I will never be able to get a small engine private pilot license due to fainting, despite it literally never happening unless I’m standing up…

Dogged stubbornness. I use Linux because I refuse to give MS any more of my money, and I’m too stubborn to give up.

I’ve been fighting with it since 5.5. I was able to play in Fedora 42 using Proton Experimental this morning, but it’s been super hit and miss for me.

Be careful with disk destroyer!

Linux Mint Debian Edition: xfce, Firefox running, 12 tabs open, just under 3GB utilized. All my usual stuff open too, Telegram, Next cloud, etc.

I bet you’d be good with it and an SSD and a bit of swap. (I have no swap used.)

Yup! Security updates, but not build updates. You’re good until 23H02 goes out of support, then you’ll have to reinstall 11. At least, that’s what I understand. My 21H02 machines just never get the push for 22,23,24 etc major build updates.

I am a Fedora fan, but I do think that they may have issues with needing to upgrade every year. I am currently holding off on a Fedora 40-41 upgrade on my school laptop until finals are done, just in case something breaks.

I’ve been on Fedora since about 32ish? And I’ve had a couple of times where the upgrade didn’t go smooth.

For grandparents, I’d probably lean towards Debian with Gnome.

I did this for a few systems, but it doesn’t do major build updates. I’m getting full screen “You need to upgrade” notifications on a few 21h02 machines now, yet Windows update says it’s up to date.

Agreed. I have a VPS exit node for 4$/month, took an hour to set up, never once come within a mile of hitting my bandwidth cap on it.

The clients run on everything.

I’ve had two different unihertz models, and neither of them could stay on any wifi, and both of them dropped calls like crazy. I contacted customer support, and they ‘offered’ to swap for another exact same phone, if I paid to ship both ways, and I didn’t mind having no phone for a month. Jelly 2, and Atom XL. The Atom was especially bad as it has a giant bloody antenna sticking out the top of it, and still no WiFi!

Avoid Unihertz.

I ran a mediawiki for almost exactly that for a while on a really old computer that was collecting dust. Eventually I turned it into a VM. I still have it somewhere… You could totally host that on linode or digital ocean.

There are a lot of problems, but there are a lot of things we aren’t worrying about now, either. AIDS was killing millions, and there was no treatment. The Satanic Panic. People were exposed to lead and asbestos everywhere. Duck and cover drills in schools for when the nukes went off. I mean, we’re all scrambling to figure out how to stop climate disasters, but then they were scrambling to stop some nutter on either side from pushing a button and ending the world! Where I come from, they still took kids away from their parents for the crime of being Aboriginal! Things change.

I choose to be optimistic. All through the twentieth century, overpopulation and mass famine were looming spectres, and better crops, phosphate fertilizers, falling birthdates all led to us not really being that worried about that. Read Stand on Zanzibar.

Crime rates are down all over the world.

The inequality? 1920’s. The FTC and the EU are (finally, IMO) taking big tech to task for their monopolistic behaviour. It’s moving slow, but there is starting to be the political will to address the challenges.

Things go in cycles.

Does it give you anything? Can you select safe mode or nomodeset from the grub menu, or do you get no grub menu at all? I almost pulled the trigger on a used getac system a while back, but couldn’t justify the cost. If you get it working, please tell me how it goes under Linux!

I am in school, and make heavy use of Teams and Office, and do just fine in Linux! 365 on the web, Libre Office, and Teams in a Flatpak. My instructors can’t wrap their heads around it. I’m the only one in my program! (IT, no less.)

This is actually a real problem… A lot of digital documents from the 90’s and early 2000’s are lost forever. Hard drives die over time, and nobody out there has come up with a good way to permanently archive all that stuff.

I am a crazy person, so I have RAID, Ceph, and JBOD in various and sundry forms. Still, drives die.

Commenting to register my interest.

I will confess that I was tempted to throw some snarky comment about Linux, but I got over the urge.

Ditto, except mine just died one day. I put it away for bed, woke up, flipped it open, Nada. Brick. I felt it was a bit slower than I’d like, but got pretty good battery life.

Really tempted to try a Musebook, based on Risc-V, because apparently I’m a sucker for punishment.

Yeah, I did try that. Basically, if I doubled the memory I allocated, I gave it half again longer before it crashed, but it still crashed, eventually.

It’s no big deal, this was last year, I may try again one day. Loving Searxng though!

I tried running yacy for a while but it just ran for a bit less than a day then ran out of memory and crashed, over and over. Tried to figure out the problem, but it’s niche enough that I couldn’t get anywhere googling the issue.

I shouldn’t talk because I dip in and out, but I do that because I like the possibilities. Like, what if someone comes up with a concept, but no one tries it, and it turns out to really work? Like, I like immutability as a concept, so I’ve tried Silverblue, Kinoite, and Bazzite. If nobody gave it a go, then the concept would die on the vine.

Also, I like seeing different ways of thinking about technology.