MudMan

It depends on what “crap” is involved specifically and your use case, I suppose.

I think it’s worth calling out that Win11 does indeed look extremely different depending on what settings you pick. Even out of the box my Win11 does not look like the mess a lot of the online advocacy likes to show. I’m guessing a bunch of the settings are saved to the MS account (which is again something people insist on considering anathema but I’ve used since before it was cool to hate it for several unrelated reasons).

Win11 has some quirks (where is my vertical dock, MS, it’s been years), some inexplicable technical flaws (how is your indexing so bad, MS, and why is the online search-enabled start menu so slow but the multisearch bar instant) and it is occassionally annoying to have to keep up with poorly communicated new features I don’t care about (what’s new screens, MS, they exist for a reason), but it’s mostly just… you know, Windows.

I’ll say this, if all my system partitions exploded today and I had to reinstall everything I’d definitely have an easier time getting back to where I was from scratch on my Windows devices/drives than on my Linux ones.

Any normal install of W11 can be cleaned up a fair bit just by manually refusing permissions and disabling unwanted features. For all the memes, very few of the features people complain about are forced on.

After that the biggest fixes I’d recommend are editing the registry to remove online search in the Start Menu, which makes it very workable (although there is a redesign incoming, not sure how that’ll interact) and installing PowerToys to get a universal search shortcut and a bunch of really nice QoL features.

W11 is actually perfectly usable after some customization, honestly.

Oh, so there literally is no practical reason? Just pure aesthetics, OCD-ish stuff?

So does that extend to the lid and people just say “toilet seat” as a catch-all or is there a specifically cultural predilection for the seat down/lid up configuration? Because that one looks messy to me. If the goal is for the toilet/bathroom to look tidy surely the lid down is a must, right?

You guys keep coming back with glib answers meant to comment on the question, and you’re missing the point.

I genuinely don’t know what the complaint is. I need someone to tell me that it’s about people finding it gross to be within 30 cm of something previously exposed to a naked butt cheek for cultural reasons or something. I genuinely don’t get it. Like, in practical terms. It’s not a rhetorical question.

Yeah, with a semi-large household there’s a fairly even chance of anybody needing or wanting any sort of configuration on the toilet. But mostly you just… you know, put the whole lid down. For one so you don’t spray your poop all over when you flush, for another because it… you know, looks nice.

I get wiping the edge if you’re a peer-stander-upper. I get making sure there’s paper left. I get cleaning the bowl (which Americans don’t get because they poo in swimming pools, as it turns out). I don’t get the argument about the toilet seat position specfiically.

Incidentally, I used to think the argument was about dudes not putting the seat up to pee and spraying their stuff all over the seat, plus the mist then leaking under and drying at the bottom, so if you don’t wipe after yourself it ends up getting all crusty under there. For the longest time I assumed the argument was that people were mad at dudes peeing witht he seat down, and only later realized that’s apparently not what people are mad about?

They care about what? What do these people want to happen that is not happening and why?

This is a conversation I’ve literally never had about an issue I’ve never heard being an issue outside of that one joke in The Big Lebowski and other US media. I genuinely don’t know what sort of cultural or personal context this “caring” is supposed to be about.

Why is this a debate? I’m always confused by this one and how everybody assumes it’s a huge argument. Why are people annoyed at either? I don’t even register what state the toilet seat is at when I arrive. I’ll just adjust it based on whatever it is I need. What is the supposed annoyance at lowering (or raising) the seat? Is that not what you do before doing your business regardless? Don’t you mostly leave the whole lid down anyway? Why is this such a cliche? I do not get it.

Is there anybody on Lemmy that isn’t a software engineer of some description? No? Anyone?

The government isn’t a subscription service or a company.

I can’t deal with Americans’ ultracapitalist perspective on the res publica. It’s so annoying.

Honestly, even at the time that entire “benefit of the doubt” garbage read like some combination of active collaboration and outright denial. It’s nuts that Trump rode it to a second term, honestly. As late as the week of the election people were having haughty conversations about the lack of ties between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign and those morons still elected them again because Harris was too weak on Israel or whatever.

I mean, I’d normally not assume an entire culture is incapable of parsing reality, but there are still supposed American leftists going “they’re both the same” on this site right now.

Which reminds me I’m trying to cut off American politics from my media menu as much as possible, so maybe it’s time to mute this stuff and move on with my day, because man, what a group of weirdos.

I mean… yeah, but also I’m very well on the record disagreeing with that and calling Trump a fascist since day one. Not that I expect you dig through my online presence to corroborate it.

I’m not American. The presence of fascists in US politics has been a commonly accepted truth in anybody anywhere left of demochristians for half a century. This isn’t “hindsigh”, it’s “I recommend always reading what people say about your country in foreign newspapers”.

And for the record, we got fascists, too. We’re just less shy about calling them that, maybe? Certainly don’t have any delusions about ourselves in terms of being inoculated from fascism at a fundamental level. The idea that Americans would have survived Bush, let alone the overtly fascist Trump without noticing or acknowledging it seems outright bizarre to me, but there you go.

I mean, Stephen Miller isn’t even shy about it. Even if you are the kind of European that would argue Berlusconi wasn’t a fascist and could maaaaaybe entertain Trump is on that same level of “just horny criminal idiot” you surely would have had zero questions after hearing five minutes of Dracula Hitler back in 2016.

What? Everybody thought fascism would come from the inside in the US. Even if you slept through the first Trump term this has been a thing since the 1930s. Surely during the Cold War, and definitely for everybody outside the US itself, but… I mean, were you alive during the whole “war on terror” nonsense?

Had the post-Reagan, post 9-11 US fascists successfully brainwashed even left of centre normies into thinking that was not the case? Were Americans that oblivious?

Most of that is entirely absurd and not worth getting into. I’m sure a pedantic historian can nitpick it if that’s the way everybody wants to go.

However, let me revisit your accusation of “contradicting my point”. At no stage here have I conflated unarmed protest with peaceful protest. All along I’ve been frustrated by the US mindrot tendency of accepting no nuance between some My Little Pony version of political action and outright armed confrontation. The worldwide protests that show how bonkers the US perception of the issue is were not peaceful, but neither were they an armed confrontation where protestors attempted to use their armed might to deter police forces. They were… you know, political action. Civil unrest. “Civil” being the key word.

The way you and US leftists in general tend to parse stuff like this is nonsense. The fact that mass protests can escalate to the point they went in Nepal, Madagascar or any of the countries in the general “Gen Z spring” movement and prior protest waves disproves the US perspective because a) it has nothing to do with the level of access to weapons, and b) it shows sufficiently commited public action doesn’t have to be either fully nonviolent or an armed insurrection.

Americans look at this as some form ot guarantee their success by either intimidating the other into submission or hoping that the other side will fold immediately. That’s not how this goes. “The cops may charge at us, we should bring guns” is some weird overlap of thinking protestors are entitled to painless victory and that there is no possible pressure beyond violent pressure. It makes no sense to me. And yet, here we are, a bunch of posts down the line.

See, and there it is. Zero to a hundred. It’s either popcorn or civil war, no gradient.

I mean, for one thing Nazi Germany also wasn’t defeated by military cosplayers flashing their gun collection at them, and clearly neither was MAGA America. The first one was defeated by a borderline apocalyptic global war, so… in the grand scheme both the military cosplay and the sternly worded letters are pretty much about just as effective there. We’re still waiting and seeing on the MAGA America part.

But for another, plenty of nonviolent and/or unarmed protest has achieved its goals, historically. From Europe to India to South Africa to the actual United States. The “sternly worded letter” derision is pure action movie fantasy. This month alone the governments of Madagascar and Nepal came down after mass protests. Not a single set of camo pants in sight, just… you know, students organizing on social media and One Piece flags for some reason because this is a weird timeline.

They weren’t even fully nonviolent, either. There were clashes, there was enforcement violence and dozens of people, mostly protestors, were killed in both countries. And still two governments came down and the situations continue to evolve and push for full regime change.

Meanwhile the example I’m being given is some American fascists standing on a street while cops that agree with them wait for them to get sleepy at their military cosplay convention and go home.

I don’t get Americans. I don’t think the way they see the world as a culture makes sense, and I am terrified at how much they export it successfully through places like this. Nepal just held a full-on election over Discord and I still understand how that went down better than middle class America’s political views.

Yeah, no, that’s the point. You look at a barbaric demonstration of a completely broken down society and see something that works. That’s horrifying.

You effectively saw some guy walk into a subway holding his erect, exposed penis in one hand and a machete in the other and went “hey, that guy found an empty seat right away, I think we can all learn a lesson here”.

That’s nuts. It’s weird that you don’t see how nuts that is.

Yeah, no shit, that happens everywhere.

Some people go back the next day, some societies react to this by protesting harder and longer. Other times this devolves into outright conflict or seismic political shifts. Sometimes it settles down over time.

The reaction isn’t typically some combination of “Oh, well, what can you do” and “maybe if we bring actual firearms the natural conflict with authority baked into all civilian political action will dissipate fully and permanently”.

That’s some US-specific delusion and intrinsic tendency to violence right there.

That is fucking terrifying and so is anybody who doesn’t think so.

Why else would you shoot at them?

Is that not what weapons are for? Who the hell goes to a peaceful protest expecting to be shot at with lethal weapons? What the hell? You are not protesting at that stage, you are at war, that’s some Tiananmen shit. Listen to me carefully: if you think law enforcement at a protest is going to open fire with live ammunition on unarmed protesters do NOT go to that protest. Start organizing a guerrilla, see if you can get the legal system to act on the people responsible, get in touch with press and try to get international awareness on the serious breach of human rights happening on your country, but do not just show up in a protest you can reasonably expect will lead to a massacre of unarmed civilians. I can’t believe I have to put this in actual words.

I’m always so baffled by American unwillingness to take any action followed by the immediate assumption that the very next step is going to be full-on murder. Just zero escalation, in their minds it’s either eat popcorn at home or be shooting at people indiscriminately.

I genuinely don’t get it. There’s a mental model at play here but it may as well not be carbon-based.

I mean, it’s a lot safer to shoot at unarmed people. I’d certainly be way more willing to shoot at someone that’s armed.

Like I said, alien thoughts in alien minds. I just can’t follow US trains of thought at this point.

Holy shit, are they? Because from the outside looking in I assume the presumption that a gun may be present is why US police is essentially a military organization willing to shoot anybody at the slightest provocation, so I would assume if you are faced with a crowd of armed people your first instinct to stop that is to shoot first.

I mean, my common sense assumption is that bringing a gun of any kind to a protest is a fantastic way to start a massacre of your own people, but I’ve lost the ability to parse how Americans understand both political action and violence ages ago.