no no, it just needs your location data every second to make sure it's set to the correct time zone. Microsoft and their 1.8 million partners decided that the clock can't work without your location data.

(I'm joking, for the inevitable person that's going to try to disagree)

Lol, waiting for Microsoft to fix things? Oh boy, your gonna be waiting awhile.

Cloud backup just means they will use all and any data on your pc and network to train their shitty ai to do more shitty things and continue stealing our data. Yay future.

Yeah, there was at least a skip for now option.... What more could I ask for?

My approach was spending even more money for the pro version so I could access the OS settings paywalled by group policy and set it to never automatically download updates.

It would tell me about updates, but wouldn't do shit until I clicked a button on the update page to actually install them (though without the option to pick and choose which ones).

It still nagged me about stupid shit I didn't want, like edge, bing, one drive, and their office subscription.

So when I built a newer computer, I gave them $0 and installed Fedora and laugh at my former reluctance because it's actually been easier and I haven't even had moments where I wished I had just stuck with windows.

Not saying that it's been perfect without any issues, I just recall that there were also issues on windows to deal with, a lot more dated responses showing up in searches that tell you do go to some setting window that no longer exists because the question was answered 6 months ago. Oh and I haven't had to fight my fucking OS deciding to change my settings back to the shitty defaults they set (plus Linux just has better defaults, so doesn't even need as much settings tweaking).

And as an added bonus, switching made me finally pull the plug on xbox game pass, which was a nice idea but I still mostly just spent my time playing games on steam and forgetting to check game pass when buying games on sale, so it was kinda a waste of money. But each time I considered getting rid of it before, I'd instead convince myself it was good to have and end up playing some games on there for a few days before forgetting about it again.

you could switch to linux

Done

We even brought in the machine that goes PING!

I remember seeing this update on some machines I set up for work and wondering the same. It occurs the first time the clock app is launched, and the "update" is really just pulling the time zone data and setting the clock to what is accurate (internet based world clock), seperate from the bios time it was going off of prior to that. It's really just looks worse than it is.

Windows

What happened? I can't find New Amsterdam.

There's thousands and thousands of them around the world. And other countries are developing faster than the U.S. too.

Also there was a big push for "web first" applications, thus there's a lot of developers with that kind of knowledge. In college, I was instructed to instead of learning software optimizations, to learn how to outsource complicated computations to the cloud, where there will be always enough compute, so I can write my code "as clean as possible, without worrying about optimizations".

Probably skill issue on my end tbh but here goes:

I'll admit I've never tried GTK. I've always assumed it was specific to linux and used to make apps that look a certain way (like they were made for gnome) vs allowing you to make UIs the way you want to. Maybe I should look into this more.

Qt I'd say is "industry standard" but I've never been able to figure it out (so definitely skill issue here). It's just that every time I've tried it, it's been confusing where you're even supposed to start. Also the last time I tried it I was a bit lost because I assume that I'm supposed to use Qt 6 (?) but it requires me to create an account because there's a whole community/enterprise pricing thing (fair enough, nobody's entitled to OSS work, especially not billion/trillion dollar companies). I plan to look again but that's where I've been stuck so far.

I hate shipping chromium for every single app and it's easy to fuck up a react app but there's something to be said about cutting through the BS, just building, and having it work the same everywhere. Webapps won't perform as well as native but they will perform well enough that it's fine assuming the product owners give a shit.

Still learning but this has been my sentiment so far.

Edit:
Been playing around with iced.rs a bit and it looks promising but I haven't done anything past beginner stuff so no fully formed opinions yet.