80% of the items I considered had either jacked up the price prior to prime days, or advertised a large discount when the actual discount was tiny - a few percent. I ended up buying nothing. Amazon sucks.

This would be of limited use for many people. Carriers lock people in by selling lots of phones that are missing frequency bands and cannot be used on their competitor’s networks. For instance, many of TMO’s phones cannot be used on AT&T and Verizon’s networks. My Oneplus 9Pro is a great phone, but if I wanted to switch to Spectrum (on Verizon’s network) or AT&T I would be forced to buy a new phone.

Some phones like the Iphone and Pixels are compatible with every U.S. network, but plenty of others are not.

Teamviewer has a history of lying about serious security breaches. The company’s networks have been breached before and they literally spent years denying it and blaming it on their customers: https://www.securityweek.com/teamviewer-confirms-it-was-hacked-2016/

Paypal locked my account after years of use for absolutely no reason. I never had a invalid charge, dispute, or any other kind of problem with it, just one day they decided to shut it down. They flatly refused to explain what was going on. With all the decent alternatives out there now there is no longer a reason to use their crappy service.

Love that they believe they’re the only game in town and can demand your bank statement.

HP has known the hinges are defective since they introduced them. There are so many people having problems a class action suit was filed about it.

Must depend on the model. I’ve been running Mint on that (repaired) X360 for years without significant problems outside crappy Realtek wireless module issues.

HP laptops are garbage. This is the hinge of my HP X360 laptop after 6 months of occasional use: https://i.imgur.com/LhZWBIt.jpg

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this doesn’t look like this has anything to do with Syncthing vulnerabilities. Instead it looks like a hack that uses a preconfigured Syncthing installation to transfer sensitive data. Disturbing nonetheless.

It’s also important to remember that Microsoft has no monetary incentive to force people to use Windows Recall.

With that in mind, there would be no reason for Microsoft to automatically enable Windows Recall in an update down the line. If it does happen, the user will be able to instantly tell thanks to that that visual indicator and turn it off again.

This article is nothing but propaganda. There is huge monetary incentive to force people to use Windows Recall and collect their data, and Microsoft routinely uses Windows Update to enable data collection. They began that practice years ago on Windows 7. It’s a ridiculously simple matter for MS to disable the visual indicator and force This Week’s Plan on their users to monetize their data.

Windows Central pretends to be critical of plans to enable a feature that can be made into malware by Microsoft in a couple of minutes, but then back peddles and says it can’t be done (utter BS) and if it could be, it wouldn’t be that bad.

Another tip: On Android phones, Tasker can be used to automatically activate Wireguard tunnels to your own or a commercial VPN host. Taskernet.com has one project that activates WG when off specific wifi networks, and another that I wrote that allows you to activate a tunnel on demand only when you open specific apps. Great if you want to access a home server occasionally (without detectable open router ports) or want an extra layer of security when running a financial app.

There are a number of ways to access your Linux drives from Windows (I did it regularly when I ran Windows) and if your drive hasn’t been wiped your data is probably all accessible. Here’s a link that should help: https://www.howtogeek.com/112888/3-ways-to-access-your-linux-partitions-from-windows/

It’s beyond belief, but insurance companies do the same thing to amputees.

We have all become unwilling, unpaid employees of every company in their pursuit of higher profits. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Corporations have discovered that there is no real downside (for them) when they don’t function. Customer satisfaction no longer has much of an impact on their profits because the few companies left in each sector are doing the exact same thing.

IMO this is yet another side effect of unchecked corporate power. It’s the same reason prices have risen so rapidly and corporate profits have reached 70 year highs. We are dealing with near monopolies and the billionaire class who created them. Until our government addresses the problem it’s not going to get any better.

In other words it’s not going to get better in our lifetimes.

Windows went a step further on my machine. I thought it had just screwed up my bootloader, but when I went to restore it my Linux partition was completely gone. Windows Update had deleted the partition.

Malware is right.

Depends on the phone. Oneplus has a 65 watt charger.

I use a W10 VM for processing individual files once a week or so. With the required 2 Windows programs it takes about 3 minutes to complete the task and shut down the OS. Not worth switching.

MacOS is okay, not terrific (I hate how much RAM it uses though).

On that note, I’ve been amazed how well Mint works with just 8GB of memory. I’ve had Firefox and Chrome running with plenty of open tabs, Thunderbird, Libreoffice Calc, and a half dozen other programs open while running W10 in Virtualbox. Mint just takes it in stride.

I had to go into the BIOS, turn UEFI to legacy, turn off secure boot, reboot to boot from the USB stick, install Mint, then turn legacy back to UEFI to get it to boot from the hard drive.

That is ridiculous and it does sound like a Lenovo problem.

I’m running Mint on a Surface Laptop (which was difficult to install because Microsoft), but getting Secure Boot working only required changing the UEFI settings to allow non-Microsoft Secure Boot certificates. With that set Mint boots just fine both with Secure Boot enabled and disabled. So do USB installation ISOs.

Secure Boot can still be a pain. To get Virtualbox working with it enabled required signing several kernel modules which took a while to figure out.

Mint is great though. After distrohopping for years I finally decided I wanted to just use the OS and GUI, not play around with them and I came back to Mint. The latest versions of Mint just work and work for years once they’re installed. For me, going back to Windows (especially W11) feels like punishment. I hope you enjoy the switch.

And btw secure boot is Mint’s fault. It just doesn’t support it yet

Not the case. I’m typing this on a Surface laptop running Mint with Secure Boot enabled. Even the bootable Mint USB can be run with Secure Boot turned on.

Tesla’s Model 3 uses a touchscreen for damn near everything. Some things are buried and require multiple presses in different places on the screen. It looks really good, but the actual purpose and the fact that humans driving at potentially deadly speeds need to operate it seems to have been placed a distant second to safety when the thing was designed. Given who is in charge of Tesla it’s not much of a surprise.