I run 16 Bit Virtual Studios. You can find more reviews from me on YouTube youtube.com/@16bitvirtual or other social media @16bitvirtual, and we sell our 3D Printed stuff on 16bitstore.com

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • For me, Windows 11 mandatory account, and Internet on setup. Yes there are bypasses, yes I could upgrade from 10. But where I’m from, having the internet isn’t always a given.

    So imagine dropping $500-$1000 on a new laptop booting it up for the first time, and learning that its now a brick since Windows refuses to let you use it since you have no internet. No Pro license can unbork you from this.

    Even MacOS isn’t that dumb (for now).

    The account thing is a personal beef I have with windows. I.e. my PC my account, why does it need to be online, I have no reason for it.

    So my plan was to migrate to FOSS or proper cross platform software for work, see if Linux works, and if it doesn’t move to MacOS. So far Linux Mint has been stable.


  • This is how switched, though I’d recommend properly platform agnostic software (Windows, Mac, and Linux support) since if you don’t find Linux proper works for your workflow, you could switch to a Mac.

    Another thing which helped me was switching my Laptop first before my Desktop since if I had problems (which I did) I could loose my laptop and not worry about data loss.

    As of now, I am 2 year with Linux on my laptop and 6 months on my desktop with no noticeable difference between my Windows experience and Linux.



  • ELI5: when a computer stores something like a file or a folder, it needs to know where it lives and where its contents are stored. Normally where the a file or folder lives is the same place as where its contents are. But there are times where a file may live in one place and its contents are elsewhere. That’s a symlink.

    So for your video example, the original video is located in Downloads so the video file will say I am movie.mp4 and I live i live in downloads, and my contents are in downloads. While the symlink says, I am movie.mp4 I live in home, and my contents are in downloads over there.

    For a video player, it doesn’t care if the file and the content is in the same place, it just need to know where the content lives.

    Now how software will treat a symlink as an absolute. For example if you have 2 PCs synced with cloud storage, and both downloads and home is being synced between your 2 pcs. Your cloud storage will look at the symlink, access the content from pc1 and put your movie.mp4 in pc2’s downloads and home. But it will also put the contents in both places in pc2 since to it, the results are the same. One could make software sync without breaking the symlink, but it depends on the developer and the scope of the software.