I’m normally really bad at timing the market but I really did get lucky for buying a Pi 5 8GB in September 2025.

I’ve been dual booting Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) for a while, and sadly I’m back on Windows after a month and a half of exclusively using Linux. The reason? Ethernet. I need to assign a static IP to a dev board with Ethernet, and while it works fairly easily on Windows, it just doesn’t work on Linux, saying it’s unavailable in the nmcli output.

Of course, Windows is worse than before. It hasn’t fixed the bug where it never updates the system time, forcing me to manually press sync on every boot. And it hasn’t fixed the newer bug where my laptop display needs to go down to 768p to display 300Hz, making me to go down to 60Hz to use the full 1080p resolution. All the while Microsoft pushes things nobody wants.

How do I do this?

Here’s an idea that won’t cost anything: Browser games! There are tons of great Incremental games playable for free on a browser, and plenty of other games too.

No no, sell them for 376, 554, and 732 UbiPoints^TM. Gotta buy that extra pack.

I first found out about it last week and it served my purpose well. It has options for what you want to name the file based on the metadata too!

That’s good to hear. I don’t use streaming services so I don’t have firsthand experience

The sources I read said only the lower versions of widevine, which many platforms don’t support at all

Which ones?

It’s more akin to trying to drive a semi truck with a semi truck motor but then something drops and there’s a ton of friction like an unintentional tractor pull. Even the best chips on the market display subpar performance.

What are good brands that don’t sell your data? Is TP-link okay?

No, I mean 500Mb/s, as my Internet will be 300Mb/s. My needs are not great.

Similar story here with my SN30 Pro+. It was great the first year then the Bluetooth stopped working consistently, then the wired mode also stopped working consistently a year later.

I also use ZArchiver and unzipping is zippy (sorry) in my experience. Not quite as fast as Linux but that’s to be expected considering the hardware difference.

However Windows is quite slow in this regard in my experience. It can easily take 30 seconds to extract a zip file that Linux can do in under a second, often with a sub 1MBps throughput. This is on an NVMe SSD.

I have a few examples:

• Flight Sim 2020
• Windows Defender is the best antivirus, better than all those paid crapware antiviruses
• An attempt at an independent browser engine that wasn’t the dated IE
• This is a hot take but seamless integration of local file storage with OneDrive. Yes, they are way too heavy-handed about forcing this on you and it’s really stupid how it moves your files without telling you, but I’ve never seen a file manager that handles both local and cloud files faster than W10’s file manager (a big part of the reason why I was mad about W11, because that advantage disappeared)

The only useful thing I can think of after the pandemic is the CPU scheduling updates for Alder Lake, but that was pretty much a necessity. Everything else is AI overhype, rewriting programs to make them slower, and/or yet another way to invade people’s privacy

Thanks lol, I never use that word so I spelled it wrong

Arch seems so interesting because you install the system component by component in the command line but I’ve heard it has poor long term stability. Is there a distro that’s like Arch for installation but more stable?

Lately I’ve been really annoyed by Microsoft products. For a certain work-related thing we were using Microsoft word to collaborate and it randomly would stop letting some of us edit, throwing warnings like “Allow access to your Microsoft 365 account” even though I was already signed in, and clicking on allow access would just bring the warning back upon refreshing.

Which would happen every 20 minutes because it gives me a pop-up to sign in, with three buttons on the pop-up. Two are cancel buttons, and the actual sign in button is invisible. I was already signed in, of course. I couldn’t continue working until a refresh.

Moving pictures is the biggest pain for some reason (and it isn’t even better in LibreOffice Writer). It’s been like this for years.

And then they have the gaul to start throwing AI everywhere when they can’t even make their basic systems usable. I’m starting to root for Microsoft’s failure these days, because they haven’t done anything useful or innovative since the pandemic.

Disgruntled, I suggested that we switch to Google Docs (yes, I know it’s Google, but we all already have Google accounts and we needed this done in a few hours), and everyone instantly agreed because I had just said their frustrations out loud.

Recently I was using Ubuntu and needed to recall a terminal command I had used a couple weeks prior. Luckily, my terminal commands are logged in the ~/.bash_history text file. Easy, convenient, customizable, and no AI needed!

• Can do stuff that isn’t just for gaming or content consumption