Yeah I honestly legit enjoyed my fond time with old Windows machines back when they were fun and user-oriented instead of the user-exploitative SAAS monsters they are now.

Win10 wasn’t even SO bad as everyone says…well, until recently when they started forcing Microsoft Accounts on install and harass you with their ads every 3 forced updates. Ugh.

Now they’re on the Ai bandwagon? Yeah they’re real small in my rearview mirror now.

I think it’s just a different landscape now, and I’m glad Linux was there to jump to after all these companies started losing their collective minds.

“Linux is open source and free! You can do whatever you want with it! It’s our thing!”

Microsoft: “Whatever I want with it?..Free?..Hm…This is my thing .”

XP was totally a wild time, to Dad’s credit though! hahaha

It was that funky era of needing like 4 different anti malware programs, and downloading game patches from various hopefully-trusty file hosts, or nabbing the suspiciously convenient “Linkin-Park-Meteora-FULL_ALBUM.exe” off of Kazaa which would promptly rootkit your whole system.

Routinely running Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad-Aware, AVG, and CCleaner to combat constantly-reinstalling spyware.

Heck, I consider myself kinda smart but I still had Bonzi Buddy for a while! …I mean, c’mon, funnee purpl monke. Who could resist?

Like wow, now that I think back on it, you really needed a bit of “street smarts” back then. Nowadays security has gotten a lot better and one can get away with just “Not downloading weird Russian Web3 games off the dark web” and they’ll usually be relatively fine. Lol.

TL;DR: Windows XP was compatible with Bonzi Buddy, Mandriva was definitely a more secure choice, seeing as it couldn’t run Bonzi Buddy unless you were determined with WINE maybe?

… It’s cool you got introduced to Linux so early. Cool dad. :)

That’s defo Broadcom’s fault. Unfortunately when Linux is a second class citizen, hardware vendors will make crappy Windows and maybe Mac drivers, but a lot of Linux support seems like it needs to be reverse engineered or something, if the company itself refuses to play ball. :(

This was the case with NVIDIA for a long while. Still kinda is. Hopefully that’s improving though.

Fair disclosure, I personally run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, BUT…

Honestly for this situation I think Linux Mint might be your on-ramp. It’s very familiar from a user experience perspective from someone coming from Windows, and everything can be done with GUI apps.

It updates the entire system smoothly through an “app store” so it stays nice and secure. “Cinnamon” is also a highly attractive and smooth desktop environment.

I’ve switched a few people to it who were sick of Windows on older machines, but NOT computer people at all, and they’ve enjoyed it a lot! The nicest thing is it will feel like your computer again, not like you’re leasing it from Microsoft.

Don’t try and “completely switch over” in one go.

Look up how to try Linux in a virtual machine on your existing setup (so you don’t have to risk anything!) and just try it and play around with installing and using it.

An old laptop or something is also a great way to try it out.

You can always dual-boot if you want. I sure did for a while until Win10 started BSODing for no discernable reason, and refused to let me “refresh this PC” because “Sorry, can’t. Goodbye.”

I still have it, just in case, but it’s been most of the year since I’ve even bothered logging into it.

If you game: you’ll want Heroic Launcher for your GoG/EA stuff, and Steam of course, and maybe Bottles to run your old CD/DVD games maybe. :)

Sometimes things take a little tweaking, but Mint’s community is fantastic and helpful. You really will start to learn a lot about computers just by using Linux a little and trying things, while Windows makes every effort to hide things from you. (“wE’rE gEtTiNg ThInGs ReAdY” who’s “we”?!)

As you start to get comfortable with it, it will grow with you. You can start trying to get the hang of the terminal, or jump to another distro once you learn why you might prefer to.

But you really can’t go wrong just trying Mint out. It’s overall just a pleasant OS.

ProTip: You’ll be asked about a file system when you install any distro. I spent COUNTLESS HOURS on researching this question. BTRFS can be a bit of an advanced file system, but if you just “set it and forget it”, it has the ability to take incremental snapshots without taking a ton of space! So if something really goes south, you can use an app called “Timeshift” to just roll back.

This is great for your root drive / partition, but I wouldn’t suggest it for your home folder. :)

(Just like Windows rollback used to do, but…more reliable lol)

Lol sorry for the ramble but I hope this might help you feel a little less lost at the grocery store. ;)

Cosmo? Isn’t that Pop_OS’s new DE coming out? :D

I legit thought it was making the cursor “closer” because windows were layered on top of each other and it was doing weird depth scaling or something LOL.

Basically like they (and Google) have handled phones. “Wow look, a majority of the OS work is done for us! Sooo if we just…overlay it all with proprietary blobs and un-removable software and locked bootloaders and…”

That’s always weird to me. If I meet another penguin-enthusiast in the wild, I try to ask all enthusiastically “Oh neat, what distro?” And I am genuinely curious and open about any answer.

But it’s funny how most of the reactions are like “Eh, y’know. This one. But mostly for work.” or something. Like I know forums are hostile but c’mon.

Big bummer. :( lol

That’s so painful and I feel for you. I had the same situation with a Honda Element. (I’ve heard of people going to Flexes as a more recent but similar body haha)

Except for me, I broke it myself, and it was a VERY PARTICULAR bolt that nobody wanted to touch. Thing was leaking oil all over the place and nothing could fix it.

Turned a ~$4000 sale price to $800 junker haul-away. :(

But I got 219,000 miles out of it, so…

Here’s to those roomy boxy brick cars everybody called ugly but were absolutely awesome and refused to die…until they did. 🍻

Fair. Can also cite all the Islamic iconography and sound removed from Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

As for Star Wars, Han absolutely shot first. (High five)

Weren’t a lot of those wacky edits by Lucas’ own whims though? I’d say there’s a distinction between a creator editing his own work and say, Disney going “We lost the rights to John Williams, so we removed the score from the entire franchise.” Lol

Sheesh!

Ace Combat games are also on a countdown as soon as they release, because the likenesses of the planes from the defense companies expire, so they get de-listed.

You couldn’t do that with physical media. =\

They’re editing entertainment history to begin with. Deletion is bad enough, but possibly even more nefarious is the blatant, unapologetically sneaky editing of existing media mentioned in this thread. Jussst a little bit at a time.

Unlike many videogames, TV shows, music, movies, don’t get “version / revision numbers.” Can you trust your archives to be original?

Adjust for today’s-sensibilities here, remove a now-naughty-word there…“oh, we don’t wanna pay for that song that released in 5 years before this 36 year old television program…better it never existed!”

Their goal seems to be relegating the Internet to simply being a flow of “What’s trending and making money NOW” and nothing else. Every byte electron has a dollar value.

They want generations growing up in a world where the corporate narrative is all that ever was and will be.

Today it’s talk shows and cartoons.

Tomorrow it’s biographies and documentaries. Family histories? Newspapers?

We need to stop this NOW.

Media conglomerates can’t even be relied on to be stewards of their own legacy. They’re coming for ours.

So, who’s up for another reread/watch of Farenheit 451 or Equalibrium?

“Alright kids settle down…you wanted to know about the 90’s right?”

• A 24k screen pops to life, accesses the file server, a super fuzzy image comes to life. A funky beat fills the room. -

"Now this is the story all about how,

My life got flipped-turned upside down,

And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there,

I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air."

Laptops though, for real…

I got an old gaming laptop with an Nvidia 960M in it, and it happened to have an M.2 slot.

I stuck a 1TB from Western Digital in there, AND it had a 1TB HDD already…man, I dunno what to do with this much space on a laptop 😂.

Made an old machine feel like brand new, seriously.

(Especially since I wiped Windows and it’s only running EndeavourOS now.)

You could attach an external drive to a slim laptop or low-power PC like a Pi, only accessible by yourself, and technically you’ve got a media server!

You can host things from a virtual machine on your main computer, with a chunky external drive attached, if you wanted. :) That’s the fun part, you can start from basically craigslist or hand-me-down hardware, and expand as your knowledge and space allow!

You could also run services from a paid hosting server, but I don’t think the returns would be great for packing tons of data on there. :p

I’ve used ebay before many times, just be diligent. The problem with these bazaar style marketplaces is much less accountability and LOTS of fakes.

Not the best prices, but it seems like Best Buy, B&H Photo, Costco, stuff like that, might be the better “straight from the source” retailers.

I don’t trust Newegg anymore. Used to like them but they’ve been chasing the wannabe-Amazon rabbit and have been caught doing shady crap to customers.

my own plex server (or something else if there’s a better alternative idk)

– complexity level 1:

First off a heads up, Jellyfin will serve you much better. Plex is commercial software, and they’ve treated their users quite poorly numerous times to appease copyright pressures. Commercial software always has an incentive to screw you.

Lots and lots of well-made guides and stuff on YouTube and such for getting Jellyfin setup, but if you want a little more in depth, I’ve detailed a bit below 👇

— complexity level 2:

Even better than a Pi for media hosting, if you can swing it is those “1 liter PCs” that IT departments throw out en masse anymore. (At least I hope they still do? They might just burn them now since reusing them has caught on /s)

Basically, something you can stuff a bunch of hard drives in. You can turn any old PC and hard drives into a decent little server. The only other important thing is offsite backups for what REALLY matters to you. I use a cloud service called “iDrive” that’s decent enough. That way my family pictures and artwork aren’t obliterated if my office burns or floods or something.

Self-hosting IS a project, but you learn a lot and it can be really fun! I want to preface that I’m not an IT professional by any stretch.

–complexity level 3:

I currently use an OS called “Proxmox” to host virtual machines. It’s really powerful and gets easier as you get the hang of it.

It hosts a little virtual server that only runs PiHole, which blocks ads and tracking across my entire WiFi network. It’s amazing. (Not YouTube ads tho. Long story. Other tools for that.)

But it mainly hosts OpenMediaVault, which is great for just hosting a file server, and it’s well integrated with Docker for setting up “containers.” Lighter than virtual machines, consistent, and easily managed. (Imagine getting to wipe Windows but leave your D:\ drive untouched every time, and everything comes back configured like you want it.)

Right now, I’d say experiment with stuff within virtual machines, try it out. Figure out how you want to set yourself up. The best part is, you don’t need to open up anything on your home network.

– Complexity level 4:

There’s a neat service called Tailscale for accessing your network securely from out of the house, but don’t worry about that yet.

There’s a service for everything. I’ve replaced all of Gsuite with a self hostable called NextCloud, for instance!

Facebook clone for just your family? Minecraft / Terraria / whatever server? (Private MMO server?), the sky’s the limit really!

TL;DR: Just take it one step at a time. Take notes. Learn to take good backups. Ask questions. Lots of questions. We’re all in this together. :)

Dude, Halo: Master Chief Collection removed a LOT of perfectly timed tracks from key moments of Halo 2, because they were Breaking Benjamin songs.

I remember when a pair of Hunters is just about to bust open these massive gates in New Mombasa…here comes the sick instrumental from “Blow Me Away”…!

…No, just some vaguely Halo-esque drumbeat on loop.

The music licensing industry has pretty much always been Satan, but the sheer arrogance to think they have the right to claw audio out of existing works because they’re not getting infinite revenue out of it is a new friggin low.

Wait what? What joke? :O That’s ridiculous!