I'm curious about what model you got. While I would avoid all their consumer-oriented machines, I have regularly purchased refurbished "business-class" machines over the years and they've served me really well. There's a couple vendors I really like on ebay who seem to get a lot of cast-off inventory from business as they upgrade. I usually pick them up for $200-$300 and maybe add more memory or larger drives. I have a T480 and T580 for my own use and got my parents T590s. I also exclusively run Linux on them.

These are obviously out of warranty with Lenovo, but the ebay vendor has been great... I was unhappy with some marks on a screen and they effortlessly replaced the computer for me.

I suspect this is where we'll end up... there will be people/organizations who will become popular because they do a good job of vetting things. Their credibility will come from the fact that they do a good job of recommending good things that people like. It will be kind of like the old days of the internet where people had curated lists of links to other interesting pages and lists.

They actually can (at least a few months ago), with some work.

There's a Kodi add-on that will work with Netflix but you have to use special software on a Windows box and log into your Netflix account there to get an authorization key that you then transfer over to your Pi. That said, the experience is very different - there's only a set of directories that you browse and see the files for various shows you watch.

This page details how to do it: https://pimylifeup.com/raspber...

They are now. But they used to be a solid brand that you could get at Costco. I think back in the 90s they even sold computer monitors.

Thanks for the box recommendation. Does a Mi Box work with local media (on a NAS)? I switched from Roku (tired of the ads and constantly added apps) to Apple, which solved those annoyances, but it doesn't play media off the local network.

The last Vizio I bought wouldn't let you past the screen-covering EULA without signing in or creating an account. Which is why it went back to the store and it's the last Vizio will ever buy. It also lacked a sleep button on the remote... and required 8 button presses EACH time you wanted to use the sleep feature.

Years ago, they were my favorite brand of TV, worth paying a bit extra for. Never again. I'm so tired of the enshittification.

The problem is the common practice of confusing, "I don't use it" with "Nobody uses it" or "Nobody should use it". Breaking things that many people use is also bad practice.

As someone who always waits for the "xx.3" versions (and often skips the even ones), I do too.

I've been using Linux since the 90s and when I was younger, I loved tweaking and getting the newest stuff. But these days I want it to "just work"(tm) and not have the UI and features not change a lot.

Maybe that was a bad idea in the face of rapidly growing demand.

What possible value is coming from this besides corporate welfare.

They're not even practicing getting into orbit around the moon, which would be needed for a landing. This is just a government sponsored joy ride.

I grew up in the 80s and remember Pizza Hut being a kind of nice place to take your family out or even go on a date (for a college kid). It was a sit-down restaurant with nice table service, good food, decent ambiance, and even a pretty good salad bar!

The last Pizza Hut I ate at was crap and it's now a tax prep office.

It will be especially fun when they start lowering credit scores because you "fail to submit to AI credit management".

As a "my first computer was a C64" kind of geek, the last thing I want is more useless plastic e-waste to clutter my house that will eventually end up in a landfill.

Gift ideas for a geek of my generation? A donation to the EFF in my name, or maybe a used copy of a book like Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg. An old copy of a BYTE, Compute!, or Creative Computing might trigger some nice nostalgia. Maybe even a coffee cup with vi or emacs commands, but even that's pushing it because who doesn't already have more than plenty of coffee cups?

Sadly, in a conceptual sense, this is hardly a new problem. Sending the data in the same channel as the commands of the public telephone system is what allowed phreaking to be so successful. For example, putting money into a payphone triggered an audio signal that was sent down the line saying you had paid. It was trivial to replicate that sound into the headset, tricking the system into thinking you had paid for the call.

I'm sure the so-called "DOGE" only helped solve that problem...

https://www.ipla.com/news/doge...

One obnoxious way to get the older version is to install an older LTS of Mint into a virtual machine and then go manually get all the bits that are Thunderbird and copy them to your new system. The hard part is making sure you have all the bits, but I don't remember how I did that.

Unfortunately, the Mint installation essentially copies a complete installation to your system, so there are no .debs of the installed packages. But I've wondered if some other distribution might install all the applications from .deb or .rpm files.