And the sunk costs aren’t even a thing tbh. You can just go pirate your books with zero moral dilemmas since you actually paid for it and they took it away.

No, but it’s a set it and forget it thing. I pay zero attention to it and it just runs. Easy means it runs more if I had to check what to mine and switch and blah blah, well I’m lazy…. So for me - ya it’s better. ;)

I went to 11 and have gone back to 10. The only thing it does is mine crypto coins (I need a heater in that room anyway - whatever). Everything else works better in Linux.

11 was fine until they repeatedly kept breaking their updates. Next time I have to reload that os on that drive it’ll be hiveos. It won’t be as convenient as the auto switchers like nicehash and their alternatives. But ya, windows sux these days.

A pool cue. It was a nice one I had grown to love. My wife replaced it. But I still keep that old one around so when guests are over they have a nice cue to play with and don’t have to feel like they are handicapped with a crooked house cue ;)

My wife is not good with computers. I moved her over to Linux with vanilla gnome. It took one 1/2 hr session and she was off and running. The next day I got a bunch of questions - another half hour. About a week later she said “this is SO much better than windows - I love it!”

Linux is easy to use. Installing and maintaining-no. But using - yes.

I agree. Newegg used to be great but not anymore. Amazon often has what you’re looking for and at the best price. Not everyone has a micro center or equivalent nearby.

I agree, post an alternative instead of just bitchin!

No, my pc doesn’t have an internal optical drive…. But doesn’t everyone have a usb portable drive?

Will never happen. Those platforms literally push addiction. It’s why the fediverse won’t ever compete imo - there’s no dopamine hit here of likes, # of friends, send a snap right now (or whatever they are called), streaks, etc.

You’re 100% right. It’s overkill and endless tinkering. But it’s also oh so good and you know it :)

This answer is FAR too complicated for the task asked for - yet I still recommend it to everyone because they are so damn handy.

Get a NAS.

You can set your own up or buy something like synology. I personally went the synology route and I adore that stupid box. Synology drive does exactly what you want across all my devices - PCs, phones, iPads, you name it. Real time sync. Keeps old copies in history. It does my photos off my phone. Every family member has their own personal space and keeps their stuff separate and private. My daughter uses my NAS as her personal OneDrive/dropbox/icloud. In your example drive would be installed on both the laptop and the steam deck. Both point to a location on the NAS and sync to and from there. EZ

Seriously, NASs are amazing. Get one and solve 100 little annoyances in one go.

Now that all said, for the question without a NAS. I would imagine just about any backup flatpak could handle backing up / synchronizing a folder. The trick is what’s the destination? If it’s the laptop folder, that’s fine - but that means the laptop needs to be on and connected to the network to work. I’d start there. Ideally it’d be smart enough to detect the destination folder coming online and immediately start the backup/sync.

New iPhones bought from Apple that are unlocked “connect to any carrier later” work on all the networks in the us. Once upon a time, there was an “unlocked” phone - meaning you could change the sim and the phone wasn’t locked to a contract. But you still had to match the phone to the major carrier. For example, an att phone could be unlocked, and then used on straighttalk (becasue straighttalk resold att network). But it wouldn’t work on Verizon or T-Mobile because they were different networks.

That’s not a thing anymore with iPhones and hasn’t been for a long time. An unlocked iPhone can be used with any carrier that supports esims.

If your old phone is still on a contract - you may not be able to transfer the phone number, or have to request an unlock, or any other shenanigans. But the new iPhone will still work on whatever network you take it to.

Ideally, your contract is done, you buy new unlocked iPhone, you take it to your existing or a new carrier, you say “I bought a new unlocked phone, I want to set it up new, and I want you to transfer my number” a prime time carrier will just make this happen for you. A reseller can be a little more of a pain in the arse.

Personally I’ve been happy with the prepaid plans from straight talk - despite their setup process sucking. If you call them and get a person to help it goes pretty smooth. And the service is indistinguishable for a much cheaper price once it’s setup. I’m pretty sure this goes for most resellers.

Good luck - you’ll be fine!

I’ve been playing around with AI a lot lately for work purposes. A neat trick llms like OpenAI have pushed onto the scene is the ability for a large language model to “answer questions” on a dataset of files. This is done by building a rag agent. It’s neat, but I’ve come to two conclusions after about a year of screwing around.

1. it’s pretty good with words - asking it to summarize multiple documents for example. But it’s still pretty terrible at data. As an example, scanning through an excel file log/export/csv file and asking it to perform a calculation “based on this badge data, how many people and who is in the building right now”. It would be super helpful to get answers to those types of questions-but haven’t found any tool or combinations of models that can do it accurately even most of the time. I think this is exactly what happened to spotify wrapped this year - instead of doing the data analysis, they tried to have an llm/rag agent do it - and it’s hallucinating.
2. these models can be run locally and just about as fast. Ya it takes some nerd power to set these up now - but it’s only a short matter of time before it’s as simple as installing a program. I can’t imagine how these companies like ChatGPT are going to survive.

The most annoying thing isn’t even the price hikes or the direct sales - it’s the ambiguity they’ve introduced into things. “Hey we need pricing for xyz”. “Ya, we’re not sure if we’re going to quote that”. Like wtf? We’re a middleman who has deployed VMware on our systems for decades mostly because that’s what end users want - but it doesn’t matter to us, we can deploy in other options easily enough.

But like - It’s like quote it or take the account - but the customer has a project and you won’t make up your mind. Seriously, we have quotes stuck in pergatory for over 6 months, yet they won’t call the end user and sell direct. Customers literally can’t buy VMware even if they are ok with a 1000x cost - and they wonder why people are moving on.

Budgeting season is sept-Dec. I think everyone I know is kicking off a migration project for 2025 to another platform - mostly because they can’t get a quote/licenses. VMware is screwed and it’s only just begun.

Anyone still defending Microsoft at this point has cognitive dissonance and deserves what they get. Seriously people - just use Linux. And for the 1% of you that can’t get that 1% of your programs working in Linux - just dual boot.

It’s like people forgot how to use computers.

Such a great game. If you’ve never played - now’s a great time to start. They changed it just enough where all your old tricks either don’t work or are obsolete. Back to spaghetti factories and making blueprints!

Although I was SHOCKED last night to realize cliff explosives are all the way down the tech tree now. I need to redo my entire base now.

Devastator and jetfire

Clear winners

98 Volkswagen Jetta. Rampant problems for everyone, not just me. Body molding falls off, window motors fail, water pump fail, wiper motor fail, 3 starters and an alternator, frame problem wearing out at the wheels, and the clear coat peeled.

When my third window motor failed, I drove my pregnant wife and her sister (who were in the car) to a dealer instead of whatever plans we had. I bought a Highlander on the spot and drove home in that. My wife drove that Highlander for 14 years.

I went from one extreme to the other! :)

I have it. I don’t know why, but it won’t sink its claws into me. It’s a great game but something isn’t clicking for me. Most people like it though from what I can tell.

See, after one year everything repeats indefinitely. You literally can’t miss anything. So there’s actually infinite time. If you’re stressing out like “omg spring is gone and I didn’t grow abc”. That’s what’s supposed to happen - you’ll grow it next spring.

Yup. There’s a story reason for it. It’s actually part of the charm of the game. But that first bit (which should be an intro cake walk, but isn’t) is a bad design choice IMO.