What if they reject 100% of applications? Seems perversely incentivised.

Trying too hard to get a reaction by threatening to load Windows, the hardware hog? Way too low to even be believable.

First thing that comes to mind with a thrifted laptop is that you need to use an older distro compiled for 32bit cpu. But honestly, modern laptops are cheap and the overall experience regardless of OS is that very old hardware is going to look bad by comparison with anything on a store shelf so unless you are familiar with Linux already and committed to rehab old hardware (e.g. for standalone use) then it probably isn’t worth your time.

That is not an ideal experience. However, hardware gremlins are not a universal experience either.

Others have pointed out that getting a slightly older laptop to put Linux on can give the tinkerers time to get the key drivers working, and avoiding bleeding edge revisions of your distro can help.

It is quite possible that my comfortable experience with Mint and Ubuntu over the years have been influenced by my low expectations of getting all the bells and whistles working the way they would in Windows. I like the software environment that typically comes on Linux and I don’t stress when Windows software (esp games) doesn’t work (though Steam makes a lot of games work anyway).

I did have to spend more time getting the bios and fingerprint reader straightened out on my latest laptop (Dell Inspiron), but Google and blogs walked me through it and the only remaining problem is that sometimes when the fingerprint prompt times out I have to use the password until I reboot.

Isn’t it “any algorithm that would impress Dilbert’s Boss”? In the vein of “I don’t have to be faster than the bear… I just have to be faster than you”… /s

if it is a magnum, shouldn’t it be bigger? /s

They are a record of the process of adding to the Linux kernel. Such background can be used to trace the history of contributions if those contributions turn out to have had malicious intent or were derived from code that came from sources that were not compatible with the GNU license that the kernel is released under.

Samsung and Pixel, but various earlier models with micro-USB also. The plugs on my nightstand chargers have also tended to loosen up over time, but since I don’t unplug those as often they don’t seem to be the weak link.

All my old devices become un-chargeable due to USB-C plug wearout. Even with wireless charging I cannot avoid sometimes needing a wired full charge.

Just a note: Windows software for controlling hardware is highly likely to assume a)direct access to the hardware (sometimes mediated thorough ancient APIs and assuming the existence of defunct expansion slots) and b) assume meatspace time can be counted using OS timing ticks (which get stretched out as modern VMs timeshare with other processes underneath the virtulized hardware). It is awfully tough to replace them sometimes.

Stick with Windows. Microft will deliver paradigm shifts and you will have no say in the matter. They are already removing options for disabling Copilot, and for all the promised backward compatibility they are letting go of features that lots of old Windows software depended on, as they introduce features similar to ones in Linux. I cannot really fault them for all of these changes, but the difference is actually one of choice and privacy, and not really the one you seem to think it is.

It is not recursive though. A directory is a special kind of inode that enumerates file inode numbers and when that list changes then the contents of that “directory inode” change. But if /home/user/.bashrc is deleted then the timestamp for /home will not be affected because the timestamps are associated with inodes rather than directory entries (assuming no symbolic links are involved).

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/inodes-linux-filesystem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/inode

Just to second that, the model series is Latitude, not Inspiron. and yeah, the i5 processor options I got over the years beat the i7 on processing power. The Precision models are a step up, but not any kind of low cost and seem not quite as tough.

Maybe if enough people file feedback on the name change they will reconsider. At least they will have a glut of feedback to deal with.

Bash is always there, and bash scripts and snippets are precise. Describing gui manipulations when the GUI keeps changing is also quite hard… what if the person you are interacting with has a 2-yo system and you have the bleeding edge? Even knowing which menu the settings are in can be frustrating for the helper.

Windows users (e.g. me at work) get grumpy when Microsoft starts changing the menu structure after keeping it consistent for 20 years and start thinking of powershell scripts to create consistency between our engineering workstations.

They are text files. If there is anything weird about them it is that they are indented with spaces and if you are inconsistent with indentation they won’t read into the yaml import function, but I can’t imagine why vim or nano would have a problem with opening them. Maybe the ones you were using were not actually yaml.

Totally lost me. Why the hate on YAML?

If you want the job, go back. If they don’t want to deal with a fragile person then it is up to them to fire you. Next time just say “I don’t know” and keep flipping burgers.

Mint.

General pickyness: Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. For example, Android and Mint are both operating systems that use Linux, but the way you interact with Android is dramatically different than the way you interact with Mint.

When you come across some Python code for something written 5 years ago and they used four contributed packages that the programmers have changed the API on three times since then, you want to set up a virtual environment that contains those specific versions so you can at least see how it worked at that time. A small part of this headache comes from Python itself mutating, but the bulk of the problem is the imported user-contributed packages that multiply the functionality of Python.

To be sure, it would be nice if those programmers were all dedicated to updating their code, but with hundreds of thousands of packages that could be imported written by volunteers, you can’t afford to expect all of them them to stop innovating or even to continue maintaining past projects for your benefit.

If you have the itch to fix something old so it works in the latest versions of everything, you have that option… but it is really hard to do that if you cannot see it working as it was designed to work when it was built.

Yes, this was an appropriate response. I hate people who wave guns around like they are toys.