Yeah I honestly legit enjoyed my fond time with old Windows machines back when they were fun and user-oriented instead of the user-exploitative SAAS monsters they are now.

Win10 wasn’t even SO bad as everyone says…well, until recently when they started forcing Microsoft Accounts on install and harass you with their ads every 3 forced updates. Ugh.

Now they’re on the Ai bandwagon? Yeah they’re real small in my rearview mirror now.

I think it’s just a different landscape now, and I’m glad Linux was there to jump to after all these companies started losing their collective minds.

“Linux is open source and free! You can do whatever you want with it! It’s our thing!”

Microsoft: “Whatever I want with it?..Free?..Hm…This is my thing .”

XP was totally a wild time, to Dad’s credit though! hahaha

It was that funky era of needing like 4 different anti malware programs, and downloading game patches from various hopefully-trusty file hosts, or nabbing the suspiciously convenient “Linkin-Park-Meteora-FULL_ALBUM.exe” off of Kazaa which would promptly rootkit your whole system.

Routinely running Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware, AVG, and CCleaner to combat constantly-reinstalling spyware.

Heck, I consider myself kinda smart but I still had Bonzi Buddy for a while! …I mean, c’mon, funnee purpl monke. Who could resist?

Like wow, now that I think back on it, you really needed a bit of “street smarts” back then. Nowadays security has gotten a lot better and one can get away with just “Not downloading weird Russian Web3 games off the dark web” and they’ll usually be relatively fine. Lol.

TL;DR: Windows XP was compatible with Bonzi Buddy, Mandriva was definitely a more secure choice, seeing as it couldn’t run Bonzi Buddy unless you were determined with WINE maybe?

… It’s cool you got introduced to Linux so early. Cool dad. :)

That’s defo Broadcom’s fault. Unfortunately when Linux is a second class citizen, hardware vendors will make crappy Windows and maybe Mac drivers, but a lot of Linux support seems like it needs to be reverse engineered or something, if the company itself refuses to play ball. :(

This was the case with NVIDIA for a long while. Still kinda is. Hopefully that’s improving though.

Fair disclosure, I personally run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, BUT…

Honestly for this situation I think Linux Mint might be your on-ramp. It’s very familiar from a user experience perspective from someone coming from Windows, and everything can be done with GUI apps.

It updates the entire system smoothly through an “app store” so it stays nice and secure. “Cinnamon” is also a highly attractive and smooth desktop environment.

I’ve switched a few people to it who were sick of Windows on older machines, but NOT computer people at all, and they’ve enjoyed it a lot! The nicest thing is it will feel like your computer again, not like you’re leasing it from Microsoft.

Don’t try and “completely switch over” in one go.

Look up how to try Linux in a virtual machine on your existing setup (so you don’t have to risk anything!) and just try it and play around with installing and using it.

An old laptop or something is also a great way to try it out.

You can always dual-boot if you want. I sure did for a while until Win10 started BSODing for no discernable reason, and refused to let me “refresh this PC” because “Sorry, can’t. Goodbye.”

I still have it, just in case, but it’s been most of the year since I’ve even bothered logging into it.

If you game: you’ll want Heroic Launcher for your GoG/EA stuff, and Steam of course, and maybe Bottles to run your old CD/DVD games maybe. :)

Sometimes things take a little tweaking, but Mint’s community is fantastic and helpful. You really will start to learn a lot about computers just by using Linux a little and trying things, while Windows makes every effort to hide things from you. (“wE’rE gEtTiNg ThInGs ReAdY” who’s “we”?!)

As you start to get comfortable with it, it will grow with you. You can start trying to get the hang of the terminal, or jump to another distro once you learn why you might prefer to.

But you really can’t go wrong just trying Mint out. It’s overall just a pleasant OS.

ProTip: You’ll be asked about a file system when you install any distro. I spent COUNTLESS HOURS on researching this question. BTRFS can be a bit of an advanced file system, but if you just “set it and forget it”, it has the ability to take incremental snapshots without taking a ton of space! So if something really goes south, you can use an app called “Timeshift” to just roll back.

This is great for your root drive / partition, but I wouldn’t suggest it for your home folder. :)

(Just like Windows rollback used to do, but…more reliable lol)

Lol sorry for the ramble but I hope this might help you feel a little less lost at the grocery store. ;)

So yeah, we will all be old one day. But that doesn’t mean we’re all destined to be sad old narcissists.

Right! Of course not! My point is that in this case, age isn’t the problem, it’s still just narcissistic power hungry jerks voting. They just so happen to curse us with their longevity.

So taking voting rights away for all after a certain age wouldn’t serve us, but if overall we keep voting in altruistic ways, we can still do a lot of good into our later years.

If you mean they shouldn’t be in office calling the shots for us at that age though, I TOTALLY agree.

I think more people will trend against that with time, and we will kill the “you lean more right with age” myth once and for all. :)

Wishing you a long and prosperous life, BTW. <3

I’ve heard rumors that some of those troops have witnessed the outside world and are already deserting lol.

I would agree, although a human with an AK is still a human with an AK. Even unskilled, undertrained, under supplied infantry should be taken seriously because they’re still a large number of bodies that can pull triggers.

I’m pretty sure they also thought he’d get spanked relatively quickly, and backpeddle within like a year after he lost enough war criminals and starving peasants who participated in his “special military operation”.

And it’s still going.

We really would be foolish at this point to make any more “It’s unlikely that…” assertions at this point… It’s all out crazy town now.

I see what you’re getting at, but we need to be careful here as we’ll be 70 too at some point.

Under that precedent, gen-Alpha conservicans would likely unanimously vote to have us all thrown into the sea to save on healthcare costs or something. Lmao

I legit wouldn’t be surprised at this point if Qanon was right, but it was just another case of their own ilk blaming others for what they’re already doing.

The entire party is “weird” at this point and refuse to die whilst leading incredibly unhealthy lives. Who’s to say they aren’t up to occult dark-ritual weirdness, mad science, and siphoning lifeforce from kidnapped youth around the world?

(Yes I’m being satirical but also if it had any truth to it, it would TOTALLY be THESE GUYS doing it and blaming it on “the others” amirite?)

I mean, he’s right in one way, you certainly ought to be able to talk about who you are voting for without fear.

Absolutely. And if you can’t, you’re in the wrong marriage. If women were free to leave Republican husbands without fear of harm, red-cap affiliation would be a more telling demographic for social isolation and lonliness than it already is.

Crazy I was about to say the same thing!

Hugely influential in turning the GOP from “Side of politics we can debate and respectfully disagree with” to “Completely unhinged violent movement based on panic, hatred, and intellectual brain rot.”

He’s basically described like some bygone disaster and yet he’s still kickin’. Holy crap.

There’s a cozy spot in whatever hell right next to Kissinger for this vile beast. Another spot beside it waiting to be filled is likely labeled “Murdoch.”

We’ve had a GE fridge that’s probably older than about 10 years. But you know, it’s complicated enough that it feels like it’s made to fail at some point.

Well, stuff stopped cooling but all the lights were on and everything else worked. It was really weird. We were thinking it might be a dead compressor or something. Crap, do we need a new fridge?

Nope! What basically amounts to a glorified computer fan with a fancier proprietary plug does all the work of distributing that cold air through the rest of the unit.

The proprietary plug is totally so they can sell it for $45, of course. Lol anyway, works like new!

Also get a dust mask and vacuum + blow out the back of your refrigerators, people. They get grooooss!!!

You’ve hear of fever dreams but this here buddy had a freezer dream.

HOW DID I KNOW 😂

This is definitely a thing!!

We’re using Linux so we just assume it’s some highly technical issue right off the bat lol. This has caught me a few times. 😂

Once I manually deleted a snapshot folder because I didn’t see it listed, and thought it was “orphaned” and just taking up space. :D

“SUDO THAT SUCKER!!” 👉

OS says “Okie dokie boss.”

Suddenly none of my commands are working.

Turns out I deleted the currently mounted active snapshot . Safe to say it was reinstall time.

Don’t go manually touching system files, folks. 😂

I used to dual-boot and use my Win10 for gaming.

But in the middle of Vermintide 2 I kept getting BAD BSoDs seemingly at random! None of the typical steps seemed to help. Probably something NVIDIA related I dunno.

I was gonna “refresh this system” and all Windows told me after “We’re getting this ready.” was: “Can’t. Dunno why. Sorry.”

But hey, switching over to my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed install made the game play really smooth, and no crashes! And soon, I discovered it ran all my other games just fine or even better as well!

I haven’t touched that Win10 install in ages, and will probably drop it in favor of VMing it really soon.

The only real holdout is that my VR headset is WMR. That really sucks. :(

That is painful. It’ll work SO WELL on a bunch of systems but sometimes someone has a particular config that’ll throw monkey-wrenches all over. It always feels like the most rotten luck being on the other end of that huh? :(