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In honor of @WhiningCoil's epic rant about Microsoft products, can we talk about "personal stacks"?
I'm about ready to jump multiple ships. Right now, we have one Windows 10 desktop chugging along, some chromebooks for just hanging out and browsing (or bringing up recipes for cooking or whatever), and android phones.1 I'm still okay with the phones. Like WhiningCoil said, Windows has gotten worse and worse, and our current desktop hardware is in the "will they, won't they?" land of whether Microsoft will even allow it to upgrade to Win11, not to mention whether I even want it. It seems like every week, I'm learning about yet another "feature" they've added that I just have to go turn off (and then put on my long list of stuff to turn off for the next time I have to bring to life a new windows machine... or reset this one (yes, I just had to reset it not long ago, because it went utterly bonkers with forgetting to let me have proper privileges)). Sunsetting of security updates (as insane as they've become) might push me over the edge.
As for the chromebooks, anyone else looking to jump ship because of Manifest V3? Maybe I need to suck it up and just try out uBlock Origin Lite for a while, see how it goes. But we've been having other issues, too. Since getting the chromebooks, we've done a lot of simple coordination stuff with google sheets, but they've been really glitchy lately; about half the time, when I navigate to an open sheets tab, the entire display is all scrambled. I have to switch tabs and switch back, and then most of the time it'll work. I don't recall seeing this behavior when I go to sheets in Chrome on my non-ChromeOS devices. On top of that, there's an issue with internet connectivity randomly dropping (still can't figure out if it's fundamentally a hardware limitation/problem or something going on in ChromeOS). For several years, these have been amazing, cheap devices that just worked for a lot of our poking around day to day, but the annoyances are building up.
I have been seriously considering just tossing both Windows and ChromeOS. Apple is too expensive; I genuinely like having super cheap chromebooks that are small (even the smallest MacBook Air is pretty big for just throwing around), have real keyboards, can be abused, and just thrown away and cheaply replaced if I break one (I could blow through at least five cheap chromebooks for the cost of one MacBook Air). Soooo... I'm thinking maybe just Linux everywhere?! Probably the biggest barrier I have to that is the Wife Approval Factor. I'm definitely her "Tech Department", and it would basically be on me to retrain her and work through her annoyance at having to learn new tech things.
Any thoughts? Has anyone else taken a similar plunge, especially with a less-techy wife involved? What are y'all currently running?
1 - Of course, we also have work computers, which will always be Windows for the rest of time. Nothing we can do about it, but there's not really any problem with the extremely small number of things that we need to have cross the work/personal barrier.
Personal hardware list:
Alienware desktop - Say what you will about Dell, I bought my desktop for $1700 at a time when the video card in it was going for over $1K. I wanted an all-purpose PC with an emphasis on gaming and there was simply no way that I could have beaten it for this.
Apple ecosystem stuff - MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone [whatever version], old iMac. Apple things just work better than whatever else you can get and I am not very price sensitive. Everything I buy from Apple lasts forever and just works the way that a normal person would expect it to.
Garmin Epix - The one exception to the above. I owned an Apple watch, and it boggles my mind that they couldn't be bothered to put out a decent setup for runners. If you give a shit about running, Garmin just blows them out of the water.
My only real complaint is that I have to take an absolutely idiotic number of chargers with me on trips.
I've bought one apple product in my life. An iPad 3. It got an unprecedented refresh in 6 mo versus the typical year, making me feel like quite the chump. At this point nearly everything has stopped working on it. Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Video, it's all shut down. Most websites load funny because of outdated SSL stuff I assume. More than half the storage has been eaten up with remnant files of OS updates that I can't get back no matter what I do. Apps don't get released for it anymore because apple dropped 32-bit support. Some of the old apps I have for it are just broken now for reasons I don't entirely understand. But storage is so gimped it's a constant chore to remove the 2 or 3 games that still fit on it to make room for others. About all I can do on it anymore is copy ebooks over from my PC.
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