Tell that to the modern web though.

:) I have an old 2010 network drive, running Debian and OpenMediaVault for music and video shares. It has 256MB of memory and doesn't need it all to act as a folder share and streaming box. Windows 11 needing such a high end chip to run is just really poor optimization

Linux gang rise up!!!

I switch to Linux in college (20ish years ago) and have been exclusively using it since. Windows XP was my last windows machine. I've never regretted it.

My first "true gaming PC" has been turned into a NAS and small docker host. Its about to turn 15, and I have spare hardware to upgrade it, but I like to see how much I can churn out of it.

The TPM requirement is artificial and can be bypassed in the installer.

My work laptop had required CPU, but said can't upgrade due to TPM chip being 1.2 and requirements are TPM 2.0. So I downloaded the firmware updater to get the TPM to 2.0. Then I reran the checker and it said nope CPU not supported. Lol, just arbitrary nonsense.

Even the cheapest SSD you can find will improve the performance quite significantly.

i use some of those low power soc laptops, running with lid closed (heat is basically a non-issue), for pihole, white noise, and a few other 'little' things. one of 'em is even running stuff in VMs (the rest are debian-based dietpi).

I did and am much happier. When I went to install Linux, it was a last minute decision to try to dual boot, and that was the day that the Win11 pop-up showed up saying that I couldn't, so I thought "that makes my decision easy" and wiped the whole thing.

I just want to know why I can only click on the date on the main monitor to view the calendar. Why? It's such a workflow killer when I'm scheduling something and trying to check what day of the week it's happening on. Takes multiple clicks on the non-main monitor before I realize what's happening every time

Regularly, file explorer just stops being an explorer for me. Window sizing and buttons work, but I can't select files or folders. I have to exit file explorer and relaunch it.

I spent probably 5-10 minutes trying to figure out how to get into the old "add a printer" thing from control panel so I could manually install a USB printer for someone yesterday. The new version in settings was presenting a list of every device on the network (corporate environment so 100s of devices) and doesn't even have a search field. Completely fucking useless.

You might want to invest in some spacers to prevent your monitor from breaking when you close the box.

Would you describe your laptop as "hot-n-ready"?

The good news for Microsoft is the EOL did make me buy a new computer

The bad news is that I have no intention of ever using Windows again now. I was already on the fence whether I'd ever willingly upgrade to Win11, but making it a high barrier to entry cemented my decision

Ok so important advice: regardless of Win/Linux, back up your data! Hard drive failures happen, and it can happen randomly at any time. So if you have important documents or any data you want to keep, back it up onto another drive, and ideally a second back up off site. And then get in the habit of refreshing those backups regularly,

I have had multiple hard drives failures over the years and learnt the hard way that you need multiple backups.

This is also important as a 5 year old gaming PC means 5 year old hard drives, and shit really does happen.

EDIT: And if you really have 0 time, get a second drive the same size as your hard drive and clone it. It's better than nothing and can be set up in minutes. It's not efficient as you will clone data you don't need but at least you'll be safe as soon as it's done.

Totally understandable. I took literal years to finally get a backup set up so that I could do this.

Well hey, if you keep your old hardware there's probably a ton of different ways you can use it for other purposes! :)

I have Linux running on a machine with 256 MB of RAM and a single core 700 MHz ARM11 CPU.

I also have it running on a machine with 128 multi-gigahertz cores and a terabyte of RAM. That flexibility is part of why I use Linux.

Linux: the official OS of vagabonds

I miss the old images of the batshit crazy homemade Beowulf clusters people used to throw together that looked like something straight out of Serial Experiments Lain.

I think it means we like to be able to make full use...

Whether its a couple of servers with 4416+'s with 128GB ram and a pair of rtx 6000s or an 11yr old thinkpad w/8GB ram, its not the OS getting in my way.