i’m gonna guess it was a staged photo using a hastily-prepped pc as a prop.

haven’t used xvid in like 20 years. do still have some old ‘archives’ though.

i almost went with aurora here. in fact it’s still on the other pc i was also testing on, sitting on a shelf unused the last several months. but after trying out pretty much everything i could get my hands on… i ended up back ‘home’, on debian. where i started ~ 30 years ago.

solus os (independent ‘semi rolling’) and ultramarine (fedora based) were two other non-debian based ones on my short list. i already have a manjaro desktop so it wasn’t on my list at all… i already knew i didn’t want it on this box.

alma and rocky are the new ‘clones’ of rhel that were spawned from the death of centos when redhat radically changed its mission in ~ 2020-21. they have most the pros and cons of running rhel itself.

it used to be that… the ‘new’ one is debian trixie-based. runs plasma but there’s also a ‘lite’ spin that uses lxqt

because the average user is kinda dumb, kinda impatient, and some of those ads and banners on google properties peddling chrome were very scary to them… that they’d lose, or miss-out on something in, youtube or google or their gmail.

i just start with the basic rule of: whatever they want or suggest or default to, the opposite is probably what should be configured or answered instead.

youtube, google, gmail. all better platform to market from than your desktop os. plus google spent a ton of money on mainstream ads, and had the perfect place on those aforementioned platforms to peddle their own and at no cost to them. and google is far from innocent here… they’ve bullshitted their way to the top of the browser game and pull similar stunts as microsoft does.

and a lot of ie’s bits were loaded into memory with windows itself.

there is 100s of miles of fiber spools just sitting for years at a utility maintenance yard here. the provider that was doing the work to expand services just took the rest of the free money and split.

https://www.pcsforpeople.org/ is another organization with low-cost internet for low income households. they some have hardware, too. they’ve expanded a lot since their first location opened in minnesota in 1998. (note: i am not affiliated with them, i just occasionally refer people to them)

they were, for months, literally giving the hardware away. no hardware cost. no recurring fees. just 20 bucks for shipping, then the whatever for the actual internet plan itself. a flat $80/mo i think the lowest cost one was. i have a few users on it that bought into that deal. i think it was just before the ipo where they started tacking-on an extra monthly fee.

they are probably just providing the windows drivers that their vendors already have for the components inside the hardware they’re selling.

amazon’s web site as a whole has always been shitty, going all the way back to when they just sold books.

iot is stripped-down ‘windows lite’ but they don’t sell that to the masses they’re trying to hoover-up data on, sling bullshit at, or trick into subscribing to stuff.

iot is excellent on the desktop or as a gamer. its existence is proof that none of the bullshit microsoft’s been peddling is actually needed in the os, and that crap actually hurts performance and stability.

absolutely. my 30+ years experience says work and personal should be separate devices with no exceptions. and the ‘work’ one should be what they want on it, how they want it. if you then get malware, it’s on them–not you. if you want something different, ask and get permission first.

i’ve salvaged enough older ddr3/ddr4 stuff and sata ssd to hopefully last until i see some newer stuff go through here destined for the recycle heap. but what i am short on is spinny hdd for more ‘‘archive’’ storage, i’m down to my last couple smaller hdd

updates, sure. let discover or gnome software do 'em.

my debian won’t break the system.

to install, though? i’d rather see exactly what’s going on. i don’t always want to bring in every tom, dick and recommend. i use aptitude.

it’s the most convenient, but i still use my winrar for some things, mainly some of the self-extractors i build and when i want recovery bits.

it would compress well for an archival backup, so that’s what i’d do for the ‘originals’.

if your long message chains look anything like mine, there’s far more quoted material overall than new text in most mails; and not all new text would be relevant to whatever is being saved… so it’d be quicker to do it the other way–copy and paste what you did want to new documents instead of trying to clean up these long compilations by deleting what you don’t.