Could also probably get a couple grand for a working i486 PC at this point

Yes, clean it up and sell it as a “vintage gaming PC”. You can get some good money for them now. You won’t get a couple grand unless it’s something rare though.

Another option is to point your DNS to one of the public ad blocking DNS servers.

That could be a failing power supply. Excessive ripple under heavy load can cause a hard lock up.

You just need a video capture card or dongle for your computer. Preferably one with an S-video input. If these are pre recorded tapes, you will also need a Macrovision remover connected between the VCR and capture card. If you want the quality to be as good as possible, you will need a timebase corrector. Those are hard to find and expensive though. The TBC will also remove the Macrovision.

You didn’t need anything that fancy. You could build a Macrovision remover circuit. The schematics were certainly harder to find before the web, but you could build one up in an afternoon with parts from RadioShack.

Public torrents don’t require trackers. Bittorrent can use DHT to operate completely decentralized.

For 16 bit windows games, DOSBox may work even better since it emulates vintage hardware. You just have to install windows 3.11 inside DOSBox.

The watchable ones are recorded from the projection booth and have an audio cable connected to the camera.

MTP is really buggy and unreliable. It doesn’t matter if it’s on Linux or windows. If you need to transfer a lot of data, I would suggest using the android debug bridge.

Hopefully we will see a lot less of it with the cost of AI going up. Eventually it will just be the big companies that can afford it.

Of course they are. That slop is unmaintainable.

Many laptops will still run fine without the battery plugged in. I prefer mini PCs though.

Stay away from anything Android unless you are going to run a google free ROM on it.

What we need are more ARM PCs with UEFI and mainline Linux drivers. That way they would run a generic OS image just like an x86 PC.

Most ARM PCs require an image built specifically for that system. That makes them a real pain the ass to work with.

Firefox works fine unless I’m on a really bad internet connection.

Yt-dlp is still working fine your youtube downloads. It usually downloads at high speed. Downloading a lot of videos can result in throttling or a temporary IP ban though.

I haven’t had any issues with Nexusmods other than it taking forever to download a multi GB file. The files download intact without a download manager.

Mint does come with a lot of preinstalled software, but I wouldn’t consider it bloated. It’s stuff that most people will use. The MATE and Xfce versions are fairly light.

With Linux, you can get 15+ years out of a PC if you got decent hardware.

It still shows up because the windows boot partition is still there.

If you’re using grub, you can add GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true to /etc/default/grub and run update-grub. That will remove other operating systems from the grub boot menu.

Have you tried using LibreOffice Draw? It works pretty well for editing PDFs. Just make sure you have all of the fonts that the PDF uses before opening it.

If you install a few Flatpak packages, it will fill it up quickly. You could also make a games directory.