“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

-George Bernard Shaw

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Most here will recommend Linux Mint and it’s what I use now after trying many different versions over the years. There’s a simplicity to Mint that just works especially well for those just surfing and doing office tasks. I’ve given away old work laptops with just mint installed as most people just need a web browser and it works great for that.

    MS office can be used in your web browser or you can switch to Libre Office which should open most of your office files.

    If you have a old laptop or computer I recommend trying to install Mint there first to try it out. It’s pretty easy to start out there first before trying dual boot. You might be surprised at how quick your older laptop works with Mint in the process.

    I use dual boot on my machines but most of the use these days is to get to a web browser so I find I rarely boot into windows now.

    You will find Firefox is the default web browser but you can add Chrome to Mint if that’s your browser of choice.

    Many will say what about the privacy issues with Chrome but many still use it. I’ve switched back to Firefox myself and I like it better for my Android phone.

    Good luck on your journey!







  • Yes back when they were pretty expensive still for a 20 year old. It was a old 386 DX with 1mb of Ram without the co-proccessor that they replaced with a 486 in their business. The 1 mb of ram was on a daughter card with many chips before EDO came out.

    I was raised on Macs in high school and Apple IIc before that. I recall my first access to a computer was a Apple in grade 5. We had one in the class. I think only the principal knew how to use it then. He was troubleshooting my Basic assignment for me as I did more than change the color of the square. I made a snake that moved around the screen and changed colors with his help.

    Later on a IBM was something we used in Graphics class while we did our Accounting classes in the Mac lab. This was backwards as Apple products were big in my district. The IBM lab was the exception. We had more Commodore 64s than IBMs but they were never used when I went there.

    I eventually got the 386 with 1mb of ram on dial up internet with AOL. Can’t even imagine how slow it was then…



  • I wish I had this password request when first trying out DOS commands on my first PC. I came across a book of Dos commands and was playing with FDISK. Wiped out the drive in the process. Learned Dos and windows pretty quickly after as it was a computer my mother in law gave us.

    It went from Dos 5 with a shell to Dos 6.22 with Windows 3.11 once I went to the library and learned about them. Yes library, I’m that old.



  • This seems to be the model I’ve witnessed with many apps over the years. Free at first to get traction and users, then ads, then pay one time fee to get rid of ads, then subscription to keep using the app.

    Then there are those that wouldn’t even pay a single fee and get upset at the thought as everything should be free.

    The part that is upsetting is the contributions the early community made is monetized when they were they there for the benefit of the community.

    I do see there are costs to maintaining and updating these apps so I can understand a need to keep revenue flowing for these future costs. The one time payment is a hell of a deal for years with updates to accommodate the revisions needed for each system update let alone functionality improvements.

    In the old days we would buy software for our PC and that was it. There wasn’t really any updates or further support for newer versions of Windows. The software would become very insecure or just stop functioning altogether with enough changes to windows.

    It’s hard to find the right balance. I know I only want to pay once, or heck never, but I want these upgrades and updates too.