What has changed is that it's more practical to use it for mass production as opposed to (mostly) one-offs and prototypes.

On release, Microsoft and MSI were both still selling current offerings that didn't meet Win11 specs.
I'm all for ditching some legacy stuff but this is ridiculous and you need to stop excusing it.

Windows users have Stockholm Syndrome.

You get what you pay for.
Employees are not the business owner, employees will (almost) never have the same passion and drive as the owner, you need to get over this idea that it's anything more than a way to put bread on the table and get back to what THEY are passionate about. If you want them to be more passionate about their job show them how much you value them, the exact opposite of what you've done.

People have said this same thing about every younger generation, your elders said the same thing about you, your kids will say the same about their kids. You've officially become your parents, congratulations.

If it's not already on the network, many won't allow you to put it on now because of the coming change.

The system monitors the phone ID and it flags any that are not VOLTE, I got booted off AT&T for putting my sim into an old 4gLTE non-VOLTE phone the other day, it was a hassle to fix. And before you say "but this is about T-Mobile", all carriers are aggressively pushing everything onto 4g VOLTE or 5G.

Even if a court forces them to keep letting Boost do it, they aren't going to let others do it or go backwards.
Worst case, change carriers and take the free phone.

Almost anything really demanding these days (AI, video editing, photo editing, CAD, etc...) use the GPU for acceleration, it's not just for gaming.
It may be a fast IGPU but that's not enough, particularly combined with a (pathetic) max of 16gigs ram.

Ghostery is known to sell anonymized data (which is never truly anonymous) back to the ad companies they block.

Seen way too many of these break off, smash the screen from behind then watch as Lenovo denies warranty claiming it was your fault.

Just search "Lenovo yoga glue hinges" for horror stories.
They've known about this problem for over a decade with posts even on their own forums discussing the issue. Average cost to fix runs hundreds of dollars and you often can't obtain parts because there's no good ones available except out of China. Even if you can find a used one, it's likely to happen again even sooner than a new old stock will.

Forget the lack of touchpad or trackpoint, this is why you shouldn't buy a Yoga.

they need to take it seriously themselves.
Yahoo waited how long to inform users they were hacked, not once but multiple times before they decided to let users know. Other companies have waited months, and often only when busted by reporters.

"I installed the root OS install on 2 "striped" usb sticks on separate controllers and I don't see that issue. "

User name checks out.
I sincerely hope you meant mirrored, not striped. Using a USB stick as an OS drive is bad enough to make me question their competence, using a striped set of usb sticks, well, I think you get the point.

Check if your preferred software runs on Wine, PlayonLinux or Lutris, you would be surprised what all they have gotten working these days, worst case you can use a virtual machine.

I agree with the others, start transitioning now. Not later when you are forced into it and in a panic to get working again, otherwise you will end up just installing Win10 out of desperation. Start with Mint, it will be easiest for you, then after a year or so when you've gotten your footing start experimenting a bit more to find what you want.

While most only thought of Windows 8.1 as a GUI fix, it was actually quite a bit more, the ACPI (power management) and driver system was changed, SAMBA networking was updated and at some point multi-channel networking was added. While that may sound like no big deal, it was a much larger generational leap than the numbering inidcated, probably so MS could save face on the whole 8.0 debacle.

The ACPI changes alone are significant enough that several Win7 and Win8 laptops couldn’t be updated to 8.1 or 10. It was extremely frustrating when you had an old netbook or Core Solo system capable of running 8.1 but your much newer Core I5 couldn’t. It was bad enough that Microsoft was offering $150 rebates on trade-in for these models since the manufacturers (Asus in particular) refused to help fix the issue.

It worked until the bots figured out a way around it then it became completely useless.
The bots don't have to necessarily be smart, Google only has so many images to feed you and once the machine learns them all the system becomes useless. They can learn them faster than you can add them.

Small site owners need to connect with systems such as Project Honey Pot, it's really the only way to stop these guys. Yes, it requires human intervention if you are the first one hit, but relying strictly on tech means they only need to find a hole, and they will, as these systems run on scripts, they are not smart. Once you outwit it once, you can outwit it almost all of the time until someone notices the system is broken and if no one is monitoring the system no one will notice. Google relies almost entirely on tech to solve everything with almost no human intervention so when there is a "minor" problem (anything that doesn't directly impact them) they don't see it and since there's no one to contact and report it to other than another bot/script it goes on for a while before it gets fixed.

It doesn't work.
Google is using machine learning to stop them while the machines are learning at the same time, using the same pictures. It's a cat and mouse battle of technology, except that it really isn't, it's an illusion. The bots don't have to necessarily be smart, Google only has so many images to feed you and once the machine learns them all the system becomes useless. I tried captcha, the bots broke through all the time. I required extra items such as social media links, they just added that to the bot. I tried blocking IPs by country, this blocked casual stuff but the pros use VPNs now and just reroute or register a server in that country with a stolen card (only has to work for a short time). I even had lists of free email providers blocked, this helped a lot actually but really impacted legitimate users as well since few use the one provided by your ISP (and you shouldn't).

What does work is setting up lists for site owners to share and report bad actors, like Project Honey Pot, which are then blocked. This has worked far better for my sites than anything else I've tried by far. Yes, there can be false positives (very few in my experience) and it is reactionary, someone needs to report them before they are blocked, but it cuts out about 99.99% of the spam and reduces user frustration by a ton.

People not running sites and servers have no clue the mount of people trying to hack into things, it's simply staggering.

You can run any protection you want in Chrome, it's not going to block Google from getting the data as it's baked into the browser.

There might be an argument if you start with Chromium, the open source foundation of Google Chrome, but there is no way in hell if you start with Google Chrome or anything based on it such as as Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, and even Brave. You can hide the ads, you may even stop 3rd party snooping but there is no way you're going to stop Google from snooping so long as you run Google Chrome.

N/T