Yeah. We have a 2009 MacBook pro here that still works great, other than being horrendously out of date. I was getting 6+ hours of battery life out of it when it was new, which is pretty surprising in those days.

And OS X is pretty nice (or was for the life of that laptop, I haven’t used it much since then), and still Unix.

When my wife needed a new laptop a few years ago, we got her a Mac, because it’s just so much less maintenance for me, compared to Windows. (She uses some stuff that Linux does not yet support.)

Vuescan.

Who is actually creating a legitimate Facebook account at this point?

I moderate a few groups on Facebook, and every account I see for new members that was created within the last few years is a spammer. The people who wanted Facebook accounts already have them. Very very few actual human beings are signing up for new legitimate accounts at this point.

Facebook should just close the new account option. They’re working toward AIs talking to each other and won’t need human interaction any more anyway.

I love that you are voted negative on this. You’re absolutely correct, but people don’t want to hear it.

Had a long argument with someone a few months back where they insisted if they come around a curve and a tree is laying across the road, and they can’t stop in time, the tree is at fault…

Yeah I’ve saved a few things that way - nothing to lose, so let’s try it. Often it doesn’t work…but other than some time, I’ve lost nothing.

The previous owners built a koi pond on the property (though there aren’t any actual koi in it…I’m not sure what breed of fish are in it). After we moved in we had a local shop come and clean it, and they suggested replacing the filter, so we did that. The new one uses a UV light to help kill some types of algae and keep it clear. Unfortunately the ballasts for those UV lights are, frankly, garbage, and I’ve replaced it a few times. I was able to figure out that the switch that detects whether the ballast is installed properly doesn’t trigger, so I’ve used tape to deal with that…then an animal chewed the wires right where they come out of the ballast.

I’ve been trying to pry it apart to get to the wires to fix it, but I just can’t get it to open up. It’s just chewing up the casing. But I guess the same thing applies, nothing to lose.

I really should just look for a better filter.

My previous laptop had a touch screen, and the Linux driver worked for it with no configuration on my end. Not exactly what you’re asking about, but I was impressed by how it “just worked”.

But that was a traditional laptop.

Seems like these could be a good display/control panel for Home Assistant.

There’s a whole community for self hosting software.

!selfhost@lemmy.ml

Hopefully I did that right…

I’ve been using it on my server for 6 or 8 years, and on my desktop and laptop for maybe a year. I’m not sure when I switched.

I like the stability, I generally don’t need bleeding edge software. And as someone else mentioned, it’s one of the packages distributors always offer.

Same here - daily driving Linux at home for at least 25 years now. I’m not a gamer, but for all the things I do, Linux has worked perfectly fine.

I struggled getting Zwift (online cycling game) running on Debian, and the issue turned out to be that WINE on Debian is a major version behind.

I did get it working, and everything else works (retro game emulators), but it’s like, huh maybe that wasn’t the best choice.

Similar for me. Debian works.

And I’m just too busy with other things to bother trying different distros. I want my computer to work with a minimum of fuss.

That said Bazzite does sound interesting and might go on my gaming system. Debian stable isn’t the best choice for that. Lol

I started using Slackware in the late 90s - say 1998. I used it for most of my desktop applications pretty much right away.

I don’t game much so that wasn’t an issue for me.

It was definitely harder to configure. I recompiled so many kernels and told myself the speed boost from getting exactly what I needed and nothing else was impressive. It wasn’t.

I dunno. It wasn’t as polished as it is now, and was harder to configure, but it was still very good, and once you got it configured, it kept working, unlike the more popular os of the day.

He caved.

Spread the word, irritate red hats everywhere.

Three days is the (generously calculated) time until civil defence will have soup kitchens up and running

Wonder if that’s still true with the budget cuts to FEMA here in the US.

How many of us old Slashdot users are here, anyway? 5 digit UID here.

How quickly do you think an os upgrade of this type finish?

This is what I’ve always done. It has worked fine for me every time.

I’ve been daily driving it on my desktop and laptop for several months now, seems fine. But I don’t need the bleeding edge either.

But that’s not what the comment was about… The top level comment said Debian was hard to upgrade, and I have not had that experience.

I don’t understand that comment either. I’ve been using Debian for years on my server, and it just keeps up with the times (well with Debian times, not necessarily current times).

It’s way easier than Kubuntu was for me, for example, which required reinstalling practically every time I wanted to upgrade. A few times the upgrade actually worked, but most of the time I had to reinstall.