and when the hot water heater is two floors down and the pipe from there runs up unheated parts of the building, it takes a very long time to get even a hint of warmth out of the hot water faucets.

i’ve lived 3 minutes away from hot water for nearly thirty years now. it sucks. if i ever get money enough to own a house, or choose where i live with little regard to cost, it will have instant hot water (tankless water heaters).

they were one of my favourites.

people got lazy about plugging them in

always have been, here. the old cdma flip phone went about a month between charges, even when it was 5+ years old. the new volte one sucks. with a higher power draw and the shitty 4g signal here, i have to plug it in every few days. the only ‘plus’ is that i always know where a charger cable is now, because it’s usb-c and i use that for other things, too.

if you’re being paid to run windows software… that’s a little different.

i’ve run across a couple prebuilts where shift-f10 didn’t work at any screen of the oobe. those just got clean installs via rufus.

rufus can download the latest 10 or 11 iso direct from ms servers (incorporating the fido ps1 script, made by the same guy), so you only need rufus and a flash drive.

And no, 4k desktops do not “look nicer”, it is stupid and tiny for no reason. Unless you have like 250 shortcuts on your desktop what is the point?

if you have an ultra-high desktop resolution, you’re probably using a scaling factor to make everything look about the same size it would otherwise be at ~ 1080p… windows will even default to something around that… just no ‘jaggies’.

so yea, it does ‘look nicer’ and no, everything is not ‘stupid and tiny’.

my ‘arch based’ system is a cinnamon-flavoured manjaro. manjaro gets shit on for reasons, one of them being they hold back updated packages for a bit… which is basically what you recommend, and it’s what i usually do anyway–defer updates for awhile (even on windows), unless it’s a super critical issue that could actually be a problem.

that manjaro desktop has been solid, never once messed-up an update even with the aur packages i have installed, and even if it’s been a month or two since it last updated.

2000 ran the best and was the most stable of all of them for me.

apple did their part by putting siri front-and-center on iphones.

opera has been owned by chinese company since 2016.

sidekicks in '09. had so many users here affected.

never again.

you did well with the ‘hardest part’. good name.

those ‘extensions’ to the spec with the extra formatting are pretty much a must-have feature.

gonna give it a spin when i get back to the office.

love the placeholder on your domain (yea, i looked there too).

in the live linux mint environment, gparted or disks should give you a clue. if it just shows zero space free for that partition or can’t mount it, it probably is–go into windows, disable device encryption and let it complete that process. while you’re waiting for that, find the rest of the power options (in control panel–via ‘windows tools’ in win11) and disable ‘fast startup’.

is your windows encrypted?

which tends to be the case for the release before an lts.

it was… is PA still around?

that was probably the issue. drm support in browsers is usually disabled by default on linux, but enabled on windows.

the odd cases where one still didn’t work on linux, a simple useragent addon in firefox to flip it to windows has usually worked.

but then, even when it is working, linux clients often still get a lesser product as the streaming sites like to reserve higher quality video to clients with os-level drm, restricting linux to 720p or even 480p.

i know the difference. this was active, in-use memory. the half-dozen dell items uninstalled and their many, many processes, used that much.

I don’t have any more drives to test this out

you have a drive from a budget-tier vendor. it could very easily a glitchy drive. the only way to know is to replace it with something else.