Absolutely this. I mean how hard is it to mic the actors saying their lines and bump that up in the mix, or even just make it the center channel, and have a volume for *just the dialogue* -- I used to have a 5.1 setup with a center channel speaker, and had a setup where I had volume control for all 5 audio channels, half the time that worked great, but the other half they didn't bother putting the dialogue full-on in the center channel, so turning that volume up didn't help. I mean WTF?!? It's like they don't *want* us to be able to hear the dialogue?!? Now I mostly just use the speakers in my TV, and often the dialogue audio is actually better than with the hi-fi setup, for whatever reason, but still occasionally can't hear it properly without turning it up uncomfortably loud, even using the "night mode" audio setting. I get that, yes, if you turn the volume up high enough, you can hear the dialogue just fine in most movies and TV shows, but it's sometimes ear-splitting loud at that level, especially for some titles, and sometimes I just don't want that and if you live in an apartment, or someone is asleep in the next room, that's just not an option. It's sometimes so bad that I want to put an audio compressor in the mix, but from what I've read, even that doesn't always fix the inaudible dialog problem. Sheesh.

DRM as in 'flag in the drive firmware saying this is a Synology drive' such that the NAS won't accept non-flagged drives as 'legit'. Same idea as a printer that identifies OEM ink cartridges vs others.

Yeah, you're probably right that it's still not for everyone yet, but with a at least a little up-front configuration support, a lot of people could make the switch now and barely notice, since many people only need a browser and maybe office apps anyway. It's a heck of a lot easier to install, customize and manage a linux desktop now than it was even 10 years ago. Maybe still just out of reach for most non-techies without support, but it's tantalizingly close.

Totally, though my previous win10 image has an old version of photoshop on it, that I have used a few times, and it's totally fine on my Ryzen 5600G (with no other GPU in the system) -- it's nearly as usable as it was running on my (AMD A10) machine natively -- I struggled a bit to get the drivers set up initially, but once I finally got it all hooked up right, QXL seems fine, at least for my needs. I was even able to do some light gaming in the windows VM inside QEMU and the performance was acceptable, though I have those games running under WINE now (Heroic Launcher is super easy) so I don't need that anymore, in fact I don't really need anything in that Windows VM anymore. The only reason I still keep it (it has it's own physical disk that I imaged from my old win box, which I also still have) is "just in case". GIMP 3 does literally everything I need and I was already using LibreOffice on windows, so there's no windows-only software that I need anymore. I'm still not entirely used to Darktable, since Lightroom was actually really nice, but I'm mostly there.

I've been using LMDE 5 (and then 6 since it came out) as my daily driver for a few years now, having been a decades-long (desktop) windows user. Debian gives me warm fuzzies, and Ubuntu decidedly does not, even though it's (for the most part) an adequate OS. I think cinnamon is about as close to perfect as it's possible for a *nix WM to be at this point for a general purpose desktop, especially for soon-to-be windows refugees. I'm about to install it onto a bunch of machines to replace win10 before it goes EOL. It's going to be a vast improvement to my "friends and family" support network.

My prediction is that Windows will become irrelevant as a desktop OS for personal/small business use within 5 years, especially if they stick with their plan of no win11 for like half the PCs in current use on the planet. LMDE (or Debian) will run quite well on most any computer that came preinstalled with windows *7* much less 10.

OEM support for linux is something that I think the PC industry is going to embrace in a big way in the next few years. The list of OEM linux PCs is growing by the day.

I realize there are already a number of linux installers one can download and run from inside windows, but it's too bad there isn't a turn-key solution ready to go that would:

1. Automatically back up all user data on a windows machine.
2. Scan it and make software recommendations based on installed windows software.
3. Re-partition or just image and wipe the boot drive and install whatever flavor of linux on it, leaving the windows filesystem in a form suitable for running in QEMU, for the edge cases where people would lose functionality only available to them in windows.

That's essentially what I intend to do "by hand" to a bunch of machines in the next few months, though most of them won't even need the windows in-a-VM thing, so it'll just be backup/wipe/install.

Ubisoft will argue they didn't cancel the license -- you still have legal permission to run the software, but it just so happens that software you have no longer works because the servers it needs to talk to no longer exist, and they never promised to run them forever.

Totally. '95 was awful, but its startup sound, composed by Brian Eno is a nice sound. Definitely a work of art.

I would absolutely wave a magic wand to have the shelf labels include tax. Long gone are the days of having to relabel literally every item when the tax rate changes, and the advent of digital shelf tags makes it trivial. I do see some differences with the 'tariff surcharge' from sales tax though:

* Sales tax is the same across vendors. I know the approximate sales tax in an area. I don't know via what exact supply chain the store obtained an item, or when, so I can't know what the tariff was. The store doesn't either -- individual items that were subject to differing tariffs are indistinguishable on the shelf, thus the tariff surcharge will be arbitrary.
* Companies hate to disclose what they paid for stock, and in many cases are contractually prohibited from doing so. An accurate tariff surcharge would disclose this to me. Thus the surcharge is going to be an approximate / averaged amount.
* Approximate surcharges become the dumping ground for 'whatever we think we can add at the end of the sale process that won't cause the customer to abandon their cart' with little relation to the actual cost to the company.
* I am not aware of a case where a store gets to keep some of the sales tax. If the tax rate goes down, they don't get to keep charging the higher rate and 'oopsie' keep the overage. A tariff surcharge, since it necessarily can't be linked to the specific unit, is really just unbundling their cost of goods sold so they can double-dip.

Which is fine so long as they advertise the full price. If they want to break it out in the price details, fine, but don't advertise the lower price up front then tack on a surcharge at the end of the order flow.

The power consumption isn't really related to the amount of transactions -- a block holds a fixed amount of transactions, and the chain adjusts so that blocks happen about every 10 minutes. The power consumption is only due to miners trying to 'win' the mining race and get a payout. You could process the same number of transactions with 10 machines mining blocks as whatever you have now.

I stopped going to the regular movie theaters decades ago when they stopped having very large screens and the audio was often too-loud, clipped-to-hell garbled rubbish. I've gone to imax theaters a few times since then, since they're worth it: very large screen and pristine (loud, but good) sound. There are also still a few independent owned theaters around that I would still go to, since they have 75+ year old 50 foot screens. If I want to watch a film on a small screen, I'll stay home. My cheesy little audio system produces better sound. Our local cineplex just closed. It won't be missed.

Slack huddles *are* Chime under the hood.

Totally. I typically work with no room lighting at all, and my monitor is positioned to minimize glare from the window during the day. When I watch TV, the room is as dark as I can make it, so the brightness is set quite low and it's really nice that way. Of course, my 50" TV uses a lot less power at a low brightness: like 30W instead of 160W. I bet many people have no idea. Here's another tidbit of stupid: there's an "energy saver" mode in my TV's settings, which one can turn on and have everything look like shit AND it makes the TV consume about 100W. Turning the "energy saver" setting OFF and manually tuning everything makes it look nice AND saves energy. Go figure.

I remember someone saying years ago about desktop/laptop screens that the default brightness is insane so that when people look at them in the bigbox store they go "Wow!" and buy one, but "configured for stupidly bright offices" makes more sense.

The phone auto brightness thing also drives me crazy. It's not that hard to make it fully user-configurable and allow a very low minimum brightness. There used to be apps you could install (on a non rooted device) that would fix that, but now I guess that's a no-no. Grrr.

For me, "Dark mode" is only good in a dark or dimly lit room. Turn the room lighting off or down and dark mode is useful and saves energy mostly because the room lighting is using less energy, it's got little or nothing to do with the amount of energy used by the screen. I'll never understand why people think they need bright lights on to use a computer or need to have the display brightness turned all the way up.

Totally, but I was trying to be funny.