I remember a scandal in Germany some years back, where it was reported that people on the airline call centres were instructed to wrongly tell customers that they weren't entitled to compensation, and to only pay out when they where under threat of being sued. Dunno whether that improved.

I mean, I've had a holiday last year where I was hiking for days, often meeting no one except for the group I was with.

That was hard from a certain perspective, it involved some technically difficult climbing, lots of different terrain, carrying your own supplies.

But I honestly found it a lot easier to just walk, one foot in front of the other, for hours and hours, than to organise my normal life. It was meditative, in a way.

Now I'm not saying that I'm some kind of pioneer, the people in those wagons didn't have mapped out places to refill their water, and I didn't have small children, diseases, or displacing natives along my route to do that I had to worry about, but I am saying that the clarity of purpose that just walking towards a destination for days on end can feel really freeing.

Had some student jobs where I had lots of downtime, but was forbidden from doing anything other than sit there, under threat of being fired.

Everyone found ways to be on their phone, sneak in an ear bud, or read something, but I was out of the door as soon as I had found something else.

Don't they have a really good safety record? They're cheap, and the user experience isn't great, but I never heard anything about aafty problems.

Curiously, for me it's more or less the other way around, in a sense. I run Linux on both my Desktop and my Laptop, and feel that after setting them up the way I like, I am more productive than under Windows. In Windows, I oftentimes had the feeling that I had to work against the OS whenever I wanted to configure it in a way that wasn't quite standard, while I tend to feel that I can work with the OS when using Linux. Especially Win11 introduced lots of things that detracted from the user experience for me, and where only changeable by editing the registry, which isn't great.

I do recognise that parts, or even most of that probably isn't applicable to the standard user, but as what could reasonably be called a power user, I never really had any problems working with Linux.

I'd also say that for non-power users, people who mainly work within Word processors, or their browser, a stable LTS distros can in some cases be less hassle than Windows.

Regarding Excel - gotta give that to you, I always felt that Excel in isolation was good software, and I am not aware of any replacement that's equally as friendly to non-programmer users, while also being equally as capable.

Regarding your last point - Dunno, I don't work there. I would however raise that inertia can be quite powerful. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, no one ever got fired for licensing Windows. Doesn't mean that there aren't other, possibly good, reasons.

Well, Munich decided to switch back around the time Microsoft was negotiating about building their Germany HQ there. There have been allegations of backroom dealings, but I dunno if there's ever been anything proven. There is a very big, very shiny building with a sign that says Microsoft near where I lived when I was there, though.

Though I also read some articles about them partially going back to FOSS, so who knows what they'll do in the end.

Thanks for clarifying. I was mostly trying to apply that scenario to a likely real world one, but there's definitely cases in which it could be two factor.

Hmh, I guess, though I feel this is a bit more complicated. What if you can look up the username in the registration mail sent to the inbox? Or it's a site that uses email addresses as usernames? Is it knowing if said knowledge is inferrable from the thing you have?

I'm the outlier, as in I use Apple Music on Android. It has an app that works for me, options for lossless, some fun radio stations, and no podcasts or audiobooks popping up on the home page. Downloads work fine for me, but I did have that skipping bug OP described in a version 6 months ago.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with it, ignoring of course that streaming as a business isn't all that great.

Edit: Also, why not pirate outright, instead of violating the ToS of a company that has your billing info? I mean, they probably won't do anything, but at that point, just getting the albums as flac somewhere seams more sensible to me.

Bitwarden inserts them automatically, and if I ever have to do it manually for some reason, it just doubles the fun. Hasn't happened to me yet, though.

I have relatively long Passwords, because why not, and had problems with pages restricting the number of characters you can enter in the login window, but not the registration window. Or restricting password length and cutting your password off, but not telling you about it, so you gotta figure out that they set the first 30 characters of the saved password as your password.

Always fun to deal with. I could make it a lot easier for me by just using shorter passwords, but I think deep down I'm a masochist.

But you only need one factor, access to your inbox?