anything worth doing is worth half-assin'

our small biz website is over twenty years old. it's been through numerous designs, several different backends, moved servers five times... url schemes change, site organization and content changes... but every single url that once existed and no longer does today, has a redirect to the relevant existing page. every. single. one. it's an 'automatic'. it's something i've always done dating back to the earliest of early days of http

gays in the closet? coathanger abortions? fuck no, it is not what they want.

agents deployed.

i have one of those already. my bookmarks file on the home pc, which began life ~ early 2001 and has thousands (10s of thousands.. probably) of entries. it's been 'de-duped' a few times over the years, but i've never ran a dead-link checker on them.

haven't used xvid in like 20 years. do still have some old 'archives' though.

i almost went with aurora here. in fact it's still on the other pc i was also testing on, sitting on a shelf unused the last several months. but after trying out pretty much everything i could get my hands on.. i ended up back 'home', on debian. where i started ~ 30 years ago.

solus os (independent 'semi rolling') and ultramarine (fedora based) were two other non-debian based ones on my short list. i already have a manjaro desktop so it wasn't on my list at all.. i already knew i didn't want it on this box.

alma and rocky are the new 'clones' of rhel that were spawned from the death of centos when redhat radically changed its mission in ~ 2020-21. they have most the pros and cons of running rhel itself.

it used to be that.. the 'new' one is debian trixie-based. runs plasma but there's also a 'lite' spin that uses lxqt

because the average user is kinda dumb, kinda impatient, and some of those ads and banners on google properties peddling chrome were very scary to them.. that they'd lose, or miss-out on something in, youtube or google or their gmail.

i just start with the basic rule of: whatever they want or suggest or default to, the opposite is probably what should be configured or answered instead.

youtube, google, gmail. all better platform to market from than your desktop os. plus google spent a ton of money on mainstream ads, and had the perfect place on those aforementioned platforms to peddle their own and at no cost to them. and google is far from innocent here.. they've bullshitted their way to the top of the browser game and pull similar stunts as microsoft does.