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.

I’ve been a dual / triple / god knows how many OS booted since the 90’s.

Windows has gotten into bad habits lately - it’s not staying in its lane. Meaning it hasn’t respected other boot partitions for a long time, and recently there seems to be a lot of people having problems with windows nuking their linux installs.

My strong recommendation is to buy a second hard drive if you dual boot. Then windows can be “over there” - I’ve never had a problem dedicating ssds to the OS. My second recommendation is to do this now, why wait until you’re forced into something? You’ve got a year to learn Linux and get comfortable with it.

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! :)

This isn’t an iPhone problem. This doesn’t happen normally. There’s one of two things going on:

1. you jailbroke your phone/sideloaded/installed some shady app. Solution: hard reset that phone and set it up as new. Do not copy over anything, and use the phone as close to stock as possible for a bit. These notifications will stop. Then you add apps and stuff slowly until you figure out what is the offender.

2. you’re being targeted. Somebody did something nefarious and they are probably good at it. It’s not easy to get into a stock device. I find this option possible but unlikely unless you’re a VIP or you’ve REALLY pissed off an ex lover or are married to overly attached girlfriend.

*Edit

Maybe there’s a third option. Maybe the phone’s hardware is just borked somehow - a chip or sensor or something is broke. /shrug. I suppose that’s possible too.

Synology NAS. I really love that thing. I use their synology drive software to backup the Linux home folder, as well as windows PCs, iPads, iPhones etc. I use their photos mobile software to automatically backup phone photos and videos. I also synchronize a few select folders between PCs so certain in-use files are always up to date. I set the NAS to keep 30 old versions of every file. This works great for my college kids - dad has a copy of everything in case they nuke a paper or something (which has happened).

I stopped cloning drives long ago. Now I just reinstall the os and packages. With Linux, this is honestly faster than deploying a backup - a single pacman command installs everything I want. Then I just log into things as I open them. Ya I might have to futz around with some settings or redownload some big games on steam - but the eye candy and games can wait - I can be productive pretty quickly after an install.

I DO use btrfs with automatic snapshots (snapper and btrfs assistant). This saves me from myself when I bork an update (which I’ve done more than once). If I make a mistake, I just rollback a snapshot, and try again without my stupid mistakes. This has saved my install 3 or 4 times now.

Lastly, I sneaker net an external hard drive to my office. On it is a manual backup of the NAS. I do this once per month. This protects from catastrophic failures like my house burning down. I might lose a month or so of pictures in the worst case scenario, but I still have my 25+ years of pictures of my kids, wedding videos, etc.

In the end, the only thing that really matters is not losing my lifetime of family pictures and the good memories they provoke.

Agreed. Now that said, OP didn’t mention WHY he wanted WiFi hardware removed. Due to framework’s philosophy-it would be absolutely trivial to put one back in. Literally five screws.

Like if I was trying to keep a kid off the internet - it would probably fail. I know I’d just buy a card a pop it in when no one was looking. But I’m a rebel like that. :)

I literally just bought a framework 13 laptop and was poking around in it (because it’s a repairable laptop). It 100% has a removable wireless card, and I was surprised because I assumed those were all soldered onto main boards these days.

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/WiFi+Replacement+Guide/96

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.

Oh right! Forgot about that one! FOUR major screw ups.

Not everyone likes every genre of game - so here’s my grouped list:

The “I’m a nerd and like to build things and I like to watch lava lamps flow” Factorio

The “I enjoy tough but fair games that I can totally become OP in once I figure it out” Elden Ring

The “I just want to chill” game Stardew Valley

The “I like to build things” game minecraft Honorable mention-Terraria

The “Metroidvania” game Hollow Knight

The “Arpg” game Diablo 2 Honorable mention - PoE

The “I like action and smashing things in an open world” game Neir Automata Honorable mention - God of war (play one of the originals so you can 1st hate the remake, and then get to THAT point, and then happily eat crow and let Kratos be your baby daddy.

I came here to say this. I’ve been gaming since the early 80s. Factorio is top 5 for me.

This one has been sitting in my steam backlog since the dinosaurs roamed the earth. I should get on that…

This is the third update in like six months that is horribly broken. There was a windows 10 update that wouldn’t install because the recovery partition that Microsoft’s installer created was too small. The prior win 11 update just won’t install for lots of people and there’s no real rhyme or reason. Now this crap.

They just don’t give a shit anymore. Microsoft had a great run folks, time to move on.

I still for the life of me can’t figure out what’s so great about secure boot and tpm. All it’s ever done for me is prevent me from booting a legitimate OS, or a bootable flash drive with iso images on it (like ventoy). It’s also pretty good at giving me a headache trying to figure out how the keys work and how to register them.

I just turn them both off and live in ignorant bliss.

I do use a wireless keyboard/mouse combo. A very very small one. But I very rarely use that. I push all content through plex which can be driven easily with devices like firetv and have remotes. The htpc does the real work, but I don’t interface with it directly (generally speaking).

Ya, because it’s a TV. You connect those things to the inputs and drive the content from other things (game console, firetv, htpc, etc.

I’m baffled by people negatively reacting to my post. It’s how tvs have worked for 50+ years. Just because they recently got the ability to execute programs, doesn’t mean you have to use it. Just air gap it and the issue is 100% solved as far as the tv is concerned.

Why? That’s exactly what I did with my tv. It never saw the internet and works just fine. I literally don’t care what Samsung does or pushes out for updates because it doesn’t matter.

I can still do everything I want from Netflix to streaming from my NAS etc.

/shrug