[inetknght]

I run Linux on my personal computers.

Word of warning: businesses, possibly including your employer, may consider you to be a robot, or a terrorist, or tell you to install Windows, or tell you to use your phone, or tell you that you have no right to privacy.

I recently had to go through a background check for a prospective employer. The background check website wouldn't even load. The support agent told me that it's a Firefox problem and told me that I needed to open the website on Chrome or Edge or on my phone, and that the website is working "perfectly". Alas, it worked fine with Firefox on Linux, as long as the user-agent reported that it's actually Chrome and Windows.

Yeah the website is indeed working "perfectly": perfectly enough to block employment of people who care about privacy.

[giancarlostoro]

I keep one Windows or Mac around always for work specific things, if Linux is unsupported I can switch. Heck you could get a free Windows dev VM from Microsoft (they rotate them out every 3 months).

[inetknght]

> Heck you could get a free Windows dev VM from Microsoft

You gotta accept Microsoft's licenses and EULAs and crap like that. Plus it's still spyware. No thanks

[swagmoney1606]

Also the VM install images have been pulled off of their page since october...

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt...

>Due to ongoing technical issues, as of October 23, 2024, downloads are temporarily unavailable.

They are morons.

[giancarlostoro]

This happened once before, they always wind up returning, hopefully that's the case.

Maybe someday ReactOS will be usable fully as a Windows VM OS.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

It's not just about us, it's about less-technical people who might adopt libre operating systems if they're easy to use, but not if web services intentionally refuse to do business with them.

[inetknght]

> but not if web services intentionally refuse to do business with them.

And in many ways, I'd be fine with that if they'd be up-front and honest about it.

Alas, Microsoft certainly is not. Cloudflare is not either. Many of these services just sit there and pretend like they're loading without showing any sort of error indication. Much like a tarpit but it's malicious on the business side and with little to no recourse on the real human side.

[msm_]

Microsoft may be malicious, buy it's more likely it's incompetent.

Cloudflare is not malicious, but is between a rock and a hard place. By caring about privacy you are, indeed, looking more suspicious. In a perfectly anonymous world, reputation-based captchas couldn't work. It's OK if you think they shouldn't exist, but Cloudflare customers and most people like them.

Everyone else is not on some secret plan to destroy the Linux Desktop, they just don't test their websites on linux/firefox (because "nobody uses that"), which makes them unusable, which causes people to drift off linux/firefox.

[giancarlostoro]

I do wonder if Edge on Linux would actually work with some of these sites.