This app lets restaurants and coffee shops charge to use the bathroom
Right. That tracks with my experience. So when Americans are all weirded out by "paid toilets" in Europe, do they mean those? I always read that as them finding they had to pay for toilets in businesses or restaurants.
I've been in the UK dozens of times and never seen those. I guess I just don't pee out that often, but in the pubs and restaurants I've been to it's never come up.
I'm not entirely sure of the logic of why somebody would be cleaner after paying 50 cents than otherwise. It seems like a move to keep away homeless people, but even then, it's not that hard to secure fifty cents and unless they have a timer going in there, which seems ill-advised, it wouldn't help either.
In any case, I've only ever seen them in outdoor latrines and rarely in public transportation hubs. They are definitely not the norm anywhere I've been.
No, I'm not talking past it. I just have less an issue with it. The Android thing is disingenuous, though.
But I did explicitly address it above, when I said once you have to pick a distro at all the OP has a point because that's already past the level of insight casual users have or care about. It's literally right there in my first response to you.
Yeah, right? That's my experience, too. I feel like outdoor latrines charge like a coin, presumably to keep people from squatting in there, but most places don't even have those. Maybe otherwise people are conflating customer-only toilets with paid toilets? I've never seen a paid toilet in an airport, though, and only once in a train station, and people seemed to be quite pissed about it and using the restaurants' facilities instead.
I've never been charged for a mall toilet in Europe. But hey, that's the problem with saying "Europe". I can tick off maybe a copule dozen malls in maybe three or four countries, so we only have like twenty or thirty countries left to verify, assuming the practice is set at the national level and not regional.
In my mind this was a German thing that people kept saying was a European thing, but I haven't peed in enough public places in Germany to tell you.
I'm not splitting hairs, I'm calling out a fallacious argument. If your take is that Desktop Linux is super accessible and mainstream because Android is a thing that's a bad take.
Here's how I know it's a bad take: if I come over to any of the "what Distro should I use first" threads here and I tell you to try Samsung Dex you're probably not going to be as willing to conflate those two things anymore.
But hey, yeah, no, Android is super accessible. So is ChromeOS. If that's your bar for what Linux has become for home users, then yeah, for sure. Linux is on par with Windows in terms of accessibility. May as well call it quits on the desktop distros muddying the waters, then. I mean, if all that is Linux what are those? 1% of the Linux userbase? 0.1%? Why bother at that point?
Where is this mystical European place where people charge for toilets? I swear, I hear this all the time when it comes to US vs EU differences and I don't know what they mean.
I mean, I know places that have toilets just for customers, so you need to ask for a key or a code to use it when you're there, I know of a couple of cities that charge a nominal fee, like a quarter for outdoor latrines for some reason, and I know of one specific train station that licensed toilets out to a private company and they tried to charge for them, which is very shitty and everybody hated it.
The idea of restaurants charging extra to pee is not a thing in the European places where I've been/lived.
I gotta say, the frequency with which you hear that Android/ChromeOS is actually Linux and it totally counts, or how successful Linux is on other applications is REALLY much less flattering to desktop Linux than people claiming that seem to think.
I'd argue the moment you have to pick a distro in the first place you've made the guy's point. That's already way past the level of interest, engagement or decision-making capacity most baseline users have. Preinstalled, tightly bound versions like Android or SteamOS are a different question, maybe. Maaaaybe.
Oh, but we haven't talked about the opposite thing, which is when tech-savvy user X thinks they know better than whichever IT person or team set up a process and decide to ignore it or bypass it and then they break something and nobody's happy.
I see your point, though. I mean, even if you know what you're doing there are many times where you just need to get a thing done and you just want somebody to make it so the computer does the thing, rather than understand how the thing-doing is done. We forget, but computers are actually super hard and software is overcomplicated and it's honestly a miracle most of it works at all most of the time.
It's not, though. Some of the people I'm talking about are experts at intricate, complicated things. But for digital natives and tech-heads this language is second nature, that's not true of everybody. And for some of those people they know enough to realize that sometimes computers lie to them. Is this message telling me to press a button real or is it malicious? Yeah, I can tell pretty easily, but they can't.
There are tons of people out there, of all ages, for whom computers are scary bombs that can steal their money or their data or stop working at the slightest provocation. Thing is, they're not wrong.
You know what? Windows doesn't get enough credit for its multimonitor window management. Win11 saving window combos and providing easy partitioning and docking on each monitor is actually really cool, and the keyboard shortcuts to handle them are simple and useful. There are lots of things about it I don't like (I'll keep whining for a movable taskbar until I get one back, Microsoft), but I'll admit they do that well.
Oh, absolutely. My favorite conversation to have with non-techies is
"It doesn't work."
"OK, what does it say on the screen."
"I don't know."
Like, they can read. I've seen them read. But the moment they get something on the screen with text they haven't seen before they freeze. And even if they can read the plainly written text saying stuff like "hey, we need to install something, is that fine?" they can't parse what is being said. Half the requests from help I get from people are about them getting a prompt to update something that needs manual permission and them being too insecure and scared to know what they should do.
So yeah, the bar is much lower than people think. As in, the question "Do you want to do this thing you have to do and is fine to do? Yes/No" is an unsurmountable obstacle.
The Windows market share has wavered between 90 and 70% over the years.
I don't know that you can ignore that assumption.
It depends on the application anwyay. My last set up for a non-techie was a Samsung Android tablet with a keyboard cover. It's now harder to get that person on either a Windows or Linux computer.
I'm a bad shill for Picard, I am about as down on the whole thing equally. Ultimately I just don't need to revisit old heroes, ever. I hate this future of all our heroes being basically watching our dads grow old and sad and frail. But yeah, people like S3 more because it's more of a fanservice-y thing than trying to tell the adventures of old Picard by himself, so if that sounds appealing to you go for it.
As for Discovery... yeah, absolutely, skip Season 1. Season 2 is the one that ties into SNW, so if you watched that, you can jump in right there and it's almost a stand-alone show that feels a lot more consistent with SNW and a lot less consistent with Season 1. I'd still go back and watch S1 later if you enjoy the rest of it, but skipping that is absolutely a valid watch order if you don't want to do the "trudge through the bad first season" thing of most Star Trek shows. I actually quite like seasons 2 and 4 specially. I'd rank them above all of Picard and just behind SNW, as far as nuTrek is concerned, and I'd rather watch those than most of Voyager and DS9, if I'm being honest.
The TOS Kirk thing is... interesting. I mean, you're not wrong, Kirk was supposed to be just an all-around good guy Mary Sue who's always great and right. It's just that 60s Trek take on that turns out to be almost comedically horny and rash, especially as parsed by Shatner's acting choices, especially when you retroactively compare it to TNG, which, let's face it, is the de facto standard people have for what default Trek is. I think SNW's Kirk splits the difference just fine... but he feels like an entirely different character. I can almost see Pine's Kirk growing into Shatner's more than I can Paul Wesley's. But from the perspective you present? Yeah, they paint him as being more aggressive than Pike, for better or worse, but also mostly just smart and nice rather than a horny hothead. Definitely not doing Shatner, though, and less iconic than either of the other takes, I'd say. Which is fine, it's Anson Mount's show anyway. If anything I'd have liked less Kirk in the two seasons they've done so far. Hell, I'd have taken that cast in a standalone show rather than a prequel.
Shout out to Martin Quinn's Scotty, though. He got like two episodes so far and already he's the one cast member who I can see as the same character from TOS. The others are fine, they're just playing their own take on the character's premise, as opposed to the same character from the original.
For sure, that's my whole point. There's enough Trek now, and it's all different enough that it's hard to not have at least one or two things you enjoy from the past five years of it or so.
I think the idea of having a Trek show that is following the one character through a season-long story is interesting. The problem Disco has is that the crew and the classic Trek dynamic is just too good, you end up resenting not spending more time with the crew early on. Like every show, though, they course correct and it all ends up being some take on TNG. Which is fine by me.
Picard got that, too. I would have stuck with a Picard-less La Sirena crew for a season. I didn't need the nostalgia trip. And it's telling that in Season 3 everybody just wanted to have Legacy be a thing because the idea of that crew was more interesting than the self-centered nostalgia porn stuff in the rest of the show. Which, hey, it's fine. I think SNW being exactly that is very helpful in allowing the other shows to be their own thing.
I don't know, man. I mean, I know about that last part, that is definitely a thing. I don't know if that's it or if the perception here is different or what. I wasn't even trolling, I'm mildly curious about Rice-a-roni now. Just mildly enough not to google it. Maybe the Carrefour versus Pepsi thing reads as a Europe vs the US thing? I hadn't even considered that until just now and it seems hilarious.
For the record, we obviously get a ton of cereal, including very sugary cereal. You can get those pillowy things with nutella inside them, which are less cereal and more a way to pretend you're having breakfast when you're really just inhaling a full box of chocolate cookies.
Up to you. Disco starts a bit rough, and I get why people didn't enjoy the gritty tone and the reworked Klingons in Season 1, although I wasn't as outraged by them (frankly, Disco S1 is no more off-tone than early Enterprise or late DS9, if you ask me). However, by Season 2 they had course corrected hard and later seasons of Discovery mostly just differentiate from Strange New Worlds in that SNW is episodic and Disco does season-long arcs. Otherwise they're pretty much bang-on tonally. I think a lot of the pushback these days comes from people bouncing off early, making it a crusade to hate it and never checking back. Which, again, big Enterprise undertones right there.
But yeah, if you're out there going "nuTrek sucks" to me these days you come across pretty detached. Watch what you like, obviously, but new Trek is all over the place in tone and feel and there's tons of great stuff in there, as far as I'm concerned.
Also, Lower Decks season 1 feels off to me and always has, but it gets pretty good later and depending on your tolerance for watching cartoons meant for younger kids, Prodigy is pretty much just a sequel to Voyager, so if you're more continuity and nostalgia driven you may want to give it a look.
Touchscreens were absolutely not commonplace in mass market devices. There were absolutely a thing that existed, but they were associated to productivity devices and corporate things trying to look modern and fancy. I'd argue with no Nintendo DS you get no iPhone.
Nintendo's pitch for the DS was that it wasn't a Gameboy. The Advance was the Gameboy. This was the adult system for adults that used a touchscreen and you could hold it sideways and read it like a book. And they had Brain Age/Brain Training, based on some quack's later disproved theories but that sounded and felt healthy and meant for older people who liked to do sudoku. Also, you want to do sudoku? You can do it here! There's a pen and everything.
That "blue ocean" strategy on the DS and the absolutely insane success of it was the template for the Wii two years later. And it worked both times. They weren't even shy about it, they are on the record a bunch explaining how they wanted to sell boring, grey DSs to people and then get them to buy games and become gamers instead. That ended up being what made Apple the biggest company in the universe, and it's blow by blow the strategy Nintendo came up with. They are just too budget minded, so they attached that to a cheap console instead of an expensive mobile phone.
Yeah, no, me too. I've peed in a couple of those in just the past few months, and in hundreds in my life, and I haven't paid money once. Like I said elsewhere, the one time I've seen a paid toilet in a place it was a public transportation hub and both I and other patrons seemed full-on outraged.
Clearly we have experience in different places and it seems like this is a regional thing. I just don't know which regions that is.