Oh, would’ve been so frustrating! I remember having a Pentium 4 laptop with an NVIDIA GPU and that thing unsurprisingly cooked itself, so I then tried 1NSANE (Codemasters’ soft body physics car game) on my crappy little netbook instead and it just couldn’t handle it.

Colobot - don’t think it was “shareware” but it absolutely came as a demo on ceebot.com (still hosted there today I believe). Literally THE game that got me into computer programming and whatnot.

Otherwise for actual shareware, I loved Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Crazy Gravity and some game unfortunately titled “Worm” (snake clone) with MIDI and sound effects still stuck in my head to this day

I really wanted to play a couple shareware games called Jetpack Joyride, and Hot Chix n Gear Stix as a kid, but neither of them would play on my Windows XP netbook as they had a hard check for if you were on either Windows 95 or 98, even with compatibility mode.

I still have mine as a secondary work phone. Love the size and format of it in general, although I think I’d still prefer a phone slightly bigger (~10%) and with a higher resolution (1080p?) display, mainly for media consumption.

Outside of that, I second the slow and buggy comment (although in my experience this has been mostly with Microsoft Teams, which is a buggy mess regardless)

There is still not a neat replacement for wmic in PowerShell. If I want to do the equivalent of wmic product where name="some shitware" call uninstall it looks like this:

$instance = Get-CimInstance win32_process -Filter "Name = 'powershell_ise.exe'" $instance | Invoke-CimMethod -MethodName 'Terminate'

Like how the hell is that easier to understand Microsoft? Everything else in PowerShell follows a general pattern of Upper Camelcase.

That’s just one instance of what I’ve found working with pwsh at work that leaves me thinking wtf

I bought a T480 coming on a year ago as my first ThinkPad. I’m pretty happy with it, feels rugged and I’ve now fully conditioned myself to using the TrackPoint. Happy with the weight of it for the screen size, I have the 1080p one and it’s not bad at all.

My work device is a L14 Gen 3 with the Ryzen 5 something and it’s okay. I don’t like the flatter TrackPoint buttons but they’re still more than usable. I actually dropped it from about waist height from my car, and apart from some scuffs on the corners it’s still completely functional.

I do miss the media keys and CPU upgradability of my old Latitude E6420 (had that bad boy up to an i7-2760QM, 16GB DDR3, 512GB SSD) but it was just so bulky in comparison and the screen maxed out at only 1600x900 (which yes, I upgraded on it too).

One more thing for me to go on a tangent about, ThinkPad X240 was a poor choice as a secondary. I thought I wouldn’t care about the weird touchpad but it’s barely usable for me, either as a touchpad or TrackPoint. I’m selling that shit on to get either an X220 or X250 onwards, depending on what comes up.

I meant it in the sense of using an obscure operating system to be less likely to be targeted by a threat actor.

Or to be more general, using obscure software for increased security, over actually correctly configuring and using secure software.

Viruses already exist for Linux and have for a long time. They are less prevalent than Windows but this obviously shouldn’t be the primary defense strategy for your device.

…security by obscurity? Guess when Linux finally explodes in popularity, you’ll see me over on FreeBSD instead

I’m gonna beat the same drum most people beat here, you know it’s dystopian when you need the manufacturer’s permission to be “let” delete something from your device. This criticism equally applies to Android devices with locked bootloaders.

Re the web browsers I think you’re right. You may get away with a more lightweight browser like SeaMonkey or Falkon, maybe like 1 tab of Chromium lol

Distros I’d try on that would be Linux Mint Debian Edition, Debian w/ lightweight DE like LXDE or Xfce, or Arch Linux 32 if you really want to make it minimalist. Gentoo if you’re very adventurous but with my EEE PC I found compile times took up to days.

Enshittification truly is a shame, because my old school GPS actually does this already (Turn left past the McDonald’s) and while I have no idea whether it’s paid promotion or not on my device, I like that feature. If that feature is equally applied to any known business as a landmark (heck, even other services like police stations, fire stations, etc.) it would be appreciated by users.

Instead, and here we are beating this drum again, capitalism gets its grubby fingers in this pie too and uses it for further advertising, turning a good feature into a bad one.

I had to do a double take between this comment and the one by @davidgro@lemmy.world

Don’t be so certain - I’d recommend Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC IoT over Windows 11 any day

I don’t think it is right? The environment looks completely different and the one in the post is 12", which the 11"8 (or now 12"4) never was.