Trainguyrom

Separate persistent data and operating system partitions, ensure that every local network has small pxe servers, vpned (wireguard, etc) to a cdn with your base OS deployment images, that validate images based on CA and checksum before delivering, and give every user the ability to pxe boot and redeploy the non-data partition.

At that point why not just redirect the data partition to a network share with local caching? Seems like it would simplify this setup greatly (plus makes enabling shadow copy for all users stupid easy)

Edit to add: I worked at a bank that did this for all of our users and it was extremely convenient for termed employees since we could simply give access to the termed employee's share to their manager and toss a them a shortcut to access said employee's files, so if it turned out Janet had some business critical spreadsheet it was easily accessible even after she was termed

I acquired an ewaste laptop with an 8 year old celeron, 4GB of memory and a 500GB HDD. I tossed Linux Mint on there as an experiment to see what would work decently on there. Its not great, but its usable and might become my daughter's first computer. Running firefox its noticably slow but I can crack open Libre Office or ScummVM and other than the initial load time it's pretty snappy. I kinda forgot how hard drives give systems that slow-then-fast feeling...

I didn't know Haiku had actual hardware support!

I once swapped a Debian install with XFCE to just running Openbox instead of a full DE and got down to 300Mb or so of memory usage. This was about a decade ago so obviously YMMV but given literally all I did was run Debian with just openbox and no DE, there's probably additional tuning to be done that can get them to a more usable state

Hilariously VLC will happily skip the "unskippable" ads on DVDs

I honestly love the new nested replies in email chains they added to the inbox view a few months ago. It makes a messy inbox so much less messy looking

I'm going to have to whip that one out in a work meeting one of these days. I know a few people will love it and a few people will love to hate it...

You could always go the used/refurbished route to not directly give the chocolate factory money

Honestly that can be a good thing, especially if you have more than one windows PC in your household, it's only downloading them once then sharing the updates about over the LAN

I acquired an ewaste laptop with a 5+ year old Celeron, 4GM of RAM and a spinning rust drive. I tossed mint on there after fighting with Windows update to try to apply 3 years worth of updates and while the installer took 2 hours to complete, it actually is a bit more usable and once it's booted it's amusingly chirpy with random slowdowns whenever it has to hit the disc for data.

I might set it up as my daughter's first computer. She's getting to that age already so it's about time to do it

I have memories of some random afternoons at the consulting firm my mom worked at, where everyone's just poking at spreadsheets. I can't imagine how cool the memory of going into the server farm and doing some hardware work there would be

Folder structures are a bizarre thing for many people

When learning about this I learned that in the analog days folks would actually put physical folders inside of physical folders and it both makes tons of sense and is mind blowing at the same time. -Late Millennial born to IT parents