Linux won’t give you much more privacy in your case. I would recommend storing and manipulating your personal data on a separate Linux machine and please don’t store anything except what’s absolutely necessary on OneDrive. Though if you can’t afford a separate machine, you can run Linux to get at least some improvement. I think the only DE that has good MS cloud support is the latest version of GNOME so you need a distro with that DE. It can be Ubuntu 24.04 (or something based on it) or a rolling release. The last one may be more difficult to use in some cases but idk any other somewhat user friendly options.
365 admin here. Use whatever distro you want and just use the web versions of Office apps. They’ve been greatly improved and are nearly identical to their desktop counterparts. Especially if you’re leaning heavily into OneDrive/Sharepoint.
My rebuttal is that I have never had arch not boot except me messing up the install 8 years ago when I was learning.
I installed a completely standard tubleweed install on a laptop, grub broke and tumbleweed wouldn’t boot anymore during the first update that was recommended to me through a notification popup that brought me to an update GUI. This was just 2 years ago.
Arch you can boot by default with rEFInd. It is infinitely easier than grub, searches and finds boots by default, even if it is configured incorrectly, and has never broken once in 8 years while grub has broken many, many times. That is not an option with tumbleweed install.
There have 100% been package and dependency breakages on tumbleweed, just like arch and every single distro. It happens.
Documentation is meager at best for tumbleweed and related. Archwiki is unbeatable in that regard.
The AUR. Please, try to go install niche programs like EdrawMax, PulseView, etc… RPMs make it pretty easy after you find it. On arch it is “yay pulseview” … “1” … “y” … Done.
They are all great distros with many pros and cons to each. Most people would be fine with any of them.
For example opensuse variants have btrfs with snapshot set up upon installation. That is pretty damn cool and useful!
That said, I am definitely going to try Kalpa because it is a fresh way of doing things.
To anyone still singing the “installation too hard” argument… Archinstall is so cool now… The defaults are just so friggin sane and systemd-boot with UKI as the boot setup is really cool to just be able to choose in an installer. The partitioner is also so easy to use… Most pleasant experience with a Linux installer in recent years. Yes, I’m talking about Arch.
All that said, I love Tumbleweed. They’re also working on providing systemd-boot and it was nice when I tried it. And the one thing that i haven’t seen anybody else implement in a comparable manner is Snapshots. Gotta love it.
As long as possible unless nobody uses it for cases that need any security (daily driver, server, enterprise etc). If you drop support, you are lazy and support ewaste creation. In some cases it can be too difficult to support it but “too difficult” has a lot of meanings most of which are wrong.
I think for me, a 10 year minimum seems reasonable.
That’s really not enough. GTX 1080 is an almost 10 years old card but it’s still very competitive. Most of my friends even use 750s or similar age hardware. And for software, any major updates just make it more enshittificated now lol.
Hardware support is usually funded enough or has enough human resources for it not to be a big problem imo. It’s ok to drop 30 years old stuff that nobody uses but dropping something just because rich people have a few years newer hardware is bad.
perhaps we should start building things with long term support in mind, and not just churn out the cheapest shit we can manage.
Like just look at modern laptops, most of them are absolute dogshit in terms of repairability and then you have the framework which you can straight up buy as a kit to assemble yourself.
Making things easy to maintain is clearly doable, not even that hard.
@Swedneck@breadsmasher It's wild how most modern laptops are a nightmare for repairs. Framework, feels like a breath of fresh air. Being able to buy it as a kit and put it together yourself is just so cool !! It shows that making things easy to maintain is not only possibe, but it's not even that difficult....
You’re forgetting that pacman can show a little pacman as the loading bar. Also I’m always happy to run updates so typing “yay” into my terminal just feels right.
I’d say more than 10 years now. Computers evolved a lot more between the 90s and the 00s than between the 00s and now, my old laptop is 10 years old and it’s still perfectly running linux, and I hope it will keep running for years.
The problem is more hardware obsolescence, it’s a Acer so every part of it is slowly falling apart (keyboard, screen, battery) and OEM parts are impossible to find after all those years. I guess this problem is less important for desktop.
I snipe used USFF ultra small form factor machines off eBay...nice being able to eventually scale into new upgrades, swap out original i3's, for i5 or i7 when I see good deals.
Although my main PC, the mechanical keyboard started to have issues...parts just arrived today so I can repair it \0/ glad I'm not roped into some laptop to try to maintain again.
Running an Acer laptop that is 9-10 years old. Everything works fine, but last summer my harddrive crashed. 8 gb ram and 2 ssd disks on 2tb each. And it is running smooth. I also have no plans on getting a new computer.
I think it is the kids who play hardware consuming games who drive the evolution of computers.
Important to note how the design of the hardware is important in enabling this, if you don’t have replaceable parts then the entire thing dies when one component does.
It’s really the one major complaint i have about my pixel 3, the lack of an SD card slot immediately puts a bit of a lifespan on the entire device.
My current laptop is 9 years old, I recently replaced the heat paste and added new RAM. It should definitely be more than 10 years, as my laptop is totally usable for everyday tasks like
the fact that it’s open and you can get old versions of the kernel. i say we are very lucky we get the support we get but ask long as that older version is still available abd opening means no e waste. even 386s
If there are no security updates, it does become ewaste because of severe vulnerability to all sorts of attacks that makes it unsuitable for most use cases. Though it’s still better than nothing.
It is not that simple.
For hardware attacks, older hardware are probably safe since the attacks are specifics to some newer features. I really doubt you can deliver a Spectre attack on anything up until the Pentium or even later.
On the software side, there could be some security bugs to which some older version could be vulnerable since there were not the vulnerable code at the time. Granted, there could be some security bugs that were not yet discovered in older codebase.
idk when you’re aware of that, you can airgap that ancient PC and have the system read only etc… it’s super slow anyways. it’s like museum level hardware without USB and like 16 or 32 MB RAM. you can play xbill and nethack on it, but it’s barely usable with modern software and hardware.
yeah that’s what I’m talking about it’s nice to be able to still run a windows 95 or OG redhat 6 distro on period hardware if nothing else for learning and museum.
people still do it today in the retro space all the time and it’s a hell of a lot harder to do on windows and Mac than Linux since every kernel is still archived. I mean am I that old to remember the 2.6 split. it’s not the same thing since that was maintained but it doesn’t mean someone in the retro space couldn’t do a back port if needed.
I was at VCF this year and people were still writing new code for PDP11s. it may not be productive in a work sense but preserving computing history is something of value and not ewaste.
for real work yeah but for getting to experience retro hardware protoweb.org works great. by no means am I advocating for any production data be used on these machines. but at the same time the code open if you want it bad enough. you do it yourself or pay a bounty to have some others do it. if you really want to use it for real work. like I said it’s great you don’t have to start from scratch the old version archive is there warts and all.
Or use a browser that's so featureless that exploits don't have anything to exploit, such as Lynx. The rest should be handled by any decent firewall in front of it.
This is great! I have managed to get a few kernel panics on my system related to Steam and NTFS drives.
I have a shared HDD formated to NTFS that I have imported to Steam as a library. It sometimes that HDD is not mounted at boot due to some error, which have resulted in me installing the same game on my main drive. When I later tried mount my old HDD and import the Steam library my computer just froze. Every time I opened Steam after that the kernel panicked. I didn’t know it was a kernel panic at the time. I ended up dismounting the NTFS drive and uninstalling the duplicate games.
I wonder if I can dig up the old kernel panic logs with this.
I would say for as long as the hardware remains useful. A high end laptop may still be perfectly usable in 15 years if the hardware doesn’t fail by then.
Still using a 5 year old laptop with no degradation in performance and expecting at least another 5. All I had to do was uninstall some malware that was eating up all the system resources and popping up a bunch of ads. It was called Windows. :-D
Usually, my computers dropped in performance after around 10 years. They might contain parts that are a few years older by that time. So, to be able to use them further, I would suggest a minimum of 15 years.
Good point. If I know it’ll meet my needs, I’m sometimes inclined to buy tech that’s a few years old, especially if the newer version just adds cloud, AI, or something else I don’t want/need. In many cases it’s still marketed the same so I think end of support dates should be clearly marked on the product itself so the consumer can make an informed choice. Intentionally bricking a device should be treated as littering and the company should be responsible for disposal fees.
Linux is a different story because of the volunteer presence. If anything Linux should get subsidies for keeping e-waste out of landfills after the manufacturer has long abandoned the product.
My laptop is about 5 years old now and still runs as fast as the day I bought it, if not faster. I replaced the battery twice, but this thing could go another 5-10 years if I don’t drop it or spill something on it.
As long as someone is willing and able to maintain it.
It’s open source. All the work is either done by volunteers or by corporate sponsors. If it’s worth it for you to keep a GPU from the 90s running on modern kernels and you can submit patches to keep up with API changes, then no reason to remove it. The problem isn’t that the hardware is old, it’s that people don’t have the time to do the maintenance
However, when it comes to any proprietary hardware/software the solution is simple. All companies should be required by law to open source all software and drivers, regardless of age, when the discontinued support; including server side code if the product is dependent on one (massive for gaming).
it’s not that wild of a concept, it’s basically just an extension of how copyright and patents expire. You should have to prove that your IP is actually in use for it to remain valid, otherwise you forfeit it. Honestly moreso to prevent patent/copyright trolling than for right to repair reasons.
There’s a good argument for more modular kernels (microkernels and such). That way the driver could be kept going for decades, only updating the IPC protocol as the microkernel changes through time
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