Thanks for the answers in advance