Worth noting resistance is not the same as a solution. While building it is important, the alternative being losing, it’s an eternal process.

As a comparison, quoting Sabaton’s Versailles song:

it will evolve, it will change
and War will return, sooner than we think```

Youtube is already pretty bad anyways. Adding LLM tools and similar, as a local saying goes, is just a fart to who already shat him/herself.

The cryptids and end-of-world scenarios there must be out of control, so they must be going with the nuclear option:
https://media.thebrainbin.org/74/62/7462bbd431d41e3d0ebbcea86713ccfec7d12bc6c4e9f9ce3c4d316a8be5130f.png

Jokes aside, it’s a draft, so I wonder if they’re proposing the absolute worse option so bad options sound acceptable. Wouldn’t be the first time I see this sort of thing, specially with alarmist, sensationalistic and discreetly ill-intented news media aplenty as samples.

Two theories I saw are that it’s an influx of Chinese machines, and/or it’s natural fluctuation and the tendency is still of growth. I theorize it could also be most companies going back to being active by February and people including those without extra machines having to use Windows to do their jobs.

While the images are public and likely hard to see fully gone, maybe you can try to get a judicial order to get the IP of the poster, and through that find and sue whomever the individual is? (And if over VPN, I’d imagine VPN companies would comply if the order is sound)

Also for matters that involve delicated subjects, I’d suggest contacting relevant people by DMs/email, as to avoid unwanted attention to it/Streisand effect.

Maybe something to do with work? Afaik by February, most companies are back in action, and so maybe people are forced to switch back to Windows to do their jobs, including in some cases in their gaming rigs due to lack of work-exclusive machines.

Also the possibilities others already mentioned here sound as valid, and I second that months may have big fluctuations, but that may not relate to the growth tendency. And iirc GamingOnLinux has a graph on the growth tendency based on Valve’s hardware surveys, though I don’t have the link with me.

@anthony@forum.unfinishedprojects.net did a like from an Mbin instance. 13 likes on my side.

Energy ain’t free, the additional lights fuck sleep schedule, blackouts may happen, the computer produces heat which wears its own pieces, chances are it will be kept online meaning greater risk of being hacked, computer on means more read-write operations which wear the memory down as Nutin said, and so on.

At most, maybe it’d be justifiable if it’s downloading/running something which can’t be stopped. Or another possibility though not a justification, the person isn’t responsible towards his/her machine. Otherwise, I struggle to think of reasons not to turn it off.

Neon blue/purple gradients, I’ve yet to find one that doesn’t look good 👌

I think you’re best asking a lawyer, to be sure.

But from what I, random citizen, have looked into the matter out of curiosity, apparently they’re a grey zone, usually overlooked, ignored or accepted. But while you’d be sharing differential code, not the protected code itself, you needed to break a patent by reverse-engineering the game, which for draconian laws like the DMCA, is potentially worth even federal prison. Plus for others to apply the mod, they’d need to break the patent too by using the tools you indicate.

And there are cases where the game has official modding tools or that the devs explicitly say they’re fine with mods. In such cases, I’m fairly sure worrying isn’t needed.

But if the awkwardness question is something your colleagues asked, and/or they’re genuine curious why you do, a more objective answer could be “I compared the two and for the reasons x / y / z, I decided to use LibreOffice / Linux stuff instead”.

If the colleague is provoking you, a dismissal answer could be a good call, like (hypothetical case) “you use iPhone and I use Android and I don’t make a fuss about it”.

Also some more from a quick search for “windows”, and my instance isn’t even that big to help with discoverability:

Maybe here on the fediverse? Community possibilities are pretty broad, and you could even create your own.

If the proposal is to avoid MAGA, do note ActivityPub is an open protocol, so anyone can join the network.

Also iirc BBC has a Mastodon instance, though I didn’t check further. And there are a few journalism-oriented Peertube channels, though most I could find are related to technology.

Also found out recently Gazeta do Povo (Brazilian news media) made a Bluesky account. Bluesky is kinda far when talking about “fediverse”, but I guess it counts since AT Protocol is a form of content federation?

Trump’s Truth Social is based on Mastodon (even if with federation and syndication disabled), and the POTUS Threads profile iirc has ActivityPub enabled. Also wasn’t Germany that also adopted for some government profiles fediverse-compatible services? Or some other EU country. Still, if the neighbors and ideological allies of Canada already tapped into such projects, I’d say it’s no longer uncharted territory, and so the possibility is there.

Also regarding Nvidia, I don’t have great experience with it, but Mint Cinnamon and Mint Xfce work rather well with the RTX board my laptop has, just having to add a control tool to change from the default Intel one.

And dunno how it is nowadays, but there’s a third version of Mint, LMDE, that when I tested, was very problematic to get the Nvidia board to work. Though that was over a year ago so maybe they fixed it since.

Linux Mint is generally the best “it just works” case, focused on stability (to the detriment of speed of updates), ease of use and visually reminding of Windows.

Also Mint comes with a few official visual* changes, but if I might suggest, go with Xfce, not the Cinnamon one. The Cinnamon version of Mint has too many animations that only add micro workflow delays, while Xfce doesn’t have all the fancy effects making it faster to use.

*avoiding technical jargons to not confuse the OP

I have a very slight feeling Reddit’s working for China, and not for the US. If I’m right, then chances only grow since the pushes for identity verification gained traction around last September.

For Misskey-powered instances, there’s also Nijimiss.moe from the bigger ones I know about. It appears to either house or federate a lot of Japanese users too, from what I could observe. And dunno your Mbin instance, but on mine, I can follow Misskey.io and Nijimiss.moe users just fine, just taking a little while to populate the /all page (but surely happening since Japanese folks seem to interact between one another a lot), and at worse on federation to Mbin with some formatting issues for posts since Misskey feels a bit like its own thing.

But alas, on the flagship (?) instance, I know a guy that was able to create an account when he/she lived for a while in Japan, and when the person went to another country, access to the site remained.