Linux

I've only had two mentionable issues with Linux so far: A GPU bug that causes a few games to reliably hang my GPU (which may have been fixed recently with newer mesa drivers; I haven't checked), and Helvum not recognizing anything (which was probably me installing it wrong or something).

Windows however... Changing system settings with no warning, forgetting network configuration out of the blue, GPU crashes that hard rebooted windows, and driver updates that prevent booting at all. Some software gets installed without notice, others get removed without notice. The forced update debacle has lost me more than one open document. I've had critical audio issues on every machine I've used, including individual school machines that should be identical. Several of my remaining windows machines have issues with various system programs maxing out the disk write speed and locking up everything for dozens of minutes at a time.

And then more recently there's the security violations, always online behavior, enshitification, and removal of user choice.

This may be a tad biased as I've used windows for a few decades and Linux for just over a year, but going back is always a chore...

Do you have any idea how hard it is to go from Linux to Windows?

I do. It's a MASSIVE Pain in the ass, especially if you're looking for minimalism, performance and a tiling window manager, as Windows can't provide either of these.

And there's also the spyware and other stuff. I just remember hating one of my lecturers in college for using Visual Studio in the first year (Y1), and using Excel in Y2, for the modules she taught, meaning I had to use Windows for them. Luckily, for the first assignment in Y1, and the second assignment in Y2, I didn't actually need Windows, and for the second assignment of Y1, I just did it in class on the college's Windows machines. But Y2, first assignment I did a Windows dualboot cuz I unfortunately didn't have time to do it in class.

Anyways, point is that I associate Windows with bad memories. While I associate Linux with good ones.

The [youtube(.)com] link is the actual website that you watch the video on which can have a crap load of extra stuff like playlist info, highlighted comment info, where you came from, and probably more. The links can get really long, like 100+ characters.

The [youtu(.)be] link is a redirect website who's only purpose is to reduce the size of the link to just the watch ID and timestamp. It dumps even the query language to keep the links under 30 characters or so.

Such link shorteners (such as bit(.)ly or tinyurl) were popular when Twitter was getting big and the character limit was an SMS message length; 140 characters. youtu(.)be in particular helped avoid bait and switch scams (as you can tell it's definitely a video instead of going in blind) and it has the watch ID so titles, thumbnails, and embeds still work.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/watch?v=WjABILVAz5Y

https://piped.video/WjABILVAz5Y

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I think the second format also allows for specifying the timestamp, so you can link to a certain point in the video