ares35

still is, and always has been. and that’s not a bad thing.

Fedora is often considered “the new Ubuntu” […]

no. it’s not. and i’ve never, ever heard anyone say it is–until now.

imho getting windows-based games running on linux isn’t for someone ‘new’ to linux. they gotta get their feet wet first, and mint is an excellent choice for that… or they will be spending all their gaming time–not gaming.

i’m on a ‘budget’ plan, where the bill is the same every month, adjusted once per year. the muni-run utility always adds more on top of estimated average bill–which i then have to pay. i always have a surplus built-up at the end of the ‘year’ of at least 1.5-2x the monthly bill amount. and no, they don’t pay interest on the surplus, but they certainly do charge late fees and interest if you ever fall behind or don’t pay for a month or two.

flash vs ssd is night and day difference for write speeds. if you write that frequently to your ventoy and write speed matters to you, you want ssd.

either make it (assemble) yourself or buy one. i have a number of clients using samsung t7 external usb ssd. they seem pretty fast to me.

i don’t use ventoy or ventoy-like devices that often, i just use flash… even some usb 2.0 ones. yea, they take longer to boot up and longer (much longer) to write to, but i don’t add or replace iso on them very often.

snooze… snooze… snooze… snooze… snooze…

alarm clock gives in. shuts it down until tomorrow.

but my flip phone, i have to open and push the correct button to shut off an alarm. that’s enough to wake me up enough to piss me off. so i guess it ‘works’.

enterprise device management and reporting unknown quantities of data back to hp are two different things.

most** hp printers don’t ship with the hard-core third-party ink/toner block. that’s in the firmware updates.

never update the firmware of an hp printer if you use, or think you might want to use some day, third-party consumables or refills.

if you ‘subscribe’ to ink, you’re fucked, as that service requires automatic firmware updates be enabled.

**some do now, those should be labeled as such on the box–‘must use hp ink for life of printer’ or some bullshit.

according to my co-worker, if you still have some left in the bottle, you haven’t used enough.

in 1990, $8-10 a carton; nowadays it’s barely worth the short drive there–they price them ‘just under’ regular retail price here.

it’s a church office, jesus does the legal shit… and apparently the pc backups, too.

florida man: looks down. pulls. “yup. it’s merged.”

i was called into one office where they bought a backup external, like someone told them to previously. they took it out of the box, set it on the tower. and i guess, that was that. the magic box would now have backups of everything they did.

five years later, i got to tell them that there’s nothing on it.

the pc was never configured to run a backup of any kind. hell, the drive was never connected to the pc.

so no backups of their documents, their spreadsheets, their mailing lists, their email, or their quickbooks (that part, they at least ran manual backups of, when prompted by the software, to a flash drive).

thank you, ordis.

i have a client in need of a new laptop to replace an aging windows one with multiple issues. a $280 sale of a 12th gen 1215u with 8gb and 250gb ssd staring at him, and way more than they ‘need’. but his wife, a k12 teacher, will insist upon a macbook when she retires and has to give hers back to the district. so they’re looking at about $1000 instead, minimum.

step 1 isn’t needed for nearly all already-activated windows 10 or 11. microsoft activation servers will ‘remember’ your pc hardware configuration’s hash and its activation state. don’t even need to associate the install with a microsoft account either, when reinstalling to the same pc, it just works.

most ‘newbies’, who just need something to launch a browser these days, wouldn’t go past line 2.

at the moment, it’s sponge bob theme…

might just maybe, possibly be, because i have classic (4:3 era) episodes playing on a random loop here for background noise right now.

because those workers didn’t buy into that corporate anti-union nonsense.

he loves this trick. it’s how crap got (and gets) added to windows, was doing it back when gates was running the show too. one little bit at a time. a lot of companies pull this shit.

when companies go overboard, reactions like from reddit api or unity pricing changes (recent examples) happen.