Pretty sure China is behind France

At least if you want to play with it in XP, install mypal browser https://www.mypal-browser.org/ I have had success with it on a XP machine, it loads facebook, reddit, lemmy.world, etc.

For an old distro, have you tried AntiX 32 bits?

In Canada it’s tap to pay for ~8 years now, never saw a QR code to pay. However when I go in USA, every stores is tap to pay, except one, there’s one store in USA where there is no tap, it’s Walmart, inconcevable.

Few years old Dell laptop, they are incredible, even easy to open and repair, parts available everywhere, BIOS update even after 5 or 6 years.

You can buy a few years old Latitude for maybe $200, 14", i5 8th gen, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, wifi, bt, webcam, usb-c, name it.

Being 8th gen it runs win11, but they also run Linux pretty well, I’m running MX Linux (debian based) on them and everything is supported.

example https://www.ebay.ca/itm/115672158079

BeOS was so cool end 90s early 2000 !!!

Well, on MX I’m using “MX Live USB Maker” which can flash any ISO on thumb drive, it’s a built-in tool.

Now I’m using Ventoy, you just put multiple ISO on the thumb drive and choose it when you boot the USB drive, it’s wonderful, no more “1 OS per drive”, you just take a 32GB USB drive and you can put 10 distro on it.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/screenshot.html

There’s even a MX release for Pi https://mxlinux.org/download-links/

CP/M, GCOS, DOS, Windows, BeOS, Debian a few years, Ubuntu (a lotttttt of years), Mint (~3 years), MX (6 years now).

I played/installed with a couple of distro like Mandrake, LFS, CentOS, Arch, etc and basically all distro in the 90s were a bunch of floppies for the kernel and gnu utils, a bunch for X, that we downloaded from university usenet.

LFS was nightmarish, so is Arch a little bit when you install everything from basically scratch, now I prefer something that is working fine, MX AHS is a really good distro.

I also always prefered simple window system, coming from mwm/twm. Cinnamon was pretty but in the end I hated it, Xfce is my DE of choice now.

S0idle is a real problem.

Years ago you put your laptop in sleep S3 mode at 5PM, put in the backpack, resume it at 9AM the next morning and it lost maybe 10% battery.

Now S0idle is like a cellphone, always powered, so you put your laptop in a backpack, windows/Linux half support a botched S0 so some devices are still powered, either your laptop overheat or dies because battery reach 0% during the night.

Sleep in RAM, meaning only the ram is powered/refreshed, everything else like cpu or SSD are unpowered.

AAC if those old movies are in mono/stereo. Also AAC works everywhere, not sure for opus? It’s been a long time I ripped dvd to convert them.

I’d use HEVC/H265 anyway, always, the best quality for its size. And AAC for audio

agree, and it compresses automatically, can be useful for some backup

I have bought hundreds of stuff on AE, it’s ok, especially for stuff that are less than $10 that local sellers sell for like $40 for the exact same thing. I got some items in less than a week in Caanda.

I used ext4 for yeeeeaaaarrssss but now I’m using LUKS+btrfs, stable, encrypted.

At an old place of work, someone wrote an awk script that parsed strings using regex from a CSV file, and it generated JavaScript code automatically. It was ~5000 lines of awk script, it was beautiful. I understood it after a couple of weeks, I was in charge of maintaining it, super interesting.

Cannot all win10 keys work with win11 too?

Mildly secure but you can put the password in TPM2 with this tool https://github.com/timchen119/tpm2-initramfs-tool

I’m using nala (it’s on top of apt) and it’s pretty enough

When I save an image, I want the exact same binary 1:1, not a recompressed one or whatever, I want the original picture, be it jpeg/png/webp, every graphics program can open webp, nothing wrong with it.

At least if you hate webp, convert them to png, but not jpeg…