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@flamingos@feddit.uk peep this article - long worthwhile read

On November 21, I purchased the bestselling laptop from Amazon — a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage (which is, and I’m simplifying here, though not by much, basically an SD card soldered to the computer’s motherboard). Affordable and under-powered, I’d consider this a fairly representative sample of how millions of people interact with the internet. […]

It took 1 minute and 50 seconds from hitting the power button for the laptop to get to the setup screen. It took another minute and a half to connect and begin downloading updates, which took several more minutes. After that, I was faced with a licensing agreement where I agreed to binding arbitration to use Windows, a 24 second pause, and then got shown a screen of different “ways I could unlock my Microsoft experience,” with animations that shuddered and jerked violently.

[…]

The computer pauses slightly every time I type a letter. Every animation shudders. Even moving windows around feels painful. It is clunky, slow, it feels cheap, and the operating system — previously something I’d considered to be “the thing that operates the computer system” — is actively rotten, strewn with ads, sponsored content, suggested apps, and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user.

So much more!:

Never Forgive Them
EDWARD ZITRON
DEC 16, 2024
42 MIN READ

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

A laptop you can take apart and put back together and it’ll be fine. You take apart a phone and put it back together and it’s like haunted now. You can’t get it wet anymore, and it rattles sometimes. It says it doesn’t like its new screen, so it’s not gonna let you unlock it with your face anymore. It doesn’t trust you since you took it apart. The buttons feel different now. They still work, but they feel… different.

This person and I have had wildly different laptop experiences.

My current laptop survived three phones and it was already refurbished when I bought it. And I can still install current versions of my OS (Ubuntu) on it.

Buy better laptops.

I've got a 23-year-old netbook that slowly perished under the weight of windows. I've got some lightweight Linux distro on it and its absolutely fucking fine.

I resurrected it specifically to use as a digital reference guide for electronics, and to program my new Arduino. It can even barely load Firefox (exclusive) OR play videos!

Tldr is: Buy old electronics. Use better software.

Mobile phones are so locked down from regular users that those usually just physically break before the operating system becomes unusably slow.

Laptops can be destroyed by software. Give a regular user permission to install programs, and suddenly there are a random purple monkey sitting on the desktop telling jokes and multiple crypto miners.

There’s definitely a ring of truth to this. Not for me personally - as others have commented, I know what I’m doing and tend to look after my tech well - but for plenty of friends and family who are seemingly incapable of taking care of a real computer with a desktop OS.

Happens all the time: they buy a new laptop, probably without asking for advice first, and within weeks they’re asking for help because it’s on its last legs. The fans spin up like jet engines, two dozen random apps open as soon as it boots, the desktop is a landfill of icons, normal actions cause error messages, etc.

‘Oh yeah, it just does that.’

Some people can’t be trusted with full control over their hardware.

I only recently sent my old as fuck Windows Xp laptop that didn't hold a charge anymore and had to be plugged in just to be turned on off to a recycler. I still worked. Probably coulda slapped a new battery in it if I could have found one. I used to use it for WarDriving back in the very early days of wifi when everything was either just open or using an easily broken encryption method. Shit made me feel like one of those heist movie hackers even though all I was doing was mapping where I could get free internet. 😎

Try buying quality laptops.

My experience is pretty much the opposite. Phones give weird problems and I can't even properly diagnose.

I think this is more of a bloated ass windows problem than the form factor. It's so fucking heavy that it kills the machine, crushed under the weight of an inferior OS

Y'all're talking about this as a windows problem but for my old laptop it was the USB ports started dying then some keys stopped working and finally the frame began dying. It didn't last 5 years.

I'm afraid to even hear what this person thinks about a desktop.

That motherfucker should lay off the DMT

Sounds like Windows laptop problems.

Surprised everyone is blaming windows. Maybe I just have bad luck but almost all of my laptop problems have been hardware or firmware related. Although windows certainly doesn't help the battery life when it decides to just ignore power rules and I open the laptop to find it never reacted to closing the lid and it has just enough charge left to flash 'battery low please plug in' before dying on 0%.

I have a 2010 Thinkpad that I ordered new. I still use it on campouts and in the garage and stuff (plugged in, no battery)

Lmao what have y'all devolved into?

It's not that I don't like it, I'm just scared

I have no idea what this means