For people who still need Windows:
I have a 10-year-old Surface Pro 4 and I was able to freely upgrade to Windows 11 and it works fine. It wasn’t technically supported but I enabled preview builds or something like that (I think I had to enable the Insider program) and it showed up as a Windows Update. I don’t know if this is applicable to all PCs that don’t support Win 11, but surely it’s applicable to some of them that Windows says don’t support Win 11.
This sounds nice but in practice will backfire. You need the systems to be universal, so that everyone, including the richest, have a stake in wanting to see them improved. Otherwise you’ll get a two tiered system where the public versions are trash because they’re underfunded and the private versions (what the rich use) are great but also expensive af.
You want things to work like insurance, where everyone pays in but only the people who need them use it. I want Musk to pay a fuckton into Social Security, not nothing at all because he doesn’t use it. Even now there’s a problem with Social Security in particular because, even though everyone has to pay it, it puts a cap/limit on how much you pay, so Musk currently ends up paying his share in the first day of the year, and his contribution amounts to the same as a teacher or something.
Universal programs with progressive taxation, that’s the way. Low taxes at the bottom, high taxes at the top.
I’m stealing that analogy, thank you very much.
I’d generalize it a bit to say, fascism is the immune system of any system built on bad principles that’s collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The obvious decay then creates a space psychos and grifters to pose as faux saviors and gain power by scamming people into something they pretend is a solution but is actually a death cult.
Ah, no worries. I’m just sharing for folks who might need Windows for one reason or another. It’s a one time thing to upgrade either way, not a hassle at all. They might own weird niche unrepairable devices like my SP4 which may not handle Linux well or who knows. For clean installs there’s that nifty place with serial keys and builds whose name I forget right now.
As for Linux, I’m kinda torn. I had my time tinkering with config files in the early 2000s in the days of Fedora Core 3 and KDE 3.x before all this Plasma stuff. The whole “year of the Linux desktop” that never came left me disillusioned, although I did enjoy the Compiz/Beryl days. It’s probably better now but I’m too comfortable nowadays. We’ll see if things get dire enough that I need to jump ship again, I hope not.