I had used Lubuntu to rescue an underpowered laptop back in community college. At university, I was on the campus tech support team… and ended up “the Linux guy” for the few foreigners who had installations (I knew how to run apt and that’s about it). Out of uni, I ended up in a career supporting RHEL. Of course Raspberry Pis skyrocketed in popularity as well, so I got to sink my teeth into a Debian-derivative and blow up a few installs without having to worry about change management.

When time came to build a system in 2025, I figured I’d try it as an experiment. I stumbled at first and learned Debian does not play well with new hardware, but after switching to Linux Mint it’s been nearly painless. Most of the software I had been using in Windows was already open source (because I couldn’t afford to buy software), so almost everything migrated 1:1. Excluding Winamp… :(

…and I’d like to add, if they are showing ads relevant to the website you are on, you are clicking those ads and thus giving away what interests you really have.

It was wild seeing fair-use Mickey Mouse in a divorce lawyer’s commercial.

To me, yellowed plastic is a badge of honor. Old age comes for us all.

You should have seen the panic back in 2017 when my team found a cluster of Server 2003 running at a hospital.

The client thought it was fine.

I just hit the same issue a few days ago. So Debian 12 (Bookworm) still has i386 support, but that support may end as soon as next year as they haven’t confirmed i386 as an architecture for LTS.

If you do go with Debian, you can easily choose a lightweight desktop during installation.

I’m really curious if it’ll stick around even longer given how slow tech advancement has become.

I lament it, but I understand it. Last year’s reports showed that GoG was barely staying afloat. Their rival shows Linux is only 3% of current market, so GoG probably doesn’t want to spread themselves any thinner until they get some surplus cash to test the waters with.

Thank goodness for Heroic launcher.

One of my favorite remotes had the sources split across the top. Composite, Component, VGA, HDMI. And if you hit the button twice it’d cycle through the different ports of that type.

Never found a remote like that again. Now they just throw a menu to slowly browse through.

Reminds me of:

I take issue with the clickbait title and am ready to perform an “Umm… actually”. Morrowind featured controller support for years via the Xbox. It didn’t just get it. Heck, it still doesn’t officially support controllers on PC. I wouldn’t even call OpenMW devs “modders”.

My stupid gripe aside, for those who don’t know, you can pop in an OG Morrowind Xbox disk into any generation of Xbox console and it’ll play. Series X will even boost the resolution up to nearly 4K (1920p).

I saw these guys at Portland Retro Gaming Expo. I played the demo a tiny bit, and while it was interesting in a way… it felt a bit too early to be showing to people. Maybe it was the 3D printed stuff that made it amateurish.

That said, if I am recalling correctly, the was open-source (oh I found the site and it is) so maybe that whole booth was to demonstrate how someone could build their own unit.

I mean, we have Evercade and it’s not failed yet.

28 years and there is still nothing close to it. Either they focus too much on flight like Zone of Enders and Daemon X Machina, or they ground it too hard like Front Mission Evolved. No happy middleground.

I really thought with the success of Fires of Rubicon that we’d get a decent attempt at a clone.

I didn’t look too far into it yet. I know that Bookworm is good until 2026, though there is a big TBD on whether i386 is part of the 2028 LTS. I guess I have a minimum of another year to figure it out. Not that I do much with 2008 hardware to begin with.

I JUST got done posting about LXQt rescuing old hardware earlier today, found out about this news, booted up my laptop to perform a Debian Trixie upgrade in preparation… only to find out that my Pentium M is too old to rescue. Debian dropped i386.

so instead of defaults I think you want noauto,nofail

Then it shouldn’t automatically mount, but at the same time won’t throw you into emergency mode if it fails to detect the drive.

I tried XFCE for some older hardware and had the same experience.

I poked around at stuff like fluxbox and found it too minimal. So I ended up using LXDE instead and got better results, but that was before it transitioned to LXQt. I have no idea if it’s still as lightweight as it used to be. Someone else might have to chime in.

Interesting. The Zero W is still in active production, with production promises all the way to 2030. I would not want to be in the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s shoes right now.

I’m betting the Bluetooth ID given by the controller advertises that it is a speaker, and Windows is assuming a newly connected speaker is where the person wants to output audio. I mean, why else would you connect a speaker? /s

Fun fact: The PS5 controller also includes a microphone. My circle didn’t know a hot mic was listening in on everything until we noticed background audio in one of our captures.