Man, where to even start on this…

“Watering down” is the MS approach to design - take all the power user features, and make them less useful and less efficient to use (or just get rid of them altogether). It’s a slow burn to “Take that to the nearest certified Microsoft Store so they can repair it for you”.

The entire design is focused around making things HARDER to use. Less reliance on a terminal, dynamic menus whose contents are clusterfucked into little panels instead of proper menus. Hell, look at the Printers dialogue in Windows 7 and prior, then compare that to the trash they’ve thrown in Win 10 and 11. Everything is designed to look flashy, and be as impossibly inefficient to use. But it looks less intimidating, so stupid users love it!

Reading some email and punching some numbers into an excel sheet are about the equivalent of signing a lease or getting a flu shot.

Not sure where you’re from, but when I get a flu shot, I sit in a chair and somebody who knows how to administer the shot gives it to me. I also don’t get a flu shot for several hours a day several days a week. Same with leases, I may sign one every few years at most, and if it’s for something serious then I would get a lawyer involved. That said, I am at least competent enough to sit in the chair and get the shot without asking “what’s a chair? How do I sit? Where is my arm?” Likewise, I can read a lease and not have to ask “What is a lease? What is a signature? How do I sign this page?” I can’t say the same about people in 2025 who say “What’s the start button?” or have no idea that decades-old shortcuts like ctrl+c and ctrl+v are things.

Also, if you consider the amount of marketing and exposure to computers that people have had by now, yes, I would expect just about everybody to know what the fuck a Start button is. Shit, if you hold your mouse over it, I’m almost certain it even pops a tooltip that says “Start”. Some of these people have worked at this same company for decades, and have no doubt touched generations of Windows software.

As for how to copy/paste on those older computers - I guess it depends on how you’re accessing them as to whether or not you even can copy/paste. But at the same time, I wouldn’t be nearly as frustrated if somebody wasn’t quite sure how to navigate through something that isn’t as commonplace as a Windows computer - you might as well say you’re “not very competent with pencils and paper”.

Well, lucky for them their fields aren’t under constant attack by droves of idiots constantly being catered to. There is no watering down of those fields in the name of “user friendliness”.

Also, they don’t expect people to understand their field, but people don’t interact and touch legal stuff or doctor stuff on a daily basis like people do with computers. If they did, then they would no doubt feel the same way about idiots who can’t grasp the basics and refuse to learn the slightly more advanced shit.

It’s 2025. There’s no reason for anybody - but especially the older group - to not know what the start button is, or keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste, for example.

I actually get frustrated when I don’t know how to do something and will spend the time to figure it out… So I may not be well versed in all those points, but I have at least some skill and knowledge in each section.

We don’t all have the same 24 hours, but we should all have the same ability to at least refer to and/or seek out information to get us some understanding of what we’re doing, and yet, here I am in 2025 working with people who are 30+ years old asking me “what’s the Start button?”

Nah, I get that we’re all good at different things. But people should be good at doing basic research and troubleshooting.

We use computers all the time. Many of us use cars all the time. And we know how to fuel them up, check and top-up oil, add wiper fluid, check coolant, etc. There’s also the manual to refer to if we don’t know.

Same shit with PCs. But people aren’t willing to put in the bare minimum effort to do shit, and companies take advantage of that to ruin it for everyone.

Adblockers will fix part of that. Using the “web” link on the results will make the search a lot better, too.

Can you put gas in your car? Do you know how to check your oil and add more? Can you put wiper fuild in? Do you know how to check coolant levels?

Most importantly: do you know how to RTFM to do this stuff if needed?

That would put you miles above the typical PC using idiot that we keep coddling by ruining things we use.

Because we keep feeding them stupid pills and encouraging them not to think. Microsoft was a pioneer of the whole “water down software and call it user-frienfly’” thing.

Idk mainstream users should learn to learn and empower themselves with knowledge.

The enshitification of hardware and software by constantly catering to the dumbest of people is hurting everybody.

Or users could maybe learn how to do things without having their hands held and treated like babies every step of the way; or at least how to search for information to find what they need… 🤷🏻‍♂️

Do you mean the ability to backup and restore your launcher config? If so, it doesn’t get more minimal and awesome than T-UI

You’ll want the F-Droid version as it is the most complete. It hasn’t seen an update in ages, but it really doesn’t need one. It’s also all open-source, so you could always download the code from GitHub and do whatever you want to it

Middle-click often works when ctrl+c/ctrl+v won’t. It’s also a separate buffer giving you the ability to have two different things copy/paste-able

I really wish we’d stop saying “anti cheat” and start saying “system compromising rootkit software”

“My baby, you have blossomed into a wonderful adult. It’s time to stop relying on us now, though. Go on and do big things, or something…”

Don’t forget that they fund the military complex.

Daniel Ek? More like Daniel Ick

I only run arch, btw. 🤣

I was thinking a “shit” mode but “stable” does sound nicer lol.

Nobody should be those people. Those people are constantly giving the industry a reason to water everything down and make things as overpriced and limited as possible.

Arm processor, an nVidia graphics card, and Ubuntu? Err, doesn’t sound great.

Imagine turning Windows into an even shittier version of itself, and you’ve got S mode.

Can’t install shit unless it’s from the MS Store. Can’t use a browser unless it’s Edge. Not sure what other stupid shit it enforces. It’s supposed to harden the system, but I find that hard to believe.

Yeah, no idea. Turns out I already had dkms installed. Ah well, it’s not a huge deal because I can still ssh or live-usb boot if I really cook something