Comments by "James LaBarre" (@SenileOtaku) on "TechAltar" channel.

Childhood??? Closest I could say for 'childhood' systems was the DEC PDP11/20 (and that was high school).
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When it became necessary recently to buy a new cellphone (my 5 yr old Droid Razr HD stopped recognizing SIM cards when we changed providers) I bought the Moto e5, unlocked*, for around $130. It does what it needs to do (make and receive phone calls, keep addresses and notes) at an affordable price, and I'm not *excessively tied to someone's ecosystem (hello Apple). My PC acquisitions are different. I usually re-purpose used equipment, and run Linux; the laptops being made these days are too flimsy in construction and lacking in connectivity/expandability. And my next desktop system will be my own custom build, since the mid-towers you get from the big-box stores or direct (from Dell, etc) are taking too many clues from the cellphone makers and using too many proprietary/specialized parts. I miss my old InWin Q500 case.
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Would have preferred, if MS was determinedbkit- on adopting a pre-existing rendering engine, that MS had adopted Gecko. I think the whole heavy-handed "Blink" dominance (Chromium's Webkit-derived rendering engine) is ultimately a bad thing, if for nothing else, the high security risk of a browser monoculture. If Chromium does something wrong, or ends up with a severe zero-day vulnerability, then a significant proportion of the internet population becomes at risk. I actually use Waterfox rather than Firefox, mainly because FF broke too many extensions I needed. Generally, I despise Google Chrome. It tends to bring my Linux systems to a near standstill, and have seen that browser crash pages upon startup on MSWindows (multiple machines & MSWin versions). The only reason I'm using the Brave browser is for YouTube, since Google became overly obnoxious with their video-breaking advertising, so I'm cutting off ALL advertising for YT, but still want to support other sites.
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@RobertVandenEynde Actually, there are themeing engines, etc that can fix this (I think KDE/Qt is actually better at it, but GTK is pretty close). They've already taken it into consideration years ago, even though it's not part of a basic installation it is readily rectified.
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@badbad_ Linux has been my "daily driver" for nearly 20 years now. Use it at work as well as at home (it's the work machine where occasionally, depending on which contract job I'm on, is unfortunately MSWindows).
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@tamaspacso9899 Hey, I could be talking about ReactOS instead.... (it's a MSWin clone, if you haven't heard of it).
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Have no problem with UI inconsistency on my systems. I'm running the Cinnamon desktop on LinuxMint, and all blends in very nicely. You have FAR more flexibility in it's look, colors, shading, elements, etc (even though the Gnome3 devs do everything in their power to break user configuration in the GTK libraries). If you're using KDE/Qt applications under a GTK-based desktop, you can even theme those to more closely match the GTK configuration (and it works the same if you are on KDE, which can manage GTK theming). And if you're running some MSWindows application under the Wine runtime, even those can be made to blend in seamlessly. Part of the secret with this is *modularity*. MS needs to break-apart a lot of the functionality of their OS. As it is now too many elements are heavily intertwined with other unrelated components, too many layers don't merely bleed into each other, but have pieces welded in that have no business operating at that level. As far as 'backwards compatibility" is concerned, I'd think MS should take on the "Wine" approach. For that matter, they could essentially just port Wine to MSWindows, and make that the compatibility layer to run all those 'ancient' APIs. Then they could migrate those legacy APIs out of the core/kernel of the system, since they'd be supported within the compatibility layer. The wine-layer could then be frozen to whatever MSWin version they want to stop at (probably W7), and let the core handle newer functionality without having to worry about breaking legacy applications. Biggest problem is that MS would have to submit that legacy code into the WIne project, under a GPL license (various reasons too involved for here), which I don't see them willing to do. The alternative would be to base it on the very out-of-date ReWind fork of Wine (an awful lot of work to bring up to date, likely to costly to even consider).
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