gt24

Windows 11 is supported longer and will receive patches for longer than Windows 10. In fact, I believe Windows 10 is only supported for a few more years. To ensure that you do not have an unpatched (therefore insecure) operating system on the internet, you will either migrate to a newer version of Windows or to a different operating system eventually.

That all being said, Windows 11 was commonly referred to as being faster than Windows 10 on the same hardware. The largest gripes are that Windows 11 has very strict system requirements (therefore not officially working on most computers) and that Windows 11 has a different user interface (taking away some things people like). Windows 10 or 11 are operating systems which basically need to be installed on an SSD so be sure to consider upgrading to that if you have not done so already.

I'm pretty sure that an upgrade to Windows 11 can be reverted and you can go back to Windows 10 if necessary. Still, I would back up any valuable data before experimenting.

On the Linux side of the world, Steam can be installed on Linux and devices such as the Steam Deck exist. Depending on what games you play on your gaming PC, Linux could be an option.

The differences between Windows 10 and Linux are greater than the differences between Windows 10 and Windows 11. In other words, Windows 11 may be a bit better or worse (depending on your opinion) but it isn't majorly better or worse.

The fun aspect of older computers is that they had interesting ways to carry out certain tasks. There wasn't "the best way" to do a thing figured out yet and there were many companies trying all sorts of things for one reason or another.

The Commodore is the only computer I know of that put "another whole computer" into their disk drive in order to make the disk drive work (meaning it was pretty much the same computer as your main computer). So your main computer and the disk drive are pretty similar and your main computer talks to the drive computer to figure everything out. It just seems like such a heavy handed way to handle things but it clearly worked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_DOS -- This explains the OS that is on the drive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC -- This explains what you work with on the computer

The photo reminds me that the PCjr used an optical mouse with a metal mouse pad.

I still remember that small amount of time that I used a mouse with a metal mousepad (on a Macintosh). It seemed like those style of optical mice only lasted for a very brief amount of time and was a tad finicky. Still, I wonder how many folks never knew that mice using metal mousepads even existed.

Information about the shell access part of SDF is at their website ( https://sdf.org/ ). The Join page explains a bit more as well as how to upgrade your membership to a different level.

https://sdf.org/?join

Basically, you can register for a free shell account. You can opt to pay for lifetime ARPA access ($36 paid once) to get access to developer type programs. The MetaARPA level ($ 36 a year) gives you even more things.

Software that is accessible at certain membership levels can be shown after logging in to your terminal by typing in software and following the on screen directions. You can pipe the command over to grep to learn that git only shows up at the ARPA level. As far as I know, you need to be ARPA or higher to access git. Regardless, you need to be ARPA to access compilers like gcc so you may want to upgrade anyway.

Notably, I am at the ARPA level and I can run the git command without any issues.

What may help in the future is that you have access to the bboard command. There you can post help messages to the HELPDESK board which may receive a faster response.

http://sdf.org/?tutorials/bboard-tutorial -- This explains how to use bboard.

Reddit is the self proclaimed "front page of the internet" and some of the subreddits that are "firmly in control" by Reddit are the ones related to news and politics. Similar to how Youtube videos have mountains of comments for whatever reason, people tend to leave comments on news stories on various news sites and politics tends to encourage many people to add their voices to that vigorous discussion wherever it is being held.

People going to Reddit are likely people who want to comment on the latest news story or political tidbit and those people want other people in the comments to banter with and to read what they have to say. To that end, Reddit has not changed much since the blackout.

Reddit likely has an important core part of their site. I feel that core part is the news and political discussions. Reddit likely feels that it would be financially advantageous to advertise to that group and that they will "always come back" so long as those communities remain intact.

Long winded explanation but hopefully it clears a few things up...

There is a protocol that allows two or more things to talk to each other. That is called ActivityPub and things that speak that protocol can work together. The things in this case are the servers which you register your account with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub

You can have two different things (kbin and a Lemmy instance) and they can work together despite being different. They are differently written programs in different programming languages. The ActivityPub federation thing allows your Lemmy instance to ask to be sent all posts and comments from another server "just to have" as a local copy which you can then read on your server. If you comment, vote, or post on your server's "local copy" then your server sends that update back to the original server so they can update their records.

The content being downloaded from a remote server is like 1 person looking at everything over there. At that point, you and everyone else on your server can look at your local copy which is quick (if your server is not overloaded). The remote server can better handle lots of users from where you are at because your server is taking on the "user interaction load". This way, the user load is distributed to remote servers where the users do their interactions and the smaller "like 1 person" transactions are sent along when necessary.

The way things work on the Lemmy side is that you can see other communities by using the search function or by clicking on the communities button and clicking on all. You will see all communities that your server "knows about" (including communities hosted on this specific server). It automatically downloads all content from remote servers that it "knows about" (and it does so frequently) but that is driven by you first asking the server to get things from a specific server if necessary.

You can ask for things by searching for a specific address starting with a ! character. Wait a few moments and search again and you should be able to see that the content was retrieved for you. (You can search by a more granular term like the server address itself if necessary.) At that point, you can interact with that community in expected ways (like subscribing to that community to see updates from them).

The link you need is on the right side of any community page you view. Examples are technology@beehaw.org and kbinMeta@kbin.social

Once everything is set up and working, the server you log in to will automatically gather posts and comments from "the fediverse", show it on your screen, and send along any comments or votes you make back to "the fediverse" for others to see.

That all being said... kbin is a bit overloaded at the moment and is not quite sending updates to other servers. When they have that sorted, you should be able to interact with them. Refer to the following post from chaorace for more information.

https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/67263

When I was graduating from college, I realized that I would soon lose terminal access to their main server. I wanted a place to store my old programming bits and bobs that I could still SSH into. I found the SDF back then and it served that purpose well. At that point, I learned of bboard and I like to read that from time to time (although I have never posted to it).

(For those not in the know, bboard is described at https://sdf.org/?tutorials/bboard-tutorial )

SDF is notable to me because it a shell account plus more things. This elevates it past any computer I can just set up with any Linux distro. The "more things" is what keeps me checking back and what makes SDF special to me.