We all know the joy of acquiring a new laptop and the excitement of exploring its features and functionalities. However, the vast majority of laptops are only sold with a specific proprietary operating system: Microsoft Windows. The vendors do not remove the Windows license, and you must pay the entire price, even if you do not want to use this system.

This is unfair and we want to change it! Consumers should be able to buy laptops without any specific operating system, and should not have to pay the license price if they don't want to.

Request your refund now!

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/34629670

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/34629418

i think the article does a wonderful job at illustrating the point without even uttering a single word

The 6-Year Saga of systemd Destroying SSDs: How a "Baseless Claim" Became a Hacker News Front-Page Reality

"Remember in 2020 when yours truly opened systemd issue 15292 showing that 500 KB of text logs turned into 700 MB of SSD thrashing, only to be met with maintainer hostility? The maintainers famously declared "I don't think you know what you're talking about," insisted it was non-actionable, and closed the issue while collecting dozens of angry downvotes from the community. Because why fix an architectural design flaw when you can just insult the user's methodology and pretend write amplification doesn't exist?

Fast-forward six years, and nothing changed—except the frustration. In early 2026, a fresh ticket was filed, proving that writing just two lines of log per second in a virtual machine pushed storage to ~50 IOPS continuously. Systemd's memory-mapped hash tables were still dirtying entire 4 KiB pages, triggering filesystem metadata updates, and churning through gigabytes of I/O for a handful of log entries.

Then came the turning point: the new issue blew up on Hacker News, exposing the sheer absurdity of the years-long denial to the broader tech community. Suddenly, faced with public front-page embarrassment, the maintainers' dismissive wall crumbled. @ValdikSS stepped in with exhaustive isolated cgroup and loop-device benchmarking, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that a single 750-byte log message regularly generates ~50 KB to ~70 KB of underlying disk writes.

Miraculously, once the corporate-backed enterprise maintainers were publicly put on blast, someone on the team finally decided to take a look and start addressing it. It turns out the issue was actionable all along—it just required six years of community pain, a dedicated independent researcher doing the maintainers' profiling for them, and a front-page roasting on Hacker News to make the enterprise overlords care.

This whole saga perfectly distills the systemd experience: a monolithic ecosystem engineered strictly for enterprise container hosts and cloud providers, where real-world desktop and edge hardware constraints are dismissed as "user error" right up until the PR optics become too toxic to ignore."

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinuxUncensored/comments/1vo2hrp/the_6year_saga_of_systemd_destroying_ssds_how_a/

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/34632736

I am looking for good options for an elderly relative which has some onset of slight dementia, but is still living alone (with assistance).

The main problem is that usual things are becoming just too complicated for that person. There are too many details that don't matter. For example, user interfaces have a lot of features that are not strictly needed, many hidden states, often no clearly visible affordances, and so on. Some mail clients make it difficult to recognize phishing.

As a good example how it is done better, I'd name GNOME simple-scan. A really good and simple UI!

This person is currently using Thunderbird + Firefox on Windows, and K9 Mail on Android. Learned to use Windows in their sixties and is now in mid-eighties age.

The main need is a simpler Email client.

Any suggestions?

I'm wondering how this actually works. I don't think our IT team would ever allow it, but even if they did, you'd have to be able to run everything M$ (Teams, excel, etc), onedrive/sharepoint, windows specific software like CAD, Bluebeam, use Chrome-only software like Autodesk stuff -

It seems kind of dumb to even do that, since you'd be locked into that M$ ecosystem anyway. But I'm curious if anyones done it.

The keyboard stops working after a while of inactivity like watching a movie or playing a game. The keys light up, and the 2.4ghz indicator on the keyboard shows it's connected, but my pc doesn't detect any keystrokes. Only after I unplug and plug the dongle again, does it start working. How do I fix this? Is this an issue on the linux side, or should I return the keyboard and get a Keychron v6 max?

Yes, it is my post, and I am trying to find a reason why it won't work. Sadly, without such a solution, it will be impossible to use many Internet services without having an Android/iOS.

alias sd='printf "w" | xclip -selection clip; echo "w W"'