Just to second that, the model series is Latitude, not Inspiron. and yeah, the i5 processor options I got over the years beat the i7 on processing power. The Precision models are a step up, but not any kind of low cost and seem not quite as tough.

Maybe if enough people file feedback on the name change they will reconsider. At least they will have a glut of feedback to deal with.

You must have done more than rename a partition… it is looking for the partition UID and not finding it. Since the UID is never supposed to change until the partition gets wiped, this is very odd indeed.

Also, putting external volumes (usb stick?) into fstab is not a good idea… let the automount find it when you put it in and want to access it.

Bash is always there, and bash scripts and snippets are precise. Describing gui manipulations when the GUI keeps changing is also quite hard… what if the person you are interacting with has a 2-yo system and you have the bleeding edge? Even knowing which menu the settings are in can be frustrating for the helper.

Windows users (e.g. me at work) get grumpy when Microsoft starts changing the menu structure after keeping it consistent for 20 years and start thinking of powershell scripts to create consistency between our engineering workstations.

Oh! I know! I would have to first install them, roght?

They are text files. If there is anything weird about them it is that they are indented with spaces and if you are inconsistent with indentation they won’t read into the yaml import function, but I can’t imagine why vim or nano would have a problem with opening them. Maybe the ones you were using were not actually yaml.

Totally lost me. Why the hate on YAML?

I think you meant “propagated”.

How do you monitor your email functionality? How long would it be before you noticed it was offline? What about paying for and configuring the new email server?

Sure it is, if you don’t understand economics, which few Merkins do. The evidence is right in front of us.

When you come across some Python code for something written 5 years ago and they used four contributed packages that the programmers have changed the API on three times since then, you want to set up a virtual environment that contains those specific versions so you can at least see how it worked at that time. A small part of this headache comes from Python itself mutating, but the bulk of the problem is the imported user-contributed packages that multiply the functionality of Python.

To be sure, it would be nice if those programmers were all dedicated to updating their code, but with hundreds of thousands of packages that could be imported written by volunteers, you can’t afford to expect all of them them to stop innovating or even to continue maintaining past projects for your benefit.

If you have the itch to fix something old so it works in the latest versions of everything, you have that option… but it is really hard to do that if you cannot see it working as it was designed to work when it was built.

I didn’t say it was unobtainable. But it might look/behave quite different than the tools you are currently using.

As for Microsoft Exchange, I only use that for work, and my employer would not allow me to connect from my personal machine anyway. I am not saying that you that you have to give up your favorite tools… but I am saying that it you are putting up so many fences then you might as well stay with what you have.

No.

If you ever so carefully paint yourself into a corner then the corner is where you will be stuck. How badly do you want out of your corner?

There are FOSS and SAAS options that could work if you wanted them to… but whether they will depends on you.

Meat eaters trying to become vegetarian for ethical reasons often fail because the “un-meat” options out there don’t meet their standards. Success almost always requires some letting go and re-adjusting. If you are not open to that then don’t force yourself to put up with something you don’t really want.

I would say you are lucky. I lived in my college town for 20years and it started out chock full of co-ops in the 80s and by the time I moved away they were all hardly recognizable or gone. Food co-ops, housing co-ops, internet co-ops… all mutated away from shared labor or were replaced by sole ownerships.

My wife works for an employee-owned engineering company, but they are anything but FOSS in their culture.

I hope these intermediate management structures that combine expertise and collective ownership grow more. But it still isn’t a slam-dunk that should be assumed to be the stupidly-obvious approach unless such organizations compete with the grifters… and then their success won’t be due to the fact that they are using FOSS but that they present a track record of success as an organization.

… and there are a gazillion examples where no community forms and the founder burns out. Cheers where it works, but some projects aren’t sexy enough to attract a self-sustaining community, and when you don’t preselect success stories but choose according to external needs that hit-and-miss experience starts to look less obvious and more like the thing only “smart” people can succeed at.

My objection is to the idea that FOSS is easy… it does require some smarts to succeed with.

Don’t get me wrong… I am all for FOSS and I avoid walled gardens, but people have a hard time remembering to take the trash out to the street on the right day. Spending time driving garbage trucks monthly in the local waste management Co-op is not going to fly well. That problem gets solved using money… homeowners are taxed and the local government either hires garbagepeoples directly, or more often they hire a company that takes care of the problem.

Upshot there is money rather than co-op ownership, and frequently for-profit contractors win the day over government ownership. Contractors supply GaaS, we just have to get the bin to the street. So the equivalency here is the need for the public institution known as city government to retain ownership of the waste management system. Not quite “the people”, since getting co-op volunteers is, well, erratic at best. And there are a ridiculous number of people out there who are vehemently against government management of actual organizations like this. I am for it, but over and over I see “privatization” win elections.

So I am not seeing how pitching this as “stupidly obvious” will win when “obvious” means hiring a contractor nearly every time.

I know, I am just someone on the Internet, but I was acquainted with someone who fasted for 40 days… twice (a little over a year apart I think)… in pursuit of some kind of spiritual enlightenment. He started out a little on the heavy side, and ended up, well, emaciated. Anyway, he did have water, which is where I think this woman’s story falls apart.

bit of a cutthroat way to characterize what you “like”. Might actually make the interviewer downvote you for threatening their position.

Having used the web version of Office at my job, I know I would not pay for it. It is compatible-ish, but severely lacking in features, enough so that I don’t trust it to render properly or maintain the formatting entered using the desktop app. If that is good enough then there are lots of alternatives.

There are thousands of programs for Linux… but you should be warned that relatively few programs run natively on both Windows and Linux. In some cases there are ways to run “Windows programs” on Linux, but in general such successes are special cases. If you absolutely must have Windows you can run it in a virtual machine… but you will most likely be happiest with Linux if you aren’t chasing after such things.

I use Windows for work because our IT department only supports that… but I use cygwin and wsl to get a smidgen of my familiar Linux tools that I use on my personal computers.

NPR sez Florida law would disallow him voting, but he wasn’t convicted in Florida, so they defer to the law in the state where he was convicted. New York allows felons to vote up until they are imprisoned, which doesn’t seem likely to happen before election day since he is appealing. Skin of teeth again.