Several hundred dollars? Let me know where you're seeing people paying several hundred dollars for a bare, working C64. If you pay $100 for such an article, you are overpaying (This comment won't age well due to market volatility but it is true today in June 2026 in the United States). Putting together a minimal real C64 system for the purpose of playing games/demos/SIDfiles and/or tinkering with BASIC should set you back about $75 for the computer itself, about $60 (shipped) for either a Kung Fu Flash 2 card or a combo SD2IEC/fastloader cartridge, about $10 for a joystick and about $15 for a composite to HDMI adapter. Unless you are archiving unique disks from a personal collection, there is truly no real reason to buy a disk drive these days. Plus a third party PSU, the gold standard being Keelog, but cheaper options exist - allow $70 for this. Or you can get essentially the same experience by purchasing a Raspberry Pi 3B and associated case, etc, for around $100 total, some assembly required.

The C64 Ultimate isn't a terrible product, but it is only a minor aspect of this fiasco. The deplorable part is the influencer pollution. Who knew enshittification could encompass a brand as well as a product.

... but why did they have to put the 99% in controlled tests bullshit first?

The "AI" related products would have far less opponents if they were honest about what they can do.

And that is a problem. You can't run Debian on new hardware.

Why did I go Arch? I had a new laptop. I couldn't even boot Ubuntu or Debian installers. Nothing would boot on that thing because it was too new. I wasn't waiting another year for the LTS cycles to refresh.

That's the other problem with Linux. If you use the standard model....you're SOL on new hardware. Especially if it's a full platform refresh like Dells were last year.

Speaking of which, some people with dyslexia find that they it only affects English, and not Japanese or Chinese.

Dyslexia is basically a made up metric where teachers can punish students for not being good enough.

It is a well known fact that people who are good in reading only need to see the first one or two characters of a word, and the last one or two, and as long as the chars in the middle are the ones to be expected, and not completely random other chars: they read the words just fine, and do not notice the spelling/garbage in the middle.

Most dyslexia people are extremely good in reading. But they do not see their own spelling mistakes:
a) they know perfectly well what they have written, so reading it several times to see a mistake does not work
b) see above ... the "word pattern matching" happens on a different level than just chaining letters

If you have such reading skills, it is actually preventing you to really memorize how words are actually written. Because you do not care how they are written, when you read them.

As soon as you have an "alphabet" or abugida (Ethopian "alphabet" or Thai/Lao/Burmeese) that is more complicated than Roman/English: people realize instantly "oops, I do not know how to write this".

For example above: "Ethiopian" and "Burmeese", is red underlined. No idea what is wrong. Have to click on it to ask the spell checker ... a, Ethopian is missing an "i" ... now I saw it, but it is still red.

In Thai language a certain sound/word can only be written in a single way. There is no we're, were, where, etc.

Chinese is (laymen explanation) completely pictographic. Japanese uses about 1200 "pictograms" (yes, layman explanation, because not all of those "pictograms" are pictograms, there are also logograms and ideograms) ... and an syllable "alphabet".

And here you see what the difference is: "painting a Chinese character" is what this half sentence implied. You have to paint it. Completely different mental process to: writing a few English words. You instantly realize: oh my, I forgot how that character is painted. Or never new it anyway.

So, spelling mistakes could happen on the syllable alphabet level. However the typical error prone combinations as we have in English or German, simply do not exist in Japanese (or Korean). A single syllable is a single character. You simply can not mix that up, if you speak the language.

Of course, when you learn a pictogram, and miss a stroke: it is wrong. Misspelled, probably even misleading as it is a correct different word. Simplest examples: 1 is - and 2 is =. Obviously not a mistake one would make.

But look at the sequence: human, large/tall, dog (in Japanese). Forget one stroke in dog, and it becomes "large", forget one in large and it becomes human. But if you read it again: you see it is the wrong word (most of the time you see it)!

Just what about the design philosphy is stupid? Is it any dumber than what other distros have done?

Look at Ubuntu? How fucking bloated is that installer. What the fuck is cloud-init? I'm running one physical machine and the fucking thing insists it needs cloud-init and all sorts of other cloud bullshit. Not to mention...what the fuck is the point of having 3 or 4 gigs worth of ISO if the installer won't fucking use it. You can't even install Ubuntu without network. It's not grabbing updates...it's grabbing all the fucking packages.

Let's ignore the fact I've got hardware that wouldn't get Linux for over a year if it wasn't for Arch...one of the few rolling distributions that actually stays halfway updated and not 2 years behind like everything else. I mean I couldn't even boot Debian or Ubuntu on my Dell because they were so far behind the kernel just noped out of the zen5 execution.

I mean maybe you need to back and look at what this OS was...back before package managers. Go build an LFS install and tell me if you want to maintain and use that.

It's the end of open source.

This is going to be proof to more companies as to why they need to go back to closed. It will be a keypoint in why open source development needs to end.

This isn't just the death of Arch...it's the opening act of the death of Linux. Because corporate interests are rapidly leaving. I'm seeing more projects get discontinued in favor of closed source.

None of us are going to have any choices in a few years. There won't be open source. There won't be community development.