Yeah, it’s very unlikely it survived.

If you have your encryption key backed up, you have a chance to decrypt it still. It’s also possible, but unlikely, the key somehow survived the ISO write and it was written elsewhere on the drive, allowing the key to be recovered. I would only trust such with a professional. (There is basically a smaller encrypted section that your typed-in password decrypts, that section contains the encryption key the rest of the drive uses.)

Honestly though, if you have your stuff backed up (you do have your stuff backed up elsewhere?!?), just restore from your backup and call this a loss.

If you don’t have a backup, this was your wakeup call. Always have a backup going forward.

the website’s admins do not want you to have any control over your front page. The end result is utterly alienating.

This is one of the biggest things. Back when I would netflix often, I would constantly be annoyed when the ‘continue watching’ dialog was not the first one. Stop moving it around! Now I just watch everything locally. It’s so much nicer.

There is no reason streaming should be such a pain in the ass, and it amazes me the industry has made basic, paid access to shows a chore. And they wonder why viewership is not great*.

*Also the writing generally sucks ass and assumes I’m not paying attention. No, seriously, they assume you aren’t paying attention and write shows as such now. It makes so many things unwatchable.

i couldn’t understand why an indie developer (if they have any ethics) would sell out like that

It’s pretty tempting to know your next offering will sell, even if not a single customer plays it. No need to consider layoffs, etc.

I’m still confused on why Netflix has any games.

How to run something you don’t trust without performance lost?

A virtual machine is generally your best choice. You build a little box around it and tell it to have fun inside that box.

It doesn’t work well for games (you can do it with games, but it’s generally not worth it), but for smaller programs, it is a very reliable choice with minimal performance impact.

Things with admin privilege have access to everything. If it is only user-privileged, it only has access to what that user was granted access to.

Well, that is fair. Those anti-cheats are in user-land on not-windows. Don’t think I have given admin permissions to any game, including those with Easy Anti-Cheat, etc.

I’m still surprised Microsoft allows those to exist. Particularly for something as mundane as games.

steam games for example are nearly impossible to run without admin

What steam game requires admin permissions? I’m not aware of any games that require admin permissions.

“Reserve Cloud PCs” will be preloaded with Microsoft 365 apps and a user’s preferred security policies and other Windows customizations.

You need a working PC to access this ‘reserve’ PC. Why not just install Office on your own PC and ignore this extra cloud thing?

I’m confused, OBS works well. What is missing you are desiring?

I wouldn’t worry about it too hard, there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with Ubuntu. Both it and mint are in the same family after all.

Sounds like you should just keep Ubuntu and get the non-snap versions of the apps that need codecs.

O, yeah. Snaps basically live in their own little system. Anything you do to your wider system, like installing codecs, will not affect a snap. Easiest solution is to remove the snap VLC and install normal VLC. Same for Firefox and MPC.

I have heard nothing good about snaps and Canonical pushing them is a big reason you don’t see people recommending Ubuntu, and instead recommending things like Mint (me included).

Yeah, I’m not sure why anybody is mentioning Windows IoT. When you lookup where to buy this, Microsoft themselves tell you to call or email a salesman; it’s an enterprise-only thing. Recommending this for individuals is misguided.

I know when you install Mint there is a ‘install codecs’ checkbox during the installer, not sure if the same exists for Ubuntu.

For Ubuntu, you could try this and see if it solves your problem.

Most people are willing to buy new hardware, and nobody pays for a Windows key tbh.

Many people are also not willing to buy new hardware. I have several friends where each PC purchase is a massive hit on their budget that requires other things to be sacrificed. And one does pay for a Windows key every time they buy a Windows PC. SIs who sell PCs with Windows as optional offer the Linux PCs for cheaper since you don’t have to pay the Windows license fee.

Even if they did it would be a free upgrade from 10 to 11.

Depends on the PC, some of them just will not go to 11, in which case you are talking about spending hundreds of dollars to go from Win 10 to Win 11, but $0 to go from Win 10 to Linux.

Enhanced Privacy

Once again not something people strictly care about.

Privacy is exactly what got me and one of my other friends to switch. Many, many people don’t like being spied on. And taking reasonable steps to reduce it is very much so within our control.

The implication that carbon emissions is something an individual can do something about has been objectively disproven.

Not buying something new and using what you have demonstrably helps. There is no world in which throwing away a perfectly good PC just to manufacture and transport another is somehow better for carbon emissions. Microsoft should not be rewarded for creating so much unnecessary ewaste by encouraging people to go out and buy another Windows PC.

Two of my friends switched recently precisely because Win 10 was going end of life. ‘I have to change the OS anyway’ was the final motivator.

intimidating complexity of installing Wine

I would give that a shot. The full guide is install ‘wine’ and ‘winetricks’ the same way you install any other software you use. Then in winetricks, select ‘default prefix’, then ‘run arbitrary executable’, and point it to your .exe installer. After that, you just open the program like any other program on your system.

You generally don’t need to do more than that and might let you forgo ever dual booting again.

Microsoft already lost enterprise servers to Linux, and has lost significant ground over the years in consumer PCs to ChromeOS, MacOS, and Linux. Hell, the top PC gaming handheld is a Linux offering. That was an unheard of idea just five years ago.

While I agree that business laptops will continue to be dominated by Windows for awhile, the market shifts we see everywhere have downstream effects on business laptops too. When you find yourself having to train more and more people on how to use Windows than you did in the past, the value argument for Windows on your employee’s laptops quickly comes into question.

Why the hell would we need AI summaries of a wikipedia article? The top of the article is explicitly the summary of the rest of the article.