I'm on the "toy computer" (a Raspberry Pi B+) this morning, because at shutdown last night, my desktop offered "Update and shut down," "...and restart" and "...later" as options. I'd read earlier that there are apparently some big, sneaky holes in the system architecture and Microsoft is frantic to patch them.
Okay, then. Has to be done. But after this morning's boot-up, my desktop has spent the last ten minutes with the Window 10 "blue window" logo and a spinning wheel of dots on the screen. It's lovely, Microsoft, but why didn't you do that last night?
The Surface is probably going to want to do this today and unless the update has bricked my machine, I'll park it on a corner of my desk at work and let it get down with itself; and likewise my other backup, a skinny (and now outdated) Acer laptop that I picked up cheap a few years ago.
If I didn't have the Pi and the very used MacBook,* this would be a lot more annoying! As it is, well, Microsoft is going to make a Linux user out of me yet, and/or drive me into the arms of Big Brother Apple.
...And we're now at fifteen minutes of "I'm thinking about it" from the desktop -- if only it was as amusing as Milton Berle!
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* I'd include the iPad, but I still haven't knuckled under and subscribed to Word for IOS. You can't just buy it, as far as I know, and the monthly fee is slightly non-trivial. Being able to hand off documents between platforms and edit them easily is a large part of the usefulness of my computers, though. Like my desktop -- presently at the twenty minute mark without ETA! -- I'm still thinking about it.
That is why I bailed from M$ on PCs with the end of NT4 and went linux.
ReplyDeleteI wanted reliability over "features" and flaky. That was a decade and
a half ago and I don't look back. My goal was big machine solid
performance as in runs 24/7/365 without burps or reboots.
Same for M$ Word/office. I use LibreOffice and have found it better
and it works for everything I've thrown at it including old wordstar
CP/M files and early DOS WordPerfect files.
The Rpi toy. I took one and put it in a nice dark wood trinket box
slightly steampunked with a 10.1" display, apple mini-keyboard and
a cheap mouse all real usb connected and it runs on batteries.
Everything that runs on my larger machines runs on the RPi-3B+ and
often remarkably fast. Its proven reliable, fast boot, and useful.
Its also been a conversation piece in meetings. Do make sure its
spooled up to 1200mhz as the default is much lower.
Enjoy the little critter its the best compute deal in town.
Eck!
What you and ECK! said.
ReplyDeleteAll this and more is making me a recent Linux convert.
Come on over to The Dark Side. You'll like it here; we have (the edible kind of) cookies here.
Alas, Dropbox doesn't play well with Linux (yet). That's a stopper for me.
ReplyDeleteMy main machine boots Linux mint, with Windows 10 and 7 on separate partitions if there is something that I absolutely need Windows for. I rarely boot into them.
ReplyDeleteHave you looked at Dropbox for Linux lately? They seem to have a package that will install right into Ubuntu/Mint (.deb)or Fedora (.RPM).
Anon, Raspbian is a fork of Debian. I'm not all that familiar with all the various versions.
ReplyDeleteOnce I figure out how to get WINE to talk to the serial port and therefore to my TNC so I can APRSIS32 over RF, I move from dual boot to Linux only.
ReplyDelete