TWIG 651: The Voltron of Terrible

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

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Fun show! Never heard of sumi news, nice find. :+1:

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Oh? This would be a great option for gaming if stadia was still a thing.

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Thx for sharing. Interesting

@Leo Thank you for telling whatever crypto-retirement-investing scammer was calling you to run ads to piss off. I appreciate that you’re trying to keep the quality of your ads high, and not just taking whomever’s money comes knocking at the door.

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HP, Dell, and Lenovo are generally very good for Linux. These companies take part in the Ubuntu Certified Hardware program, which means that typically they have their own branded fork of Ubuntu that is tested against the certified device. As time goes on, the Canonical team typically take the drivers and other bits with branding removed and push that development into the upstream kernel. The end result is hardware that can have software specific to the makers’ brand, but general compatibility with all Linuxes.

As an aside, searching that list is generally a very good way to find a $300 refurbished laptop that will do the general tasks of a laptop without any frills. I know, because it’s how I got my current laptop!

I had an old Gateway that was nuked by the forced update to Win10. The constant telemetry, search, and scanning made it completely unresponsive. I put Xubuntu on it and it became nice little Digital Audio Workstation for playing around with my guitar. It’s insane to me how much slower Win10 was than any other OS.

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Agreed - I have a Lenovo T420 that I bought used online just to become a Ubuntu machine

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When Reader was killed, Feedly showed up as an alternative that would import my feeds from Reader and work in much the same way. Still use it and would recommend it as a good Reader alternative.

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The legendary T400-series! I have an HP Elite book circa 2011, which also has great repairability and serves as a thin client to all my other systems. Screen: not awesome. Battery life: decent. Sustainability: off the charts! It will probably become a server when it’s retired.

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@Leo I really liked your guest Cathy Gellis. Would like to see her on your shows more often.

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Where did you find it? I keep going down dry holes. I have been running NeverReady for about 3 years and updates seem to be slow. Being an experienced user I want to compare them.

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Get ChromeOS Flex for PC or Mac - Chrome Enterprise Make sure you read about the install process before you begin it.

Thanks so much. So a simple search should have popped it up, but I got a ton of Amazon FLEX. Today it is first.

You know, I just thought about this. I have an old Chromebook that just ran out of its miniscule 3-year support window. Now Google is supposedly releasing a version of ChromeOS just for old devices? Can I install it on the old devices that they stopped supporting? Checks list No.

Sometimes I can’t make any sense out of this company. It’s like this is a flex against Red Hat, Suse and Canonical.

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Boy that’s a good point. Why can’t you put ChromeOS Flex on an out-of-date Chromebook???

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Likely because that would make sense. :+1: From a non-technical standpoint shouldn’t Google (or other companies) try to keep older hardware working to meet environmental goals.

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It’s hard to make sense out of it. I checked the install instructions for GalliumOS related to my device: it would require turning off the OS verification, but surely that’s not a great hurdle in the grand scheme of things? It also can’t be age, since there was at least one Sandy Bridge device that was fully certified.

It’s just strange that this wasn’t a supported use-case for “giving life to old devices.” I’d guess from the website that this is not really aimed at consumers, but instead is a bid to win over sysadmins with old devices, low budgets, and Microsoft trauma.

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