As far as I’m aware, they had to stop doing that some time ago.

I personally find the my cognitive load with Linux is much lower now that I’ve switched over.

First of all, the Windows 11 UI is awful and ugly. The Windows 10 UI was never that great and only looks good as it ended up sandwiched between 8 and 11. I’d have to go to Windows 7 for something that’s decent. Admittedly the polish on a lot of Linux DEs and applications can leave a lot to be desired, but I have a choice between multiple DEs and many of those DEs are highly customizable. I’d have to go back to Windows 7 for something that’s better polished and works as good for me as XFCE does.

Then there’s being in control of my own computer. I control when it does its updates. My computer respects my settings and preferences and doesn’t randomly change or reset them. It doesn’t randomly install unwanted software on it’s own, or reinstall stuff I explicitly removed. It doesn’t place ads in my whisker menu or on my desktop or lock screen. There’s no telemetry being sent home to the mothership. With anything past Windows 8 I’ve never really felt like I’m in complete control and Microsoft can just do whatever the hell they want.

While there are the occasional issues as someone who is familiar with Linux it’s typically not too difficult to track it down and fix it. Though there are exceptions of course. At least if I have to edit some files in /etc they tend to stay that way as opposed to having to edit the registry with regedit.exe only to have Windows randomly undo what I did with the next update. And while PulseAudio is notorious for causing all sorts of havoc, it seems like it’s finally gotten to the point where it finally works and I haven’t had any issues with the volume control for a while now.

As for games it obviously matters what games you like to play, but the amount of tinkering I’ve had to do to play any game in my Stream library beyond enabling Proton so far is zero. Which has been a very pleasant surprise and honestly I’ve been pretty impressed with that.

My guess is one of the upcoming major updates will either refuse to install, or will try to install and fail, if you try that route.

Something like that happened with a 2006-era laptop I have with Windows 10. It ran Windows 10 fine for several years, but finally one of the big updates decided it no longer liked some of the Vista-era drivers I was using. The update would try to install, fail, and roll back. And since Windows doesn’t let you turn off or disable updates, a few days later it would try again only to fail in the exact same way.

Any new computer sold that has a copy of Windows preinstalled means Microsoft is getting a cut.

Besides there being no 1998 Aerostar, this is one of the early models. The badges on the front fenders went away after the first few model years, and the later ones have composite headlights rather than the sealed beams.

I’d be fairly certain the washing machine has a few sensors and a fairly simple computer program (designed by humans) that can make some limited adjustments to the wash cycle on the fly.

I’ve seen quite a few instances of stuff like that suddenly being called “AI” as that’s the big buzzword now.

I’d argue there was a fourth serious failure, and that was Intel allowing the motherboard manufacturers to go nuts and run these chips way out of spec by default. Granted, ultimately it was the motherboard manufacturers that did it, but there’s really no excuse for what these motherboards were doing by default. Yes, I get the “K” chips are unlocked, but it should be up to the user to choose to overclock their CPU and how they want to go about it. To make matters worse, a lot of these motherboards didn’t even have an easy way to put things back into spec - it was up to you to go through all the settings one by one and set them correctly.

Github Copilot is about the only AI tool I’ve used at work so far. I’d say it overall speeds things up, particularly with boilerplate type code that it can just bang out reducing a lot of the tedious but not particularly difficult coding. For more complicated things it can also be helpful, but I find it’s also pretty good at suggesting things that look correct at a glance, but are actually subtly wrong. Leading to either having to carefully double check what it suggests, or having fix bugs in code that I wrote but didn’t actually write.

I feel lucky too. I have a 14900k that’s stable. I did have some minor stability issues after I built it, but dialing back the motherboard’s idiotic default settings plus a few BIOS updates cleared that up. With that said, if I had to do over, I’d build an AMD system. One of the big reasons I built Intel is that historically my Intel builds have been much more stable and less problematic than my AMD builds.

Besides what people have mentioned, you also have simulator type games like SimCity. Though with SimCity, I got bored of the “new” SimCity they released… in 2013. Either play something like SimCity 4000, or try Cities Skylines.

That’s the problem. A lot of those high-end, expensive appliances are built just as shitty as the low-end, basic models. The difference is just some bells and whistles and a higher price tag.

I have no problem paying extra for a higher quality, better built appliance. But the challenge is differentiating those from the low quality, built as cheaply as possible appliances that have just been marked up with a premium price tag.

At least when I buy the cheap, shitty model, I get what I paid for.

The games that are going to be the hardest to preserve may end up being many of the mobile games that are popular now.

These games are usually installed through an app store, so if the app store pulls it, that could be it for new installations of the game unless the game can be extracted off an existing device. And even if you manage to extract the game off of a device, in order to get it onto another mobile device will likely require some way to side load it.

Many of these games also depend on a server so once the server is turned off that’s another way the game to die.

The mobile devices these games run on aren’t built for the long term either. They are essentially disposable devices meant to last a few years and then be tossed. They aren’t built to be serviced or repaired. Eventually the batteries will die, and while you can replace the battery, there’s no standardization of battery packs and eventually replacement batteries won’t be available either.

Even if you can get an old mobile device going, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually be able to do anything with it, because the device itself may depend on some remote server just to function that could someday be shut off. There’s already old phones today that if you factory reset them, it effectively bricks them since they need to contact some activation server as part of the initial setup process and that server is long gone.

Of course, many people may ask - who cares? Perhaps so, but I’d bet a lot of people said the same thing about the old Atari and Nintendo and Sega and MS-DOS games that were popular years ago and are still popular today.

It’s kind of interesting that pretty much all the games I played as a kid are still accessible to me today - in many cases the original game is still playable on the original, still functional, hardware. But a lot of kids today growing up today playing mobile games on a phone or a tablet, when they are my age, could very well have no way to ever experience those games again that they grew up with as kids.

I’m using Manjaro for my desktop and laptop. If I had to pick a new distro today, I’d likely give EndeavourOS a try. But Manjaro has been working well for me for a several years now, does everything I want with little drama, and issues have been few. So I’m a happy camper and I’ll keep on using it.

I have a home server that has been running Debian Stable since the mid-2000’s or so. It just chugs right along, so complaints are few. Though occasionally having to deal with the old versions of some of the packages on it can be annoying.

I did the opposite. After one of the big updates, Windows 10 decided it was no longer going to work with the Vista-era drivers for an old Core 2 Duo laptop. To be fair to Microsoft, was I pretty impressed when I initially installed Windows 10 and it accepted those ancient drivers without any complaints on a laptop that was 10 years old at that time.

So I instead installed Manjaro and everything worked just fine.

Safari is holding back the web with their old, quirky, outdated engine. However, as Safari’s engine is the only option for iOS, most web developers can’t afford to ignore Safari because they can’t ignore the iPhone. So it’s IE all over again - an old, outdated browser that everyone nevertheless has to support as a significant portion of the users are using it. In some ways it’s even worse, as iPhone users don’t have any choice due to Apple’s restrictions, but even in the darkest days of IE’s stranglehold on the web Microsoft never restricted what browsers you could install on Windows.

That it has e-SATA would put it in the Lenovo-era, possibly one of the models that still had the IBM badging.

For the humor-impaired, there were also ThinkPads with an IrDA port too.

Maybe they are counting all the times Microsoft launched a new brand of phone and then unceremoniously killed off about 6 months later?