Yup
Par for the course in Boston and southern New England generally speaking. You can have my firstborn if you really need it, but I reserve the right to break your balls forever.
We’re not nice but we are kind. It’s how we keep each other sane when the fuckin sun goes away at 4:30, and the plow just un-shoveled what we just finished shoveling (cue the ice storm to make that snow extra wet and heavy only to later freeze into a foot thick block of ice).
I miss screensavers :(
I’ve had good success with makemkv for ripping both blu rays and dvs. I’ve not had good success making a duplicate disk though. It can be done but it’s been a very long time. I used to use handbrake in that chain but it got to be too much trouble. I resorted to ripping all my stuff, serving it up digitally, and only taking the disks out when nostalgia hit.
But ya - makemkv and handbrake used to get the job done a long time ago, you can search in that direction. Maybe there’s a newer better way.
Yes, like this ;)
No no - not like that. Like crappy overpriced laptops. Like “I’m a piece of crap laptop masquerading as a good one and sold to people who don’t know better at a price way way way too high”.
Of course we have laptops :)
It’s often a laptop, something us nerds wouldn’t buy generally speaking, so they tend to have hardware issues. So newer tends to be better. So plain old Fedora workstation with gnome. I pin their favorite programs to the dock, and show them the basics of the interface. I show them the software button and say they can install anything they want from there, and that they should do the updates that pop up from there.
Zero issues. Honestly does a better job than windows - things are more intuitive for the non tech savvy.
Edit: mint is pretty good too if it works. It’s one of those two systems.
I don’t know why there’s so much nvidia hate going on here. It’s MUCH better than it used to be. Lots of distros mentioned work out of the box with nvidia cards, and if you pick something else - it’s just a matter of installing the right driver. On fedora for example you just go to the rpm fusion site and follow the very easy directions.
Sometimes I’m just out with coworkers but not starving. I used to get a cheese and chicken quesadilla. It used to cost $4 and change. Then they started charging burrito prices - $15 and change for a tortilla, a handful of shredded cheese and 1/4 of a chicken breast. I get there is regional pricing differences - but their costs (at least here) are out of control.
It’s funny how companies just don’t get it.
Fast food has been historically cheap. Chipotle worked because it was fast, it was cheap, and you didn’t feel like you were as much of a fat ass compared to grabbing a giant bacon burger and a bucket of fries.
Now you go to chipotle and pay $20 for a burrito and a soda. Still fast, still decent enough (at least the one near me), but $20 is highway robbery.
OR, I can go across the street to a sit down restaurant, have a first generation Thai guy (who started his American dream restaurant) whip up the best damn drunken noodles I’ve ever had for $12. AND he does this FASTER than chipotle (seriously how does he do it? Must be a magic wok).
Guess where we grab lunch these days.
If it’s a texture thing, have you tried all the tomato varieties? Like Roma tomatoes have very little seed and pulp, cherry tomatoes are kind of like grapes, and I’ve even tried some obscure varieties that make me question what a tomato is.
If that doesn’t work, I’m honestly having a hard time thinking about a substitute for a tomato. They are pretty unique.
I had strange video crashing bugs on my laptop with 41. 42 has been rock solid for me. Was thinking of staying there for a while anyways.
I disagree. I’m old and Pepperidge farm remembers :)
Back in the day, there was “no way I’m sticking my credit card numbers into the internet.” People were MORE likely to give out credit card numbers over the phone, or write them down on a piece of paper ripped out of a magazine and mail it. Crazy, I know, but true.
Amazon was cool because it became the first big digital store. You could order all kinds of quality stuff, from the comfort of your house, CHEAPLY, and then they shipped it to your doorstep. If you joined prime - they delivered in two days. Full stop. Oh - it didn’t make it there in two days? Here’s compensation.
Let’s compare that to today:
Amazon lost its way. We ditched our decades old membership and shopping habits. We save more money, stuff gets delivered faster, we don’t worry about getting knockoff crap, and cutting Amazon out of our lives has been a total non issue. (Surprisingly - I thought it would be much more inconvenient than it’s been)
I’ve used it since the 90s, but windows was always my daily driver. Linux always worked, but games could be spotty and there always seemed to be to be the random breakage for no reason.
But that changed a few years ago. Games “just worked”, device support became really good, and if I’m being honest - I became a gnome guy. That interface is very very productive, especially on a laptop with a trackpad.
And then windows just, started sucking. They break machines with every single update, it’s like there’s zero qa anymore. And the little things became more and more annoying - the pop ups “upgrade to 11, try copilot, OneDrive isn’t working omfg let me help you fix that” the “where is that setting moved to now” game, the extra clicks everywhere.
My dual boot setup found a windows drive that was never being used anymore. I didn’t switch, I just stopped using. Eventually I just deleted the partition and use it for extra space and playing around with other OSs.
During this process I distro hopped quite a bit and eventually settled on fedora workstation. It’s been good to me on three PCs.
I should note that depending on which internal drives are used - you can use them like external drives for backups. You can copy files and images there, then easily disconnect the sata cable. Then you can’t overwrite it by accident during install. But you get to use the large size of the drive for images and whatnot.
It sounds like you have enough drives to do this super safely with zero chance of screwing things up :)
Um, let’s just clarify a bit more just in case.
You have your pictures, music, videos, and other personal files on what?
On the internal hard drives (hdd/ssd/nvme/whatever) and the backup/copy of those files on the external drive (external usb hdd/ssd, flash drive, NAS, whatever)? Presumably both are formatted ntfs?
What I described above is the ideal scenario. It could be as simple as formatting your internal drives and installing Linux, then copying those files back to your newly formatted internal hard drives. This is going to be fine as long as you are SURE your backups are good. Linux can read ntfs drives and copy files from them.
I’m always a bit paranoid though and I like to take extra steps. Sometimes, you forget to backup a file. Like a save game file sitting in a random game folder, a configuration file (like a blahblah.ini) files for program settings, or your favorites, you get the point. This stuff usually isn’t a deal breaker - you really only care about the stuff that’s irreplaceable like pictures and home movies. But it’s annoying…
So what I like to do is to take a drive image. Not a backup - a bit for bit clone of the internal hard drives. Then you can’t forget anything ;) Pick your program of choice - I’ve used macrium reflect successfully in the past and it was free - it’s been a while and there may be better options these days. Make that image and store it on a large external drive/nas/whatever. Then if you screw something up - you can simply restore your windows computer or go grab that file you forgot in your backup routine. I usually keep both my “backup files” and the drive image for a good long while after I reload a pc. Sometimes it’s months before you realize you’re missing something.
So in summary/my advice.
2 day old spam account
All I wanted was cd quality audio (which I’m willing to pay for)…
You know you’ve screwed up when the lazy people (me) actually get off their butts to switch.
There’s three threads recommending framework 13. I commented in one. I actually own a new 13 with all the latest stuff. It comes close, but it’s not a Mac.
The trackpad works really good except it has a lot of play in it - it’s annoying.
I’ve seen better screens. Yes I have the newest one, no it’s not terrible - but there’s better out there.
The speakers are just ok. Not bad, just ok.
The 13 craftsmanship wise is amazing. My father in law just bought the 16. That one has fit issues with the trackpad and the spacers on either side of it.
Fingerprint readers on both and they work great. No touchscreen.
Battery life is good. Macs are better. My 13 goes about 6-7 hours of continual “normal use”. If I’m using teams for a video call, it’s significantly less - maybe 3 hours. Games - depends on the game but that can drain it in a couple of hours. You cannot under any circumstances go an entire day+ of continuous use without charging.
They are both fantastic linux machines (frameworks) and I highly recommend them. But the hardware is not Mac perfect despite what others say. Just trying to be real here - sounds like you have high expectations and I’d hate for you to buy an expensive laptop and be dissatisfied.
I’ve installed Ubuntu and fedora workstation on 5 machines in the past 6 months. Not a single install required using the terminal even once. A couple of those installs were on sketchy hardware and everything still just worked.
Meanwhile I installed win11 on a new machine a couple of weeks ago and it had missing drivers on install, trouble activating, and the login screen switched to Chinese characters after a few reboots (it is a known bug).
/shrug