I’m also in the club of having a couple of Manjaro installs that now date back a few years to when it was still cool.

Honestly as a distro it works pretty well and my complaints are few. If I had to reinstall I’d take a closer look at CachyOS, EndeavourOS, or even just Arch, but I can’t really be bothered to replace something that’s working just fine so I’ll stick with it for now.

The problem with a third party ROM without Google Services is that a lot of these apps simply won’t work without Google Services present. You might as well be using a flip phone as far as this stuff is concerned.

It also forces you into the iPhone/Android phone with Google Play services duopoly. And I simply don’t want some stupid app on my phone.

Plus it’s also just inconvenient. I give you money, you give me food. It should be that simple.

When I saw that, I was like “wait, is Knoppix still around?”. A quick search revealed it hasn’t been updated in some time.

Back in the 2000’s Knoppix was a life saver more than once, but once other distros gained the ability to run live from the install media, I didn’t really need Knoppix any longer.

My assumption is the lease payments will more than cover the cost of the computer, and when you turn it back in at the end of the lease Apple is just going to scrap it.

I suppose that doesn’t preclude them charging you extra if you return it all scratched up just to extract even more money from you.

The funny thing is, the people who care about Group Policy and Active Directory are the same people who aren’t happy about their network potentially being compromised because someone hooked up their work laptop up to a monitor at their home.

Hate is perhaps too strong of a word, but personally, I just don’t care for their default desktop environment. If I had to, I could still use it but as I have lots of choices I’m going with something else.

On the other hand, I find Ubuntu to be a fine server OS, especially if you want something in the Debian family but want something a bit more up to date than what’s currently in Debian stable but still widely supported.

It’s always seemed to me that MacOS is still suffering from design decisions made back in the 80’s when it was running on a single 9" monochrome screen, and Apple is far too stubborn to change it.

At least Microsoft isn’t afraid to change things up, even if a lot of their UI changes end up pretty questionable.

Not sure myself. Like many I used WinRAR back in the day, but it’s been at least 15 years since I last installed it.

Well, it’s not like it would be the first time something like that happened.

I still don’t get the people who say they are going to watch the Super Bowl for the ads, then the day after the game they’re bitching about how terrible the ads were.

I’m like… yeah… they are ads…

I’ve still got a pile of DDR2 around, mostly 512MB-1GB sticks in the slower speeds. The better stuff got used, some of it is still in use.

The real money is the 2x16GB 2400MHz DDR4 sticks I have sitting on a shelf. Not long ago I figured it wasn’t worth trying to sell some old, slower DDR4 memory but now it’s apparently worth something. On the other hand, I might need it myself if one of the old DDR2/DDR3 era systems kicks the can.

As someone who is lazy, I find running Linux to be less work than fighting with Windows.

That’s some vintage hardware there too.

The surprise is that while Microsoft did announce how they were changing how Copilot usage is billed, they didn’t really give users a good way to gauge how expensive their current usage would be under the new billing system. Turns out it’s a lot more expensive than most people were expecting.

There’s also the projects that people think are dead because they haven’t seen any significant updates in some time. But in actuality there just hasn’t been any need to make changes. The code works, is mature, and feature complete. Unlike proprietary software there isn’t any pressure make changes for the sake of change to convince everyone they need to buy it over again, so once the code becomes stable development naturally will slow down.

That’s one of things that bothers me about how AI is being pushed in the workplace. Assuming AI actually does manage to help me get my work done faster, it’s not like I get to home earlier or work less days. I’m just going to get more work piled on me.

Windows 9x would crash after 49.7 days.

Windows Vista had a bug where the network stack would crash after 497 days, but if you didn’t care about networking the rest of the OS would continue to run.

I have to say that is pretty dumb. I will agree the scenario isn’t completely implausible, but if someone who doesn’t know what they are doing is allowed to do something like that, they’re going to screw up other stuff too.

It may not be completely crazy, depending on context. With something like a web app, if data is being sanitized in the client-side Javascript, someone malicious could absolutely comment that out (or otherwise bypass it).

With that said, many consultant-types are either pretty clueless, or seem to feel like they need to come up with something no matter how ridiculous to justify the large sums of money they charged.