I was talking about the Windows UI on Mastodon the other day, particularly in reference to how I have it set to dark mode on my PC at work, but when I hit Send/Receive in Outlook I get a bright white, XP-ass-looking box pop up. Someone replied, “the older the settings boxes look, the more useful they are”. And I can’t disagree.

This is the output of dmidecode

Handle 0x0026, DMI type 9, 17 bytes System Slot Information Designation: SLOT1_M.2 Type: x4 M.2 Socket 3 Current Usage: Available Length: Long Characteristics: 3.3 V is provided PME signal is supported Bus Address: 0000:ff:1f.7

Handle 0x0027, DMI type 9, 17 bytes System Slot Information Designation: SLOT2_M.2 Type: x1 M.2 Socket 1-SD Current Usage: In Use Length: Short Characteristics: 3.3 V is provided PME signal is supported Bus Address: 0000:ff:00.0

I’m guessing the top one is the M.2 in question, on account of it saying “Available”. And from what I understand having searched for some of the info on that, it should work, assuming the firmware allows for it.

So the currently unused slot won’t work with an ethernet adapter? It’s purely for storage?

It doesn’t look like anything to me.

Brb, just submitting a merge request on the Graphene git.

Ah, but Linux is faultless, so no such thread could ever happen.

Yeah, the one and only PC on which I ever used Vista was a comically under powered laptop that my Mum bought. If it was running XP it would have been solid, but alas, it had 512mb RAM and Vista was thiiiirsty.

If you want to install Windows on another drive and quite rightly don’t want to pay MS for the privilege, then massgrave is your friend.

I started with Mint, then dipped into KDE Neon and Kubuntu, and these days I rock Debian on my server because I want absolutely nothing to fall over if possible. And that’s how it’s been for me. I SSH into it every couple of weeks to run updates, and that’s about it.

Debian is great. Boring, and great.

This puts me in mind of the smart playlists I built in iTunes. Several playlists of 3/4/5* tunes, plus a few other rules to bring lesser played tunes to the surface. These all fed in to one bigger 50 track playlist that would pick something like 30% of its tracks from 5*, 25% from 4*, 20% from 3*, then make up the rest with the other stuff. Oh, and it would filter out any track that wasn’t 5* that had been played in the last two weeks.

Then, when I was rocking my iPod, if I was digging something that wasn’t rated, I could spin up a rating and it’d get shifted to the corresponding list ready to drop into the pool for future enjoyment.

It was properly great.

I guess you can still do it with Apple Music, but it’s not as much fun when your library is thousands of songs you added and never listened to again.

Anyway, I’m going to see if I can recreate it with Navidrome. I’ve got 14k tracks in there and a willingness to listen to them all.

Fucking Rockstar.

It took me fucking AGES to get Red Dead 2 running on CachyOS because of that bastard launcher.

Just be aware that if you want anyone else to connect to your Jellyfin, you’ll still have to route it through a domain and reverse proxy, unless you’re comfortable letting them log in to your tailnet.

It’s a bit of a fiddle to set up, but once it’s done it’s quite satisfying.

If it fits it sits.

+1 for CachyOS

My PC has an AMD CPU / Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU which was fine when I originally set it up with Kubuntu but had some unrelated issues. So I took the opportunity to try it with Arch and had an absolute bastard of a time getting the Nvidia drivers to work. Cut my losses and tried CachyOS instead and pretty much everything just worked from the off.

I’m not an expert on non-Apple hardware by any means, but the Apple stuff I’ve had over the past 20 years has all be incredibly well built. The lone exception was the white plastic MacBook I got in 2007 which was broadly good, but designed in such a way that the palm rest would always chip where the little standoffs at the top of the screen pushed against it when it was closed. But other than that, iPods, iPhones, Macs, iPads, Apple TV, all of them have been very, very well put together.

Whether the components inside were good value for what I paid is a different matter, but the build quality was always exceptional. I never had a MacBook released between 2016 and 2019 though. We don’t talk of those.

But yeah, the software - even with all the current shortcomings - has always been good. Moving from iOS to Graphene was one hell of a learning curve in working out that it was always easy to do stuff on my phone because Apple had put the work into making software that did what their customers needed it to. And for whatever reason, most folks who make apps for iOS/iPadOS put a lot of effort into making their apps really nice to use. The same isn’t always true of Android.

Yeah, there’s an enormous gulf between using a thoughtfully put together app, and cobbling together a solution using command line tools on a phone screen.

There’s a thing that happens on Mastodon throughout June: #AudioMo. Basically, people taking part record and upload a bit of audio every day. Pretty simple.

I used to do it when I used iPhones. Record and edit in Ferrite, add a thumbnail image that I’d edited in Pixelmator, then export from Ferrite as an mp4 static video, ready to upload. It was a piece of piss.

These past two Junes I’ve had a Pixel on Graphene, and I’ve yet to figure out a similar workflow for it. I’ve tried a bunch of different apps, but none of them really match the quality I got used to on iOS, and I didn’t fancy spending loads of money trying different apps, only to find they were lacking in some way.

Yeah, my only wish for my M2 is that Asahi is up to 100% by the time Apple pull the support for it. It’s close. Damn close. But still far enough away that it feels like a compromise.

Are those videos around the 2016-2019 MacBooks? Because yeah, Apple massively dropped a bollock with those things.

But I’m at a point where I’m genuinely pondering whether a fully-specced 2015 MacBook Pro running Linux might be a great replacement for the M2 MacBook Air I currently use, once it dies on me, or Apple drop support (whichever comes first (which will be the dropped support, guaranteed)). I said in another comment on here that I still have a 2011 MacBook Pro at home, running Debian, still trucking along as well as the day I bought it. My home server is a 2014 Mac mini (also running Debian) that’s my Jellyfin/Navidrome/Grimmory/Lidarr/QBittorrent server, all with just 8gb of soldered RAM, drawing very little power while doing it.

Apple have many, many problems, but the build quality of their hardware ain’t one.

I can answer this from the perspective of someone who, until 18 months ago, was all-in on Apple stuff.

The short answer is: As long as all of your devices are reasonably new and running the latest software, they’re all really good at talking to each other. Got a Mac and an iPad? Great, you can use Universal Control to operate the iPad using your Mac’s keyboard and mouse/trackpad. And that is a genuinely useful technology. Got something on your phone that you want to share with your partner on the TV? AirPlay it across to Apple TV. And so, and so forth.

Thing is, once you’re in that situation, you’re kinda stuck. If your Mac ages out of OS feature support, the only option is to replace the Mac if you want it to match the interconnectivity features of your new iPhone. So the answer in that situation is to buy a new Mac, one that supports the new features available in the newest OS. At that point, your options are to either shell out £1000+ on a new Mac, or completely change your workflow to one that can be achieved using open source or paid alternatives. The vast majority of people have neither the time nor the inclination to set up things like that, so they factor in the cost of a new computer, phone, or iPad every few years.

But Apple’s real secret sauce is that - and judging by the attitude you’re swinging around in your post, OP, you’re not going to like this - they make REALLY good hardware.

My primary computer is still a 15" M2 MacBook Air. That thing is super thin, super light, completely silent to use and has never given me a moment’s trouble in three years that I didn’t somehow inflict on myself. Using Crossover, I can play Windows games on it just as easily as using Steam/Proton on my Linux PC. I can play RDR2 on my fanless ARM laptop and get a perfectly fine 30fps when I’m not at home. The battery is three years old but still gives me a full day of use. Sure, it only has two ports, but both of them are Thunderbolt 4, and it has a dedicated Magsafe charging port.

I still have my 2011 MacBook Pro at home. It’s currently running Debian and is still rock solid. Looking a little rough around the edges these days, but still a perfectly usable computer - that’s 15 years old.

Apple has inherently worse hardware

This just isn’t true. At all. The build quality of their hardware is the best in the business.

Sure, they effectively paywall things like 120hz screens to the higher end Pro models, but they have enough market research telling them that people who buy a mid range iPhone don’t care about refresh rates, or even know what they are. Why spend money on a QoL upgrade that the user will never notice?

But yeah, their cost for memory and storage is downright criminal, and always has been. The only thing that’s changed in recent(ish) years is that now everything is soldered or proprietary, they’ve made it effectively impossible to upgrade it yourself at a far, far lower cost. And that’s incredibly shitty.

These days I’m primarily a Linux user. My work PC is Kubuntu, my home server Debian, my gaming PC CachyOS. None of those machines are as easy to use as my Macbook running macOS 15. They can (theoretically) achieve more, but in the 2 years I’ve been using Linux I’ve had to teach myself how to use a command line; something I very, very rarely needed to when I just used macOS alone.

But I reached a point where I got sick of Apple’s bullshit, their performative stance on progressive politics that didn’t match the image of Tim Apple licking Trump’s ring. So I traded in my iPhone 13 mini for a Pixel 9 onto which I immediately installed GrapheneOS. That one act completely broke the spell of the interconnected nature of Apple products for me. I still have an iPad mini, but 90% of its use is as a peripheral for my MacBook, where it does still have genuine utility.

So yeah, Apple don’t do anything particularly groundbreaking, they just make good hardware running software that’s mostly good and useful. People, it may shock you to learn, generally prefer to use devices that don’t need much tinkering to keep them running.