This argument is covered in the article.

I think the point they’re getting at Is that you can’t use a self-hosted vpn to hide your piracy activity because the link is registered to yourself.

Two PiHole servers. One is hosted via docker on my primary file server and the other is hosted in a Hyper-V VM on my sole windows box. The VM one is also my DHCP server.

It actually is available on the website, but like most stores their mobile web experience isn’t great.

That actually made me laugh out loud. 😂

The Lowe’s app is actually really handy. You can look up any item and it will tell you the exact isle and bay it’s in for your store. No more wandering around or hunting for an employee to ask. It’s the only store app I actually keep on my phone.

I’ve been using screenfetch.

IDK man, I’ve been using it exclusively on my main desktop at home and I’ve been getting along just fine with those “not particularly good” applications.

I dicked around with the VM route for a while and could never really get it working 100% to my liking. There was always a trade-off. I ended up just getting a second PC and tucking it in a cabinet out of sight. When I need Windows I just use remote desktop to connect to it.

Do your friend a favor and install Windows back on his laptop for him.

They have their uses. In particular they’re useful for easily getting applications your system repositories don’t have or getting more up to date version of applications. Downsides are certainly the space all the redundant dependencies take up and the sandboxing can be a PITA especially if you have an application that needs to run another application. Overall I think they’re the best “third party” package system available but they’re not great.

App Images do suck, but I don’t think flatpak is much better. It’s more of a lesser of two evils situation. Snap isn’t even in the conversation.

Good luck finding a 65 inch computer monitor

I have one of these on every TV in my house and they’re great!

That seems like a bad faith argument, but I’ll indulge. Gasoline internal combustion engine aren’t made to run indefinitely and have many components that can wear over time and require regular maintenance. Modern computer hardware has no problem with the task and my “newest” computer which was built back in 2016 has run pretty much non-stop for 8 years now with 0 failure. At this point the hardware is more likely to be replaced due to age than failure. The only argument I can see making sense is maybe the cost of electricity aspect; but even then modern power supplies are so efficient I’d be surprised if it costs me more than $10/yr. to leave my PC on so I don’t it’s a very strong argument.

Nope, no issues in all these years.

Hmm. That’s interesting. The only thing I can think of that could potentially cause that is if for whatever reason there was an exisitng EFI partition on your linux drive. Windows will use whatever EFI it sees even if it’s on a separate drive from it’s primary NTFS partition. As you can imagine this can cause some fucky stuff to happen.

People who shutdown their desktop computer everytime they’re done using it are so bizarre to me. Why? What are you trying to protect? I only reboot when updates are needed and otherwise my computer is on 24/7. Been doing this since ~2004 and have never had an issue.

Edit: I’m not saying you’re wrong if you shutdown everytime. I’m just saying it’s weird to me because it hasn’t been necessary since the mid 2000’s or probably earlier.

Put a second hard drive In your PC and install Linux solely to it. Then you can use your BIOS boot menu to choose which OS to boot and Windows can’t wreck GRUB when updating.

Linux Mint might look outdated but it’s stable as hell. Especially LMDE. Any time I mess around with arch/arch-based derivatives or any rolling release distros I’m quickly reminded why I chose to run Mint as my primary OS. I’m long past my distro hopping days so having something that works without question and doesn’t require any mucking around is huge for me.