I’m in a similar situation, though I’ve already got a dual boot set up so it’s just a matter of only using Windows when I just absolutely have to.

Earlier today, I tried to zip a directory on Windows 11 with the context menu, and it wouldn’t do it! It’s a feature that’s been in Windows forever and is even in Ubuntu, but somehow over at Microsoft they’ve managed to break it. Incredible.

In the United States, it’s loose. A PE license is required to stamp plans, which is very important if you’re a civil engineer working on buildings or infrastructure or an electrical engineer working on utilities.

That said if you’re a mechanical engineer, you probably aren’t going to work on anything that requires you to be a PE. (Though the Federal Aviation Administration has the DER [Designated Engineering Representative] qualification, which is separate from the PE but useful in aviation.) Because of that, most mechanical engineers don’t bother. The same is true for a lot of disciplines.

That said, this guy didn’t get his undergrad degree in mechanical engineering and worked as a millwright. At that point, we’re definitely stretching what counts as an engineer.

The main benefit I remember from jumping to Discord from IRC back in the day was the ability to easily see past messages. That said, I’m not sure if that’s a problem anymore on IRC since I haven’t used it in ages. Even then, I don’t think it would be too terribly difficult to whip up a self-hostable fediverse competitor to Discord. It would essentially be IRC++.

It’s probably more of a critical mass issue, though not near the level of Reddit vs Lemmy or Twitter vs Bluesky vs Mastodon. Every Discord server is essentially a walled garden. A Discord server doesn’t hold much advantage over a Slack server, GroupMe, Teams, or IRC. For that reason, it would be a lot easier to move individual communities over.

Bullshit. Nobody, or at least very few people, expected Reddit to revert the changes. A protest can be successful even if it doesn’t lead to immediate change. I was here on Lemmy long before the API nonsense happened over at Reddit, and the difference over here is night and day. Lemmy has been around for awhile, but until these last few months it couldn’t hold a candle to Reddit in terms of content or activity. Maybe it still can’t, but now it has enough users to be viable. Reddit might go on like nothing happened, but in the background a competitor has been born.