you mean debian, right?

they count clicks on a distro’s page on their site, not usage or anything else.

if they dared put hanna montana linux on there, it would be the perpetual #1 listing.

a pallet of 4th gens? i have a dozen left here from around that era that i can’t get rid of without literally giving them away. they’re ‘tolerable’ for a gui linux or win10 with an ssd, but the ‘performance per watt’ just isn’t there with hardware this old. i used a few of them (none in an always-on role, though), but the rest just sit in the corner, without home nor purpose.

these 800 g1s are, iirc, 12vo, so upgrade or reuse potential is a bit limited. most users would want windows, and win10 does run ‘ok enough’ on 4th gen, just make sure they’re booting from ssd (120gb minimum). but they’ll run into that arbitrarily-errected wall-of-obsolescence with trying to upgrade or install win11 when win10 retires in ~ 18 months (you can ‘rufus’ a win11 installer, but there’s no guarantee that you will be able to in the future). that limits demand and resale value of pretty much all the pre-8th gen hardware.

if it supports the basic hardware, there’s nothing wrong with peppermint for basic stuff like your use case. after the base system is installed, add a browser and libreoffice and you’ll have a nice little system for writing on.

if you want to keep using windows on it, you’ll probably have to ‘start over’ with a plain install of windows (without hp’s junk, and to a clean–partition table cleared–‘hard drive’), uninstall the useless crud like candy crush that comes with the base windows install, ensure compactos is enabled (it should be automatically enabled with those specs), install your browser and word processor. you shouldn’t have to do thing where you connect an external drive for ‘working’ space for updates (something i’ve only ever had to do twice on 32gb emmc models) anymore as long as updates stay relatively current.

but with only 2gb ram and a 10 year old ‘atom’ based cpu, i’d probably go straight for peppermint.

if they don’t need a new printer, and if mom is happy with what she has… don’t fix what ain’t broken (in mom’s eyes). or just look for 3rd party ink for it. many and good reviews, reputable seller. it may take a couple tries to find some that work. hopefully mom hasn’t allowed an hp firmware update that nixes that option and doesn’t let you roll it back.

if you do replace the printer:

if they’re low volume, can live without color, or are sporadic printer users, get a laser. a b/w brother with the features you want, that has 3rd party toners and drum kits available.

if they’re higher volume and regular printer users (they don’t not print for weeks or months at a time) and ‘need’ color, you could consider one of those ‘tank-based’ color inkjets. do not let it run out of ink and always leave it plugged in to the power (let it go into power-save on its own). they also usually have 3rd party ink available. you may want to see if and how the printheads themselves get replaced when needed and whether or not you can actually buy them (we’re binning one here because the printer says it needs a new printhead—but you can’t buy them!).

for photos, stick 'em on a flash drive and go to walmart or a drug store that has the self-service photo printing stations or use an online service that ships. it’s much cheaper than printing photos at home.

read the box, and all its fine print. some printers (mostly, but not exclusively hp) are shipping with strict blocks on 3rd party consumables. hp had previously reserved the hardcore blocking to the first firmware update you’d get after setting it up (let that update come in, you were screwed. disabled firmware updates and you were ‘ok’)… but not anymore.

duplex printing (both sides, automatically) is something we use a lot. a sheet feeder (adf) on top for copies and scans is another feature we couldn’t live without at the office. even though it might only be used occasionally–when it is needed, it saves so much time.

two other features that are often overlooked is a second input feed (even if it’s ‘manual’/one sheet at a time) for envelopes, letterhead or a sheet of labels… and a main input tray with a decent capacity… the one i’m using now only holds 50 sheets (about 30 in practice, because if you dare to fill it, it will misfeed frequently), and that’s just not enough.

for printing from phones and tablets. look for that feature in the printer specs, then when you set it up at home, set it up as a wifi printer.

samsung sold their printer business to hp in 2017.

messed around some with slack 0.99.

but first one to actually see some regular usage was buzz, which progressed over time through to potato.

and the first to get its own dedicated box long-term was woody.

erecting a firewall.

someone spycheck already, dammit!

MEDIC!!!

they’re just trying to con people into using the new data harvesting mail app by calling it ‘outlook’

you don’t even need a player script; browsers today can play media on their own.

and scripts with added features is a very crowded market.

new ui is literal trash.

media formats it already does, and it is expected to support nearly everything. but as far as a front-end for whatever tf they’re planning–there are plugins and extensions already, it should be there. not in the base code.

still is, and always has been. and that’s not a bad thing.

Fedora is often considered “the new Ubuntu” […]

no. it’s not. and i’ve never, ever heard anyone say it is–until now.

we still play that game. at least once every week or two, i’m calling a ‘lost’ phone from another or using the handset locator on a cordless system.

imho getting windows-based games running on linux isn’t for someone ‘new’ to linux. they gotta get their feet wet first, and mint is an excellent choice for that… or they will be spending all their gaming time–not gaming.

flash vs ssd is night and day difference for write speeds. if you write that frequently to your ventoy and write speed matters to you, you want ssd.

either make it (assemble) yourself or buy one. i have a number of clients using samsung t7 external usb ssd. they seem pretty fast to me.

i don’t use ventoy or ventoy-like devices that often, i just use flash… even some usb 2.0 ones. yea, they take longer to boot up and longer (much longer) to write to, but i don’t add or replace iso on them very often.

it’s a church office, jesus does the legal shit… and apparently the pc backups, too.

i was called into one office where they bought a backup external, like someone told them to previously. they took it out of the box, set it on the tower. and i guess, that was that. the magic box would now have backups of everything they did.

five years later, i got to tell them that there’s nothing on it.

the pc was never configured to run a backup of any kind. hell, the drive was never connected to the pc.

so no backups of their documents, their spreadsheets, their mailing lists, their email, or their quickbooks (that part, they at least ran manual backups of, when prompted by the software, to a flash drive).

i have a client in need of a new laptop to replace an aging windows one with multiple issues. a $280 sale of a 12th gen 1215u with 8gb and 250gb ssd staring at him, and way more than they ‘need’. but his wife, a k12 teacher, will insist upon a macbook when she retires and has to give hers back to the district. so they’re looking at about $1000 instead, minimum.

step 1 isn’t needed for nearly all already-activated windows 10 or 11. microsoft activation servers will ‘remember’ your pc hardware configuration’s hash and its activation state. don’t even need to associate the install with a microsoft account either, when reinstalling to the same pc, it just works.

most ‘newbies’, who just need something to launch a browser these days, wouldn’t go past line 2.

we do that around the veggie garden, but with aol cds.

this isn’t anything new. fake downloads, malware, and scam support sites and links and phone numbers have been a thing in results since they started putting paid placements and ads in serp… and even before then, back when simple keyword spam could game the algorithms.

i have a some sata->usb adapters/enclosures/docks that can’t be used with > 2tb drives or with 4Kn (native 4k sectors, no 512 emulation) drives. i also have a 2-bay cheap nas that can only do 2x1tb or smaller and there’s no new firmware or hacks to ‘fix’ it even though it’s linux under-the-hood.

start with hooking it back up to sata to copy anything on it you want elsewhere, check the filesystem, and run the extended diagnostics.

is there anyone on the planet that didn’t see this coming the moment the buyout was first announced?

Sure, but Firefox isn’t one of them

but those that do inflate google’s stats.

i had to fudge the useragent to chrome yesterday to get 1080p out of azn.

be sure to actually launch firefox and don’t use the google ‘app’ either.

users can modify their useragent string, and sometimes they have to because some webdevs are morons.

some browsers actually default to using chrome instead of its own.

using a browser-reported useragent string to count marketshare itself is flawed from the start, using a very narrow and limited scope of web sites to measure it–even more so.

if i counted my own clients: home, soho and small business end users… it’s about even between chrome and firefox on windows (chrome users doing so on their own, as we highly recommend firefox, and vivaldi over chrome for a chromium-based solution) with edge trailing far behind; and about 3 to 1 android (chrome) over safari on mobile with (so far, but soon to change) very few mobile firefox users.

“most” desktops are used in business and other organizations, not by gamers, and it is these customers and their systems that will be the bulk of the e-waste generated by the forced-obsolescence of their hardware due to 10’s EOL and 11’s ‘new’ requirements.

the basic requirements (compute power, ram, storage) to install windows hasn’t really changed at all since like vista or 7. dual core and 4gb ram were common even back at vista’s launch (and earlier, even. many late xp systems shipped with those specs).

due to bloat these older systems (like dual core windsor am2/dual core wolfdale lga775) fall flat with 10; but swap their original mechanical hdd for sata ssd and feed 'em at least 4gb ram and they run 10 as well as 7 or 8.

it was a false/inaccurate quote, afaik, but my thinking after hearing it was…

yea, last one we’ll buy, everything after will be a subscription.

might be ‘postponed’ a few versions (my guess is whatever’s after 12), but i’m certain that’s still microsoft’s end goal: subscriptions and only subscriptions.

absolutely this.

lately i haven’t even been able to get some pages (just pages, not streams themselves) on yt to even open up in firefox, with or without ubo enabled.

as real as ‘artificial cheese’

it’s a hell of a lot more work and liability than just renting the server space and letting the user do ‘whatever’ with it.

smr drives are horrible. we have some here. some by accident, others for cost savings (used only for long term, large file storage)–but all of smr’s faults are really not worth it… maybe at half the price per tb it might be–for some use cases, but not at current pricing.

the last batch we got in don’t even support trim, so i guess the only way to ‘clean up’ zones is to literally dump everything off, secure_erase them, and ‘start over’.

devices on the hub share the total bandwidth to/from the host system’s usb port. data going between drives on the same hub has to travel to the host then back again.

so: transferring files to/from a single drive will go ‘full speed’, transferring files between two drives on that hub will run at about half speed, accessing data on all the drives on that hub at the same time (such as syncing a snapraid array built on externals all connected to that hub) will be painfully and brutally slow.

of course it is… ‘instant ink’ subscription requires you consent to automatic firmware updates. the very first of which will block ‘non genuine hp’ ink cartridges (even more than the factory-loaded firmware does) forever.

so they either get the high-margin recurring subscription revenue or they get the high-margin oem ink sales revenue every time a tiny oem cartridge empties or clogs-up to the point of not working.

‘instant ink’ is only potentially of any value for some users who have a very consistent printer output from month-to-month, every month, that happens to match-up well with their subscription levels, and that output contains a lot of ink coverage like figures, graphics, and pictures.

if you want to print pictures, an online service or retail store with a printing kiosk is usually the more economical choice–so long as you don’t mind a third-party ‘seeing’ them.

absolutely. turnkey retail product is the answer here.

OR, a normal windows-based (so they know how to navigate it) desktop with one or more internal drives added. set up the shares, done. i’d add stablebit drive pool and maybe cloud drive to it for pooling, redundancy, and encrypted online drives to hold a copy. no weird hardware setups, no ‘foreign’ ui, no raid arrays to babysit…