The fact that we need a third party program to make our computer respect our privacy should say it all for Windows.

I had to do exactly this for a family friend in his 70s, it was a fucking nightmare. I think ultimately I caved and hotspotted it to my phone just long enough for it to be happy, and disconnected it while it was still loading the sign up page so it fell back to local account creation (at the time I didn’t know about a@a or bypassnro)

Yeah one of these is literally my primary USB 3.0 to SATA adapter

The thought of Microsoft remastering XP scares me, you and I both know they’d still be throwing Copilot into it.

I think while this is true, it’s the time you have to switch over is much smaller.

Windows XP kept being supported until 2014, and up to that point you had Windows Vista (2007), Windows 7 (2009) and Windows 8 (2012). That’s 7 years users had to move over.

Even if you consider something like Windows 7 with a shorter support cycle ending in 2020, you had Windows 8 (2012) and Windows 10 (2015), giving you 8 years to cave in and upgrade.

Windows 11 came out in 2022, and you have 3 years not to just upgrade the OS, but in a lot of cases your hardware too. I think this is why everyone is feeling the squeeze moreso than previously.

I’m sure you say that in jest to some extent, I do know some people who say “arks” instead of “ask” and they have never realised it until it was pointed out. I’d say a similar phenomenon happens with “nucular”

I hate the ambiguity in that too. My usual goto instead is “the coming Friday”

They’d get a bunch of support, but I think they know that people would just continue to ride Win10 even longer, than actually spend the extra time upgrading.

Speculation on my part (so was my parent comment to be fair), prior to Windows 11 and even the later major updates to Windows 10, Windows had a horrible rep for physical security. It was well known that if someone stole your computer, all your data is compromised and whoever stole it just needed a YouTube video on various lock screen bypasses.

Microsoft wanted to do something about this, so Windows 11 relies on the TPM so that BitLocker can be enabled, and having the TPM makes it entirely transparent to the user. Enforcing the Microsoft account requirement gives a recovery avenue should something go wrong like the TPM changes.

Unfortunately, they would rather that the image of Win11 is this really secure OS, rather than let users who don’t have a TPM upgrade anyway, which really will just leave more users insecure on Win10 and overall in a much worse spot from a security perspective.

I think there’ll be some users but honestly? I think you’ll have three general kinds of users. Those that just bite the bullet and upgrade to 11, those that don’t care and will continue to use Win10 for more years to come, and the minority that care enough to try this “Linux thing” out.

I genuinely think Microsoft won’t extend anything for Win10 unfortunately, no matter how many users cling to it. I’d love to be eating my words here, but I think Microsoft would rather pull all the marketing tricks out the book to force everyone into Win11.

I’m also a decade long Linux user and it drives me insane too. I’m happy to support someone if they have questions ABOUT Linux, but otherwise I don’t shove it down their throat or really mention it. I nearly lost friends being the way so many other Linux users are and that was the changing point for me.

They did. DUO was born.

I’ve never gone down that route myself, but I have both an iPad 2 and iPad 3.

The iPad 2 is downgraded to iOS 6, making it significantly useful and faster, and this can be done with the Legacy iOS Kit. That being said I did this over a year ago when the App Store still worked on iOS 6, so you’d need to instead find IPAs and install them, which is definitely a more subpar process. I have a metric ton of old games on mine, as well as TwomonUSB so I can use it as a second monitor

My iPad 3 is downgraded to iOS 8, which is maybe a 15% speed improvement but it is more bearable than stock iOS 9, and the app store works as well as more apps like Spotify, Discord (with tweak), Telegram (editing Info.plist). Against the grain of what r/LegacyJailbreak would suggest, downgrading to iOS 8 is probably better than iOS 6.

This doesn’t answer your Linux question, but if you wanted to get more use out of your iPad in the meantime I love having mine as a second monitor for my laptop (could also use VNC instead of TwomonUSB) and in general what I’ve said above makes them 100x more useful than on iOS 9.

It’s understandable that you suspect InvaderDJ as a bot, but rest assured that InvaderDJ is not a bot. This is a troubling time for you, so it is important that you reach out to friends and family members to ensure your safety in learning of this news.

I implore you to consider reaching out to the website https://www.totallylegitrecommendation.org to further test if other users you suspect are bots or not, they only require a $54.99/month subscription but is well worth it. Free and confidential.

In terms of detecting bot accounts, it is important to consider the worthiness of detecting bot accounts to begin with. From there, you can then determine which financial advisor you should seek out so that you are able to be financially stable during this troubling time whilst also supporting my overlords on https://www.totallylegitrecommendation.org who make use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms to determine with a 99.77% success rate, if users you find on the internet are bot accounts.

I exclusively use NewPipe on my phone, and it works well (although it seems comments broke recently, but I’m sure it’ll be fixed in due course), but I try to use Piped on PC and I find that it is significantly slower, most videos I have to play at 720p or lower, and it usually takes 20+ seconds to initially load. Being in Australia probably doesn’t help

Is there any other alternatives that I should consider?

All the best with that. I have a Galaxy S5 and it is still daily drivable, although it lives it’s retirement years as a dashcam that I can quickly deploy in any car should I need it.

I actually found an old /home drive of mine this week where I had exactly this setup, so painful.

Didn’t Apple try and class their iPhones as game consoles a couple months back?

You could do the screen replacement yourself which honestly isn’t too difficult if you follow a repair guide such as the ones iFixit make available. You may find it cheaper to find an iCloud locked 5c with a functional screen than to buy a replacement screen itself, and you have spare parts should you need them.

However, I believe the 5c was a bit of an underwhelming phone because it was effectively the same as the iPhone 5 that came before it. The latest iOS it got was 10.3.4, which is pretty much unusable in 2024 without jailbreaks. You would need to find tweaks to try and fix apps that are broken, and force the app store to serve you older versions of apps. It’s possible to try and make it usable but I do honestly think it’s a losing battle as more and more apps update and break compatibility.

If you’re really into the form factor of the 5c you could find a used SE 1st gen which got to iOS 15 but still looks exactly like an iPhone 5, as these are still very daily drivable without jailbreaks.

Otherwise, I’d usually say its best to keep your S7 going, and install custom ROMs like LineageOS to keep it going further. If an Android phone has mainstream ROM support (by LineageOS or hobbyists on XDA Developers) it’s usually much easier to keep it going for longer than an iPhone, and it’s usually more secure as you’re getting OS updates again.

My iPhone 4s is a proof of concept device that shows it’s possible to have it work with some services today (Fediverse via old.Lemmy.world, Spotify, Discord, iMessage, Reddit via Narwhal, Maps, Telegram, YouTube via m.youtube.com, and Hacker News) but it is a very slow and patience testing experience in nearly all of those. I would not consider my 4s daily drivable and it’s exactly why I use it for a distraction free music player with modern conveniences.

Edit: I should mention that a community I frequented on Reddit was r/LegacyJailbreak, so they will have much further information for you should you want to ultimately repair and reuse your iPhone 5c