I was finishing the book, written by William Forstchen, just as the Crowdstrike event was unfolding. Happy people paying with credit cards to Mad Max style raids for scraps of food in just a few months... I hope it doesn't happen again while I get a second job to pay for my 5-10 year supply of MREs that taste like sawdust. Oh, and water filters. Lots of ammo. Crates of ammo. Old car with no computer chips. And definitely make friends with really old people who walked to school in snow, uphill both ways.

I bought an Ecotank printer in 2021 and it's been great. Moderate printing on business days, mostly B&W and some color here and there. Can't match laser speed but good quality prints. Ink bottles are cheap compared to laser toners. Watch out for models with smaller waste containers. They need to be replaced and chips reset (online app with $10 payment). The ink bottles are $15-20. The HP toners were $200+. No thanks, HP is indeed hated.

Old habits die hard, especially when you've been addicted to it for the last 35 years. 65 Miles? Yup, that's far enough. 105 Fahrenheit? Not mowing today. 70 Kilometers? Need to convert. 40 Celsius? Need to convert, can't relate. Plus, metric just feels sterile. Imperial feels... warm.

Fortunately, many saw the problems and made available custom ROMs for various Android devices. Yes, there are risks involved with rooting and I see the argument that you shouldn't have to resort to steps that void your device's warranty to get updates... but at least there is the choice to take that risk. Many thanks to the AOSP and Slimroms developers for extending your kindness to my "jflteatt."

My experience with Arch has also been positive, even with the occasional dive into AUR. I check the news page before I run "yaourt -Syua" and I haven't had any catastrophic issues since the install in late 2012. It probably also helps that I update almost daily, which makes rollbacks easy.

Coming from Gentoo/FreeBSD way back when, I expected a fair amount of tinkering with Arch on my T530 and maybe that is the reason why a few breakages here and quirks there don't bother me. I have yet to come across an issue that the wiki nor the forum gurus could not help solve.

I'm typing this on a T400 running Linux Mint. It's pretty and very simple to use but it isn't as "fun" as Arch. I've even solidified my commitment to Arch with the purchase of an Arch coffee mug: see, now I have to use it.

It's a "dramatic opener" to my post, coward. Certainly caused drama for you.

Yes, I'm sure you've emerged from your mother's womb as a full-fledged software developer. Fucking elitist dipshit. I have some CS experience from school so I took upon myself, on my own time and dime, to learn VBA for Excel. I am one of those "dumb-ass" managers who made a few time-saving tools with VBA for the hotel I work in. I know that my code is amateur at best. I also prefer that my corporate IT won't ever know my code exists, especially since "professionals" like you are so helpful to noobs like me. Through word of mouth, however, my tools are now used in several hotels. Hypercard, BASIC, VBA, whatever: what took a real person 4+ hours to do now takes the same person 10 minutes SOLELY due to the fact that an easy-to-learn-and-program platform was available to me. If all I had was "heavy" language, that same person would still be wasting 4 hours every week. I even have a counter to a popular rebuttal: "so, what happens if something goes wrong with the code and you're no longer working for the hotel? Who's going to fix it then?" That's right, I didn't think of that! I'm going to continue to waste time and labor just so that I can spare the uber-professional IT guy five years from now the pain of going through my amateur code. If it's your job to maintain and expand someone else's code, oh well. Please, don't propagate your elite-speak and go back to whatever elite thing you were doing. I now have six VBA projects involving anything from supply inventory to billing clients in the neighborhood of $30k every week. Good for me: bring on the Hypercard. And just in case you work for my corporate IT, I'm going to go through all of my VBA projects and delete all of my super-friendly comments of what I'm trying to accomplish. Since you are so elite, I'm sure you can figure it out without issues... heck, my comments will probably just get in your way.

Give Deep Freeze a try. It may not be a 100% match for your issue but it does wonders on public computers.

Set up the PC, install apps and customize it. Once the PC is ready to go, install Deep Freeze.

Use whatever browser you want. Install whatever you want. Get a virus or really mess things up. Reboot and it's back to square one.

It also has the ability to set folders aside that are not frozen. You can store pictures and other documents in that as the changes to those folders are immune to the freeze.

I'm just a satisfied user: I have nothing to do with the developers. I only have to check on the public workstations if there are hardware issues or major updates to browsers or other apps. It sure beats reinstalling those public workstations every few months because of caked on spyware and viruses.

Linux is already fun without games.

I'm going to jailbreak my phablet and see what happens.

I've read a lot of good, interesting posts. You should let him break things a few times so that he can be familiar with the reinstalls: it is a wonderful opportunity to learn how to fix things on your own. Also, you can set aside some time to go over things together. I've always fixed things for my dad when it came to tech related issues... so I can only imagine what it would have been like, had my dad sat down with me with some floppies and gone over DOS commands back in the day...

I'm sorry I left you for that whore Redhat but she was much easier (she came with the book). I went around the block a few times and am happy with Arch now... I'm sure you wanted to know that. I still think of you and your floppies from time to time...