EasyMark (u/EasyMark)

EasyMark commented on Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux himthe.dev/blog/microsoft... · Posted by u/bobsterlobster

I just started a new job where I'm subjected to Windows 11. They gave me a behemoth of a laptop. 64GB of RAM, absolute screamer of a CPU, big GPU, the whole deal.

Windows 11's file browser lags when opening directories with more than 100-ish files. Windows 11's file browser takes a few seconds to open at all.

Context menus take a noticeable amount of time to appear.

I'm getting used to a new keyboard, so I keep hitting Print Screen by accident. Half the time I can smack Esc and Snipping Tool will go away. The other half of the time, I have to mouse over and click the X to close it. There is no pattern to when Esc does/doesn't work.

If my computer goes to sleep, WSL becomes unresponsive. I have to save all my stuff and reboot to continue working.

If Windows 11 struggles this badly on a brand new laptop that I'm certain would retail for $4000+, I can only imagine how miserable it is for everyone else. All my colleagues who have been here for a bit longer got last-generation laptops. oof.

Edit... and besides, what does Windows 11 even do that KDE Plasma 5 wasn't doing a decade ago? How did it take this long to get a tabbed file browser?

EasyMark · 10 days ago

My work laptop does the same thing. Pretty maxed out for a Dell but still can be slow, especially right click context menu. Someone else said it could be endpoint software (executable scanning?) which makes sense. things improved a bit after a I turned off the eye candy under appearance settings other than font rendering and shadowing. Might be worth a try.

EasyMark commented on Proton spam and the AI consent problem dbushell.com/2026/01/22/p... · Posted by u/dbushell

stilldavid · 16 days ago

Seconding fastmail.

I have a catch-all and can reply from any address I please. If I reply from an email sent to retailer@mydomain.com it even auto populates the "from" address for me with "retailer", or I can choose to reply from one of my named accounts. It's really slick.

EasyMark · 15 days ago

I think the big downside for a lot of people is that it's hosted in the USA where the government is definitely headed in an autocratic direction that is abusive of most countries who don't comply to rantings from an orange madman. Definitely a huge downside.

EasyMark commented on Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops techcrunch.com/2026/01/23... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

knowitnone3 · 16 days ago

except MS could easily turn something on without you knowing and be uploading your files to their cloud. Yes, I believe they would stoop that low and even lower.

EasyMark · 15 days ago

or just save all your keystrokes and regular screen captures with "Recall"

EasyMark commented on Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops techcrunch.com/2026/01/23... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

mawise · 16 days ago

I consider myself pretty pro-privacy, but there is so much dragnet surveillance and legitimate breaches of the fourth amendment that I have a hard time getting up in arms over a company complying with a valid search warrant that is scoped to three hard drives (and which required law enforcement to have physical possession of the drives to begin with).

This is so much more reasonable than (for example) all the EU chat control efforts that would let law enforcement ctrl+f on any so-called private message in the EU.

EasyMark · 15 days ago

A lot of them are not really legitimate though. There's a reason that 4th amendment needs a modern version to require a warrant for tapping of any sort for things people generally assume are private. Flock, palantir, etc need to all go bankrupt, starved of data to spy on. In an ideal world of course. Maybe someday we'll wake up from the nightmare.

EasyMark commented on Microsoft gave FBI set of BitLocker encryption keys to unlock suspects' laptops techcrunch.com/2026/01/23... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

ferrouswheel · 16 days ago

It's interesting how many comments these days are like, "well of course".

Back in the day hackernews had some fire and resistance.

Too many tech workers decided to rollover for the government and that's why we are in this mess now.

This isn't an argument about law, it's about designing secure systems. And lazy engineers build lazy key escrow the government can exploit.

EasyMark · 15 days ago

The engineers who developed this developed it to a spec so that microsoft demanded that allows them to get into the system at any time. There was nothing lazy about it. This would be easily found by anyone who has the impetus to encrypt their drive. Don't put things on your work laptop that you don't want Dom down in IT reading all of it or Phil the police forensics dick

EasyMark commented on American importers and consumers bear the cost of 2025 tariffs: analysis kielinstitut.de/publicati... · Posted by u/47282847

bartread · 20 days ago

I'm glad they've done the work here and put a figure on it - the impact absolutely needed to be quantified - but I also have to say... to the surprise of absolutely no-one with even the most basic grasp of how economies function.

People, lots of people, lots of people who have a really deep understanding of national and global economics (unlike me), have been warning about this since talk of tariffs became common currency a year ago.

I wouldn't like to comment on HN's political leanings in the round and, obviously, there are a large portion of non-US readers/commenters on the site (including me), but will say this: there are a portion of you who voted for this. Exactly this.

What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.

EDIT: Wow... well, having asked the question, it looks like I now have a lot of answers and perspectives to read. Thank you all for taking the time to comment.

EasyMark · 18 days ago

I have a suspicion very few of HN voted for this, probably less than 1/4

EasyMark commented on Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux help.kagi.com/orion/misc/... · Posted by u/HelloUsername

freediver · a month ago

Kagi founder here. Orion isn't open source yet primarily because we're a 5-person team that spent 6+ years building this and created significant IP doing so, and we're not in a position to defend our work against a well-funded company using it as a base (we care very much about the business model of the browser surviving). Restrictive licenses help in theory but enforcing them against a company with a larger legal budget doesn't.

We also see limited upside from community contributions - the number of people who can meaningfully work on a WebKit browser is small (from our experience hiring), and most of them already work at Apple or Kagi. Meanwhile, managing an open source codebase of this size would add real strain to our small team.

The plan is however to open source when Orion is self-sufficient (business model of Orion is you are the customer and can pay for it - like we used to pay for browsers 20 years ago before advertisers started paying for our browsing), meaning it can sustain its own development independent of Kagi Search. I want to take the opportunity to thank all people who supported the Orion browser vision [1]. We're not there yet but recent 1.0 launch and expanding to Linux are steps in that direction. And on Jan 1st this year we began development of Orion for Windows (HN exclusive yay!).

I understand this is unsatisfying to people who want source access now. It's a tradeoff we've made deliberately, not something we're hiding behind.

[1] https://kagi.com/stats?sub_stats=orion

EasyMark · a month ago

Thank you for building orion. Thanks for the explanation and it all seems perfectly reasonable to me and your choices are solid.

EasyMark commented on Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux help.kagi.com/orion/misc/... · Posted by u/HelloUsername

hellcow · a month ago

It seems weird to run a closed-source browser on an open-source operating system when so many open alternatives exist—I certainly wouldn’t do it, and I’m a Kagi customer.

Does Kagi plan to open-source Orion on Linux?

EasyMark · a month ago

Why does it seem weird? I run a lot of proprietary software on linux. Actually made a career of it. I also run a lot of open source whenever I can, but I'm pragmatic about the whole affair. I think most users are like that.

EasyMark commented on Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades latimes.com/business/stor... · Posted by u/ValentineC

kwanbix · a month ago

Really? My dream retirement will be to be on a beach surfing while I drink caipirinha.

EasyMark · a month ago

The commonality is that you both enjoy doing what you love, rather than the actual realization of that which is obviously far different.