My first Linux install was Slackware sometime in the late 90’s. I didn’t really use it though, as I never managed to get it working with my dial-up Internet. Stupid winmodems.

The first distribution I actually used was Mandrake. Others I’ve used since then include Suse, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Manjaro, and EndeavourOS. I’ve landed on using Manjaro on both my main desktop and laptop, though I have secondary machines running Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, and EndeavourOS.

I’m not saying that old hardware is useless. I make good use out of old hardware too. I have an old i5 Dell from about 2012 running ZoneMinder, a Phenom II system from around 2009 that I use a Linux server, an even older Core 2 Duo system that’s a glorified MP3 player, and even a very early 2000’s Pentium III that I use for a router (sadly I’m going to have to retire it from these duties soon - it can barely handle a 100 mbps DSL connection, and it’s too old and outdated to run the modern router distributions).

However, for every one of those computers I have another one like it sitting in a closet plus a few extras. All the geeks and tinkerers I know are also swimming in old hardware. If I really wanted to get rid of this stuff, I’d have a hard time giving it away. Economically, this stuff is worthless. The supply greatly exceeds the demand(*)

(*) well, except maybe the Pentium III… it’s old enough now that retro gamers may be interested…

If all she uses the computer for is playing Sims 4, another option is just let her continue to use Windows 10. If she’s running it through Steam she’s probably got another 3-4 years before that stops working.

That’s true, but the supply vastly outstrips the demand. They may make great Linux machines, but the majority of 10-15 year old computers have little to no economic value.

I use BiglyBt on Debian. I use BiglyBt because I previously used Vuze, and I used Vuze because I previously used Azureus. I don’t really remember why I went with Azureus originally, but it may have just been because it was popular at that time.

I get the impression most people use other bittorrent clients nowadays, but BiglyBt does what I need it to do. I never really used any of the “advanced” features of Vuze myself, pretty much only using it for torrents.

The sad thing is back in the Windows XP days Microsoft had the focus stealing thing pretty much solved. Well okay - I remember you had to install some of the PowerToys or make some registry edits to get at some of the settings. But once setup pretty much nothing could steal focus away from the current window, which was a welcome change from where we had been. That started to break again in Windows 7, and has gotten worse with every release since then.

Admittedly XFCE isn’t perfect either, but it’s much better behaved than modern Windows.

I see enough weird behavior out of the Dells at work and their USB-C docks so I can believe it. Not detecting the dock, not charging from the dock, ports not working on the dock, randomly insisting the dock isn’t compatible. Even the machines that end up as folding desktops that never get disconnected from their dock end up doing this stuff. I really had no use for a laptop anyway so I finally convinced them to give me a desktop.

I can see it. My corporate work laptop is locked down with their security and monitoring software, so I’m not using it for personal things, even if it is allowed for some limited things. And there’s company resources that I can only access through the machines under their control, so I couldn’t ditch it either. And using that laptop for a second job would be a big no-no.

I can see the school laptop being similar, though my experience is that they tend to not be locked down quite as hard as the corporate machine, unless you do boneheaded things with it and piss off the school’s IT department.

So I can see the need for a personal computer, plus it’s always nice to keep that well separated to avoid things like incidents hooked up to a projector and screen sharing.

Besides what people have mentioned, you also have simulator type games like SimCity. Though with SimCity, I got bored of the “new” SimCity they released… in 2013. Either play something like SimCity 4000, or try Cities Skylines.

The reason we have timezones is because of the railroads. Before the railroads came in, every town would have its own time, typically set so noon is the time when the sun is highest in the sky. This really wasn’t a problem, as back then it didn’t really matter that the time was different in every little burg.

Then the railroads came in. They needed things running on a coordinated time table out of necessity, and having every town with its own time was unworkable. I’m sure the railroads would have loved running everything off of the same clock everywhere because that would be simple. But people were too used to noon being the middle of the day, so instead we got the compromise of having timezones so that the railroads can still run on a coordinated time table, but also so that noon is still approximately the middle of the day as people were used to.

So the solution is just go back to the 1800’s and convince the railroads that timezones are actually silly and that they really should run everything based upon UTC. And if people want rail service to their town, they can just deal with not having 12PM being when the sun is highest in the sky.

If you’re comfortable with swapping out components in your PC, just buy a second SSD. Remove the Windows drive, put Linux on the new drive. If Linux doesn’t work out for you, just swap them back.

You could also run a live Linux distribution from a USB stick, or potentially install Linux onto a USB stick or SD.

It’s been a while since I’ve used Gnome, but back when I did I also felt it lacked a lot of configurability much like the Mac.

In comparison, KDE felt a lot more like Windows (or how Windows used to be in the past) where you could configure and tweak all sorts of things.

Finder? Polished? Even compared to Windows Explorer, Finder is terrible.

Not too long ago, on a Slackware box I needed to manually change glibc to another version. No problem, I thought, just remove the version that’s there and install the package for the version I needed. So removepkg glibc and then immediately dawned on me… oh wait I really didn’t want to do that… Of course, after that installpkg and pretty much everything else was broken since pretty much everything either depends on glibc, or has a dependency that depends on glibc, so I couldn’t install the new package or do pretty much anything other than smack my forehead.

Wasn’t actually too big of a deal to fix. Used another computer to create a bootable USB stick with the Slackware installer, booted the computer with the USB stick, and did some chroot trickery to reinstall the old glibc package again. Then booted it back up normally and used upgradepkg to change glibc like I should have in the first place.

Well, if you’re sticking with Windows, you really have no choice. The sun is rapidly setting on using Windows 7 as a “daily driver” - a lot of new software doesn’t support it and the older versions that work on Windows 7 are getting less and less viable. Windows 8 is in the same boat as Windows 7. Windows 10 goes out of support next year, but you’ve probably got to 2028 or maybe 2029 before you really have to move.

I ended up riding Windows 7 pretty much to the bitter end. Steam dropping Windows 7 support last December was it for the last Windows box. Everything now is running Linux.

I consider Windows 7 the last good version, but I still consider Windows 2000 to be when Microsoft was at the top of their game.

I did switch over to yt-dlp some time later as development seems to have slowed on Pytube and yt-dlp seems to be where all the activity is.

That reminds me back when some time ago, I was tired of dealing with sketchy, and often broken, websites and programs for downloading videos from Youtube. I figured these sorts of programs must be doing something along the lines of downloading the Youtube page, parsing through the massive pile of HTML and Javascript to find the stream, and then saving that to a video file. That seemed like something I could do myself with Python, so I set out to see if I could figure out how to do it.

A few minutes and a couple of web searches later, I discovered that someone else had figured that all out already and I just needed to do “pip install pytube”.