site banner

Friday Fun Thread for December 27, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

After my experiences at work, I'm staying on Windows 10 until the bitter end, and possibly past that.

I took a screenshot on a Windows 11 computer on the production line, and went to annotate it using the default application ("Designer"). The mousewheel didn't scroll or zoom regardless of which modifier keys I was using, and ctrl+Z didn't undo. I have no idea how they could break the UI that badly on a core application.

They might make Windows 11 into a feature-complete operating system before killing Windows 10, but I'm not holding my breath.

Long term support version of 10 has many years left, right? And you can use a certain GitHub program to give yourself the industry pro version of that. I'm doing a reinstall this week, will do that myself

Officially, normal Win10 support ends October 2025, and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC support ends in January 2027. There’s a one time offer of Extended Support, but it’s thirty bucks per station and gonna be pretty limited. I would expect some limited security updates after that despite Microsoft’s best promises and it’s certainly possible Microsoft does a last-second extension, but it’s not a lot of time for migration prep if you’re worried about 11.

Oh, that's less than I thought, but I still consider another two years a long time in PC terms. That pushes things out to "I'll deal with it on the next hardware change or reinstall," even if someone isn't comfortable running an unsupported system.