My first Linux install was Slackware sometime in the late 90’s. I didn’t really use it though, as I never managed to get it working with my dial-up Internet. Stupid winmodems.
The first distribution I actually used was Mandrake. Others I’ve used since then include Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS. I’ve landed on using Manjaro on both my main desktop and laptop, though I have secondary machines running Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and EndeavourOS.
I’m not saying that old hardware is useless. I make good use out of old hardware too. I have an old i5 Dell from about 2012 running ZoneMinder, a Phenom II system from around 2009 that I use a Linux server, an even older Core 2 Duo system that’s a glorified MP3 player, and even a very early 2000’s Pentium III that I use for a router (sadly I’m going to have to retire it from these duties soon - it can barely handle a 100 mbps DSL connection, and it’s too old and outdated to run the modern router distributions).
However, for every one of those computers I have another one like it sitting in a closet plus a few extras. All the geeks and tinkerers I know are also swimming in old hardware. If I really wanted to get rid of this stuff, I’d have a hard time giving it away. Economically, this stuff is worthless. The supply greatly exceeds the demand(*)
(*) well, except maybe the Pentium III… it’s old enough now that retro gamers may be interested…
If all she uses the computer for is playing Sims 4, another option is just let her continue to use Windows 10. If she’s running it through Steam she’s probably got another 3-4 years before that stops working.
That’s true, but the supply vastly outstrips the demand. They may make great Linux machines, but the majority of 10-15 year old computers have little to no economic value.
That’s interesting. I always felt the newer Bond films were taking themselves a bit too seriously. I suppose this might be why.
I remember my first game of Stellaris many years ago - I had bought some pack that included some of the DLC out at the time. The crisis was bugged so that even after I beat the crisis and wiped it from the galaxy, the game didn’t recognize that I had done so which left the game unbeatable. This was my first playthrough, no mods or anything like that, and I hit a game-breaking bug.
I played quite a bit of Stellaris as it was (still is?) a fun game, but I am more of a casual gamer and every time I picked the game up again they had changed at least one major mechanic, and there was yet another DLC out if you wanted the full experience. Encountering bugs in a play through was common, and game breaking ones would still pop up from time to time. Finally I just got fed up, especially for the cost of some of the pricier DLC you can buy a game like Factorio which is a much better value.
So at this point I’m done with Paradox. I suppose if I really had the urge to play Stellaris again I’d find something out on the high seas, but there’s enough other, better polished, games out there to keep me busy.
And for all the money you spend on a Paradox game, you end up with something that feels like a half-finished beta.
I use BiglyBt on Debian. I use BiglyBt because I previously used Vuze, and I used Vuze because I previously used Azureus. I don’t really remember why I went with Azureus originally, but it may have just been because it was popular at that time.
I get the impression most people use other bittorrent clients nowadays, but BiglyBt does what I need it to do. I never really used any of the “advanced” features of Vuze myself, pretty much only using it for torrents.
The sad thing is back in the Windows XP days Microsoft had the focus stealing thing pretty much solved. Well okay - I remember you had to install some of the PowerToys or make some registry edits to get at some of the settings. But once setup pretty much nothing could steal focus away from the current window, which was a welcome change from where we had been. That started to break again in Windows 7, and has gotten worse with every release since then.
Admittedly XFCE isn’t perfect either, but it’s much better behaved than modern Windows.
I see enough weird behavior out of the Dells at work and their USB-C docks so I can believe it. Not detecting the dock, not charging from the dock, ports not working on the dock, randomly insisting the dock isn’t compatible. Even the machines that end up as folding desktops that never get disconnected from their dock end up doing this stuff. I really had no use for a laptop anyway so I finally convinced them to give me a desktop.
And you’d know they’d gerrymander it into a small handful of high population blue territories and a giant pile of mostly empty red territories.
Canada is one of the founding members of NATO. But so is the USA. Could get interesting, but not in a good way.
That’s impressive. Even the IT-managed corporate Windows 11 Enterprise installs at work have ads in it. Nothing like what you’d find buying a cheap Windows laptop from someplace like Best Buy with the Windows Home edition, but there’s still ads in places like the start menu. I can get rid of some of them, at least temporarily, but not being an admin on the machine I can’t seem to squash them entirely.
It didn’t help that Netflix was also one of the big users of pop-up ads back when that was a thing. I’ve never forgiven them for that either.
I guess it’s the difference between the TV turning on and immediately doing TV things vs. having to boot up the TV, then after a wait getting dumped into some terrible smart TV interface.
I’d say traditional (linear) television. Still common enough, though even today it’s clearly on the way out.
Unless something drastic happens, there will be a decent number of cars on the road in 20 years that are already on the road today.
Subnautica has some nice scenery, though for a painting I’d probably go with something like the safe shallows where there’s plenty of sunlight, or maybe the underwater islands or the kelp forest.
MInecraft would have a lot of possibilities, particularly with some of the new terrain generation for mountains as well as the cherry tree biome that was recently added. However, with each world being generated randomly, there’s no definitive scenes that would be instantly identifiable as Minecraft. So you’d have to rely on making the painting sufficiently blocky and/or replicating some of the terrain generation quirks like the occasional floating tree or lava flowing out the side of a hill and things like that.
To me, it’s one of those movies that seems like it could have been great, and as you say it had cool concepts and high stakes scenes. But there were just too many places where the characters were dumb, and they had to be dumb in order to make the story work, and then story itself is pretty weak. To me, it’s not a terrible movie, but I’ve never understood all the hype around it.
That’s not fair. You can make bootable Linux flash drives in Windows too.