Thank you, I didn’t know this existed!

The parents are getting a divorce, meaning the kid will celebrate Christmas twice, once with each parent

My favorite non-standard holiday song is If it has to be Christmas

With such lines as

If it has to be Christmas for you to be nice

You’re an asshole

If you think the season is the reason

You’re a piece of shit

And calling people spineless if they can only make a change for the better if it’s New Year’s and hints that so much of the holiday just appearances

It’s part of an album that was made for a game, so most of the other songs directly reference the game, but this one and a couple others are standalone

Recently I had two major problems with Windows updates that needed manual intervention in a very user unfriendly way.

Earlier this year one of the security updates for 22H2 broke my computer’s recovery partition and prevented the update to install and constantly fail. It took like a week for Microsoft to acknowledge the issue, at which point they said they would post a fix shortly. Then a whole month later they said they wouldn’t/couldn’t fix it automatically and anyone affected would have to manually delete the partition, shrink your main disk partition, and recreate the recovery partition. On top of that, there was no notification of the issue or how to fix it, one would have to notice the update keeps failing, look up the error, and dig up the instructions from their blog. And then go through the ugly process of editing partitions which I can’t imagine most users doing.

Either that or just live with no recovery until the next time you reinstall the os.

https://superuser.com/questions/1837245/kb5034441-and-changing-the-recovery-partition-starting-offset-in-order-to-be-abl

The second issue this year was halfway through a windows update (when it just reboots a couple times) my computer just simply stopped booting. I could power cycle and everything and after the bios it would just black screen forever. The only way I got around it was to hop into the bios and change the boot order. Another thing I wouldn’t expect normal users should have to do to just boot the computer

And I personally have seen all the ads in Windows explorer, the start menu, the lock screen, etc. and the massive pushing of Copilot being added to the toolbar even after removing it manually. And readding OneDrive. I’m in the US though so that’s probably why (it’s nice to know the only reason Microsoft does all this because they’re not legally pressured not to. Gives me so much trust in them to do the right thing with my computer and data)

I’ve since moved to Linux (which I’ve used on my work machine for many years) and have had near zero issues. It’s very nice not worrying how my computer is going to make itself worse without my consent next

edit: I definitely wouldn’t consider myself a fanatic that tries to convert everyone to Linux. For a lot of people Windows is the best choice, but in my case in particular it really has made things easier