The foundational tenet of “the Cult of Mac” is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:
From The antitrust case against Apple. See also:
I saw How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes and decided to try it on my Linux desktop system. It took a lot more than 10 minutes but I got it to work.
Looking at the BIOS, the system dates from 2013. Here are the details:
I recently read Reviving the Glory Days: NsCDE Desktop for UNIX Buffs. NsCDE is based on the old FVWM window manager. When I was a lot younger I got a few chances to look at classic Unix workstations and I thought they looked really cool, but I never has a chance to try one. So I decided to indulge my curiosity.
I have worked some more on the HP Pavilion g6 Notebook I bought for $30 at a local garage sale. I did get the additional RAM I mentioned there. It seemed easy enough to slide into place, but I have not yet been able to get the machine to recognize it. So for now I am stuck with just 4GB. Not long ago that was considered plenty, and I was very happy with a 4GB system, but now “they” are saying you should have at least 16GB on a PC. So now I am looking at lightweight Linux systems to see if I can get some more life out of this system.
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I recently watched Red Hat: why I’m going all in on community-driven Linux distros. from Veronica Explains, after which I decided to try to seriously use Debian 12 rather than Ubuntu in my daily computer work. This is working reasonably well. I have run into a variety of differences, but so far I have overcome them. A lot of these have to do with Gnome. I have learned a lot about Gnome in the last few days, chiefly how little I actually know about it.
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I found an HP Pavilion g6 Notebook at a local garage sale. 64 bit system, 4 GB RAM, 600 GB hard disk, Windows 7 Home Premium edition. $30. It did boot into Windows 7, but I had mixed results when trying to access internet sites. This may be because Windows 7 is obsolete and no longer supported. Given that I decided to install Linux. The Debian 12 installer did not recognize the Windows installation. This may be because the hard disk is MBR and there were already 4 primary partitions. I might have been able to manually rearrange the partitions and add an extended partition, but that process would have been tricky and it simply was not worth the bother for Windows 7, so I let the Debian installer wipe the drive. With Debian there were no problems connecting to the internet and my configuration process worked perfectly. I really do not need this laptop, but the price was hard to resist and I enjoy computer necromancy.
I installed Debian 12 on a laptop. This was the same ThinkPad X130e on which I had installed Debian 11 nearly two years ago, but subsequently deleted. Installing Debian 12 was a lot easier. I had no trouble with the wifi. At one point the installation gave me an error during the actual software installation phase, but it offered the option to retry, which I took and then everything worked fine. Afterwards I had no trouble with my configuration process.
It is the third decade of the 21st century and I found Running DOS on 64-bit Windows and Linux: Just because you can
I have experimented with FreeDOS. To conveniently have any networking you have to install it in a virtual machine. I have done this and it works. The problem is getting files in and out of the VM. This is doable, but it is certainly not convenient. I also installed it native on an old (2011) laptop, and then afterwards installed Xubuntu as a dual boot system. Xubuntu can see the FreeDOS disk partition, so I can copy files into it, then reboot into FreeDOS. There I can do whatever I had in mind, then reboot into Xubuntu to extract my output files. Even more hassle than using a VM. The only reason to do it is to experience DOS natively on (sort of) modern hardware. So I looked for other options.
I have used Boot-Repair-Disk a lot. It has saved my computer systems many times, since I do a lot of experimenting on them. The title program, boot-repair, can often fix the boot procedure on Linux systems if that has been messed up. This happens to me more than it should since my computers typically can boot Windows and one or more flavors of Linux. Altering one OS sometimes causes one of the others to be unbootable.
Other programs on the disk are also useful. For example, OS-Uninstaller does exactly what the name suggests. GParted lets you add, move, delete, and resize disk partitions, which I often need to do in preparation for adding a new OS (You need to be careful with this, especially for bootable partitions). The whole disk is actually a standalone Linux system, so with its Linux terminal you can access and work with any of the drives on your system.
I had a Debian 11 system on an HP desktop. I followed How to Upgrade to Debian 12 from Debian 11 to upgrade it. This worked well, though there were a few glitches.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 