It has been my experience that you can just forget about disk space usage when sysadmin-ing an old person.

The olds that I’ve set up with computers basically don’t move in. They go to a couple websites. They don’t create files, they don’t install a lot of software, they aren’t playing all 500GB of Red Dead Redemption 2. Like, I’ve gotten ready to move files across, prepared full on network connections or brought large external SSDs to transfer files from one computer to another or to copy them off of Windows to copy them back on with Linux…half a gig of pictures, maybe.

We’re talking about folks who might not install any software on the computer at all because they live in a browser.

I have Mint installed on my Aunt’s laptop, which she basically never uses. Fun thing I learned: APT can get constipated if it doesn’t run in a few months. It got itself somewhere you couldn’t GUI out of so I had to use the terminal. It needed something like an apt clean or an apt --fix-broken or something, the error message it gave me told me what command to run, but that needed to happen.

I think you’re alright, Mint’s whole thing is being defuckulated Ubuntu.

I have told this story several times.

In late 2013 or so, I bought a Raspberry Pi 1B as part of my amateur radio hobby. I did all my actual work on a Windows laptop, the Pi was pretty much just a toy, and I learned a little about Linux with it.

Mid-2014, the display in my aging laptop died. I was going back to school that fall, I needed a laptop. So I ordered a high end Inspiron from Dell. And Dell sold me a lemon. That laptop would just…shut off and never turn back on again. And then I’d call Dell’s tech support. They’d send a tech out within a week or two. He’d throw a part in it, and then it would last somewhere between days and seconds. After waiting over a week to get a tech to come out and fix it, it didn’t finish booting before it died again. I finally got them to replace the laptop outright, with a system that lacked many of the features I had explicitly ordered.

I am no longer a Dell customer.

That whole time, I needed a computer, and the only thing I had was that Raspberry Pi in addition to my Galaxy S4. It was real fun typing up homework in LibreOffice on a single core 700Mhz ARMv6 and 512MB of RAM.

I finally got a running Dell, after an entire semester, loaded with Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 was a total pube fire. Linux felt more familiar at that point, so I tried a few different systems, discovered Linux Mint, and 11 years later I don’t have any computers that run Windows.

Probably, I was always taught that the # was just a reminder you were logged in as root, and I’m a Bash boy, I don’t know diddly squat about zsh.

if logged in as root, wouldn’t thebprompt be a # instead of a $?

I think this might be shopped.

Mine actually doesn’t.

Well, I’ll put it to you this way: If I hire a graphic artist to design a logo for my company, and they turn in a .png they drew in Photoshop, GIMP or Krita, they’re fired. Because I’m going to have my logo on my website, printed on business cards, on key fobs, on the side of work trucks, and painted on the side of buildings. I need a four color variant, a black and white variant and an outline variant, and they all need to work when printed at any scale. Raster art can’t do that. “Hey, can you plasma cut my company logo out of stainless?” “Send over the file.” “…what the fuck is this?”

Hell just having it in .svg format rather than .ai format is gonna be a problem, because Adobe Illustrator is a proprietary industry standard. But I mean, the rest of society is dying, why shouldn’t graphic arts also have the disease?

Yeah, that’s kind of a thing; the Adobe suite kind of doesn’t have a raster drawing program, Photoshop gets used for that but Photoshop is meant to be a photo editor.

A “digital artist” or “digital painter” will want to use Krita, a “graphic artist” designing logos or signage is gonna want Inkscape, and people wanting to lie via photograph want GIMP.

It is my understanding that Kriita is a raster art program, while Illustrator is a vector art program. Inkscape is a vector art program.

It might be my pickup truck.

It might be my toilet. Every moving part in the thing can be bought at every hardware store in town.

My washing machine is pretty good, it’s a Kenmore 80 series, it’ll probably outlast me.

Windows 11’s TPM requirements.

I recently built a brand new computer for my uncle. He was running a 3rd gen Core i7 machine running Windows 7. I get a call that it won’t boot. I do manage to get it booted, the SMART data shows the hard drive is on its last eyebrows, and anyway he’s running an OS that’s three generations out of date.

I’m a big Linux user, I’ve got my aunt running Linux Mint. My uncle is such a dunce at computers I don’t think I can do that, because he lacks the vocabulary to tell me what he wants his computer to do. “I might use it for business.” In his line of work that could mean anything from going to quickbooks.com to needing some piece of Windows-only shitware. So “Get a .exe from somewhere” had to remain intact.

For everything he actually does with that computer, that old 3rd gen i7 was fine. Replace the hard disk with a SATA SSD, maybe replace the weird 2-4-2-4 some but not all of it is dual channel 12GB of RAM with two 8 GB sticks of DDR3 and let it roll…except no currently supported version of WIndows runs on this computer.

For a large number of people, computers became objectively fast enough in 2015. That’s about when SSDs became standard equipment, fixing any hardware reason for “damn this thing is slow” even out of midrange consumer hardware. Gamers, home labbers and AI startups need more power, the rest of the world doesn’t. And that was a problem for Microsoft.

The oldest single player game I keep going back to is Super Mario World on the SNES, Copyright 1990.

I will occasionally play games older than that, but the SNES is where my actual nostalgia begins.

Vorta. Qt based front end for BorgBackup.

Probably “Native Linux apps are made in Linux-only bullshit by useless neckbeards, and probably only run in the terminal. Real actual apps like Discord made by a for-profit corporation have to be made cross-platform.”

And what did we get for it? If you search “chrome install” in Edge it pulls a Janet, all like

I’ve had a few creatures put down. My grandmother’s dog was in such bad heart health she couldn’t really move around anymore. When the creature shakes and whimpers under the strain of standing up, and sometimes just randomly screams in pain, it’s about time to make that difficult trip to the vet.

My old cat Spice lived to the ripe old age of 18, and then she had a saddle thrombus. Essentially a blood clot blocked her aorta where it forks to her back legs. Her back beans turned cold and blue, she couldn’t walk right, she was obviously in distress, so we rushed her to the emergency vet where we were told at her age she probably wasn’t going to survive any treatment, and that she probably had about 3 more horribly painful hours to live. She was actively dying, it was a question of how long do we let her lay there gasping?

I let it get about that grim before it becomes an option.

That’s the winning hypothesis, dumpster diving gooners.

I personally don’t, no. I have it installed on a PC though.

Surely there are people who bought Chromebooks for college? Or boomers who bought the $245 Chromebook instead of the $285 Win10S manufactured ewaste laptop?