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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.
I just use a win10 desktop and Linux (mint xfce) laptop as a "home server." Both 8th gen Intel, which is still adequate for everything, and will be until they finally come up with a better video codec than vp9.
Modern Linux is so simple a non tech person wouldn't even notice the change as long as you use the default windows background. The browser is identical, and that's all that matters 99% of the time.
Some of my friends are using Linux on their family desktops, like my dad on his 6th gen Intel. He can even watch YouTube properly because Linux actually added limited vp9 decoding support for quick sync on skylake, although that's something I had to get working for him.
I've had random wifi connectivity drops on my android phone lately. Seems like something to with ip leases expiring: it will lose Internet connectivity on the 5ghz network, but switch over to the 2.4 network within a few seconds. I should try disabling DHCP and hard coding fucking everything
Win10 PC just developed a habit of graphics crashing (window frozen, mouse still moves, hard reset needed) when dragging Firefox between monitors. Jank just seems inevitable unless you buy apple and use them exactly as prescribed.
(Re. Crashing: main monitor plugged into GPU, side ones into igpu, browsers set to run on igpu for hardware accel reasons. And it only happens with Firefox: not brave, not Vivaldi, or edge, or the five year old version of portable chromium I use for running h-(tml)games. Error seemed to start when setting the GPU to power-saving mode. There are a lot of potential factors, fuck)
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