it was at 50 percent in aug 2024’s survey… that last 15 percent to 65 took over a year to achieve.

the paid scam is 30usd for a year of extended updates.

(the first year only, i’m guessing… if they did it like win7, the price will ramp-up year 2 and again year 3).

They dropped 7, 8, and 8.1 at the same time, January 1st 2024

the actual ‘end of service’ dates for win7 (with the max 3 years esu) and 8/8.1 all occurred during the first half of 2023… so they gave a whole six months of extra life on those versions.

if that’s all you need it to do: browser, kitra, libreoffice and not much else… any mainstream distribution will work.

fedora’s ‘atomic’ distributions tick your boxes. minimal terminal exposure, hard to break, and infrequent demands of user password.

silverblue (gnome) or kinoite (kde). kde is a traditional desktop experience, but gnome would be excellent for your rather basic set-up.

my guess is someone big wants it and offered to pay enough to fund it, so canonical is just opening up the same support timeframe to anyone willing cough-up some cash.

checks?. these moronic clowns don’t even know what the fuck they’re raging about.

i bet even shitstain donnie could count the number of ‘blue states’ sending checks for snap benefits.

(hint: it’s ZERO. checks are not used for snap benefits–ebt debit cards are, and it was the iconic coupons known as ‘food stamps’ before that).

pictures are taken by sorting machines of every piece of mail that goes through usps. that data is retained by the usps for a period of time, and is open to ‘law enforcement’ on request; and who knows what really happens to that data when the usps doesn’t want to hold it any longer.

and some are, apparently, obscure af:

“an issue with decoding LucasArts Smush codec, specifically the first 10-20 frames of Rebel Assault 2, a game from 1995.”

the form itself is easy, it’s the bot detection and spam prevention that’s hard. on my own sites, i’ve given-in and use the highest-level recaptcha, a hidden form field triggered by bots but not humans, and a server-side script for the mailing that also has some spam detection routines. they still get through, but far less often than a naked form would.

if you’re satisfied with your existing comments function, can you simply enable comments on your ‘contact’ page and hide them from public view?

every shit-tier chore ever conceived, and every task on every ‘honey do’ list ever made, would be completed. every day. on schedule. and without fail.

and the ‘game’ forces you to drop half your carried inventory as well as whatever was equipped in either hand when you do try to get back up.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five?

That’s amazing. I’ve got the same combination on my luggage.

i’ve got one user who has refused to update their win7 system for a full decade–literally the entire lifecycle of win10. offered to set up a dual boot for her and she seemed to be receptive of that–even bought a nice big ssd drive for it, but she never used it and never upgraded. husband says that ssd is still in the damn box sitting on a shelf. i expect to hear from her when that now tired old hdd in her (i think) wolfdale-era win7 finally craps out.

Literally no one is throwing away a working machine just because some deadline passes.

yes. yes they are. we’ve taken in a lot more ‘junk’ systems over the last six months than we ever have.

many of those who aren’t tossing their pc on the heap are paying for the updates or jumping through the link-and-sync bullshit for them.

microsoft’s scare tactics work, and work very well.

yup. i have a bunch of users that won’t be happy. they only still have fb for messenger, use the messenger app, and never go to fb itself anymore.

have to have PiHoles and other DNS sinkholes for a basic protection, which is hard for regular people

mullvad’s free dns. free for all, not just their subscribers. encrypted doh or dot only. a basic ad and malware blocking dns sinkhole is a fairly simple configuration away if your os supports it (win11 and android do… those are what i’ve set it up on for others so far).

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

not a whole lot of takers here either, and not a single one yet due to win10’s “retirement”.

everyone wants windows. but after that, most are pretty receptive of other foss options like libreoffice.

i can’t get the /download or /getxubuntu pages to load straight off the project site–just goes to the domain root. the .zip file that was linked also 404s. perhaps an admin temporarily mitigated the issue on their end.

the .torrent files available via /releases page at…

https://xubuntu.org/release/25-10/ (latest release)
https://xubuntu.org/release/24-04/ (most recent lts)

appear to be the correct ones.

that was probably just a byproduct of the actual feature of ensuring there was no slack built-up from vibrations before re-engaging the tape head.

just give 'em time. it’s still a bit early in the game for that play