I have actually bought an app on the play store once, because I had a gift card. Turns out, they didn’t use the gift card and used my cc on file for Google drive. Had to spend hours sorting that out with automated customer service, never gonna use that again. Their product actually does suck, and a lot of the reason that f-droid doesn’t is that they aren’t charging you to use it.

Given the state of a lot of the summaries I’ve seen lately, that is scary.

It’s the tls certificate that proves your website is legit. Without which, you can potentially be a malicious actor that can pose as the website, and when you download the iso, you could unknowingly download something malicious. It’s pretty hard to forget certificate renewal (most of the time there are plenty of reminders sent and warnings given), so the fact that it happened twice was very impressively bad.

Plenty of things, but the most obvious being the two separate instances they had issues with renewing their certs.

Also, don’t forget creating a bootable USB stick with the distros you think you’d like. Rufus or balena etcher should get you there, just figure out what distros you think you’d like to try out, as sometimes it can be easier to set those up than create a vm, plus you might be able to notice any obvious issues running natively.

I mean, I use Bluetooth headphones on my phone most of the time, but I do still require a headphone jack as a backup. I used a phone without one for a while, and decided I need one on future phones, as well as a micro SD card (I need more than a tb of storage for my music and audiobooks).

Actually, a few of the Motorola phones do have headphone jacks and sd card ports, like the moto G. Which is why I’m really, really hoping those are the models supported.

You absolutely can. Currently running mine off of my desktop, but it’s overkill and have a few coworkers that used nucs/cheap mini PCs to setup jellyfin. Biggest thing is to make sure you have enough storage to hold all of your media, then you’re fine.

My father got and installed two of the newer nest thermostats, and they are bar none two of the most annoying tech devices I’ve ever had the misfortune of having to fix. Have literally spent hours debugging them when changing the wifi password, they don’t support wpa3, and the setup app feels like a half assed student project. I know this audience probably isn’t interested in getting one, but if one of your family members gets some for free, do NOT let them install them.

They’re not really that great compared to AMD for the most part. Plus rumor is that AMDs next gen is a lot further ahead of Intel. Then again, it depends on how good of a deal you get on them and if power efficiency is a priority (I’ve heard that Intel still is pretty decent in that regard). That being said don’t get any of their 13th or 14th gen CPUs, that’s part of what has led to their current state of affairs.

Don’t forget, most computers are faster on Linux than on the newest windows version, so you can hold off on upgrades for longer if the hardware is physically fine, which just further decreases costs.

I mean, wasn’t it mostly spam anyway?

Excellent read, this isn’t a post you should just up vote blindly, read it first.

It is, but it’s one of the newest in my fleet. My favorite daily was my x230 with a third Gen i7, ran manjaro on it for years. Currently on endeavor sway edition, pretty decent handling of a touchscreen.

Currently running a ThinkPad x380 with a 8th Gen intel quad core and 16gb of ram. A bit old by modern standards, but on Linux it’s plenty fast and I probably won’t have to upgrade for a decade. And that would only really be if the hardware was either worn out or there is some major upgrade I feel I need. I got it a few years old for $200 (it was a top spec model when new), I can fix most of the problems that might come up with it with used parts for cheap, and when I upgrade I’ll probably get another cheap laptop where running Linux won’t make it feel slow. From experience, if it were running windows it would begin to feel slower a lot sooner than with Linux, and indefinite security upgrades are not guaranteed.