• 2 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 26th, 2023

help-circle
  • Two sets of my grandparents use Mint ever since, after two decades, I just couldn't be bothered to give Windows tech support anymore. It wasn't much of a "conversion" since they weren't really aware of it (and after about a year, when it came up in conversation, remarked something to the tune of "That's Linux then? That's nice."). And you know what, that's what a good operating system should be - invisible to the user. The general user doesn't care, they want to do stuff unrelated to the OS, they just happen to need an OS in order to do it.



  • Most important to me: Which of them is easier to self-host?

    I've been running a Mumble server for my friends for over a decade now and I'd like... something more without having to get too technical. Mumble is literally just a single apt-get and you're basically done, so that's about the level of technical expertise that I bring to the table. I've tentatively looked into other solutions over the years but I always feel my attention drifting when the setup-tutorial covers multiple pages and starts with manually configuring some database or certificate authority or whatever. Sorry, I didn't mean for this to get too ranty.




  • I'm a bit baffled that this hasn't popped up yet: Sell them on eBay.
    Mark them as broken goods/scrap and re-iterate that fact very clearly in the product description. Broken drives often sell for up to 1/3 of the value of a working one, no scamming needed.

    I cannot tell you why that is, but my theory is that a lot of folk buy up broken drives in private sales in the hopes that the "broken"-diagnosis is just user error and that the drive is actually fine. Knowing my users that might actually be true in many cases.

    Edit: I didn't quite catch that you were not able to successfully overwrite your data. I guess that's a point against selling it. Always encrypt your drives, that way you can always sell them when they break!


  • Unlimited* plans are always sold on the idea that a sizeable part of the user base aren’t going to use an actual unlimited amount of the resource.

    Unless there is a contract regarding a fee over a period of time, there isn’t that much that users can do to compel a service to offer a service they no longer want to offer.

    Absolutely! But I don't think that's the point of contention here. The problem is the "abuse" rhetoric, since it's not just incorrect but disingenuous to basically claim that the users did anything wrong here. They're imposing limits because they miscalculated how many heavy users they could handle.
    Again, that's a completely reasonable move, but framing it as anything but a miscalculation on their part is just a dick move.