For my personal devices:

• Microsoft products from MS DOS 6.x or so through Windows Vista
• Ubuntu 6.06 through maybe 9.04 or so
• Arch Linux from 2009 through 2015
• MacOS from 2011 through current
• Arch Linux from 2022 through current

I’ve worked with work systems that used RedHat and Ubuntu back in the late 2000’s, plus decades of work computers with Windows. But I’m no longer in a technical career field so I haven’t kept on top of the latest and greatest.

Those small USB drives are too slow anyway, often limited to USB 2.0 interfaces or slow flash modules. I’ve switched over to an SSD specifically because of how slow booting and installation is from a standard 10-year-old USB stick.

every distro I’ve tried has a strong sense that if you’re using the GUI you don’t need or deserve admin controls

It’s more that GUI programs can’t be trusted with root privileges. They’re not designed for that, and can break things in unpredictable ways.

Apple, too. The 2012 MacBook Pro had a high DPI display, and everything scales normally even when dragging windows over to non-HiDPI external monitors.

That’s not even getting into the mobile OSes, which have to deal with nonstandard display sizes and resolutions all the time, across multiple settings for accessibility.

The meaning of words is consensus-based. If you want to make the point you’re making, you probably should avoid making up your own definition of “light truck.”

Also, I don’t think this is a lift package. I think this is literally the factory specs.

There are quite a few classifications of trucks. In the U.S.:

Class 1: 0 - 6000 lbs
Class 2: 6,001 - 10,000 lbs
Class 3: 10,001 - 14,000 lbs
Class 4: 14,001 - 16,000 lbs
Class 5: 16,001 - 19,500 lbs
Class 6: 19,501 - 26,000 lbs
Class 7: 26,001 - 33,000 lbs
Class 8: Over 33,000 lbs

Classes 1 through 2 are considered “light” truck, 3/ through 6 is “medium,” and 7 and 8 are “heavy.”

Classes 7 and 8 require a commercial driver’s license.

Generally, Class 3 starts to have 4 wheels on the back axle, and Class 6 generally starts having multiple axles on the back. At a certain point, you’re up to 18 wheels on a tractor and trailer.

OP’s picture is probably of a Class 2 truck, while you’re thinking of Class 1 trucks.

I agree.

I especially love that it addresses the biggest pitfall of the typical “fancy new format does things better than the one we’re already using” transition, in that it’s specifically engineered to make migration easier, by allowing a lossless conversion from the dominant format.

What does “maximize shareholder value” mean if not profits? You can dress it up how you like but that’s the way businesses treat it.

It doesn’t mean short term profits over long term profits, or dividends/buybacks over reinvestment, or anything like that.

The Delaware courts have repeatedly confirmed that majority shareholders, officers, and directors are allowed to do things like pay their employees bonuses, give corporate money to charity, demand less than the market-clearing, profit-maximizing prices, etc., even over minority shareholder objections that the corporation isn’t properly maximizing shareholder value.

eBay v. Newmark doesn’t change that. That was a fight about shareholder rights to buy or sell shares (or majority shareholder powers to prevent minority shareholders from acquiring or selling shares without the majority shareholders’ approval), which directly affects the value of the shares themselves (without getting into the question of the corporation’s obligation to grow that shareholder value in business operations). It’s one step removed from what we’re talking about, about the directors’ power to control shares, rather than the directors’ power to control the company.

That’s not a requirement of publicly traded companies. Any corporation has the same obligation to put shareholder interests first, whether it’s closely held (like Valve) or publicly traded but still under the founder’s control (like Facebook) or publicly traded with no one owner that exercises significant control (like IBM). The court case that established that corporations have a duty to shareholders above everyone else (Dodge v. Ford Motor Company) involved a closely held corporation (not public) and also confirmed that the corporation’s management can exercise its own judgment and discretion in prioritizing long term over short term gains, or vice versa.

My ping to the server is usually less than 10ms on wifi, and sometimes less than 5ms on a wired connection, so I’ve found that most games work fine. After all, that’s lower latency than some displays.

But why would I even try to remember them? Just look them up.

For me, I used labels when setting up those volumes manually. Creating a LUKS container, setting up LVM groups and volumes, configuring my bootloader to decrypt the correct encrypted disk, etc. It was just easier to remember which device label was my encrypted container, which was the group, and what the different volumes were. And once the labels were made, well, I just used them.

You can give your partitions labels and mount by label. Labels are persistent, like UUIDs, but are also easier to remember and copy.

In the early 2010’s, daily driving Arch on a laptop was a bit of a pain. And maybe I just didn’t have the skillsets to be able to understand how I needed to maintain the system. My Arch install broke when they switched from Sysvinit to systemd. My system broke again when pacman started enforcing package signing. I also had some issues with a buggy wifi driver that would break almost every time I updated the kernel, so I started to hold back on regular updates, at which point I probably should’ve switched to a distro with a 6-month release cycle.

Desktop linux was my daily driver from about 2006 to 2016, then I was dual booting from 2019 to 2021 or so before it became my daily driver again. Choosing Linux-friendly laptop hardware is a compromise.

From 2006-2009, I had a few issues with a shitty wifi driver. Then I bought a “built for Linux” laptop that worked well enough for my purposes, but still had a few minor limitations: shittier battery life, no Bluetooth, and a video card that NVIDIA eventually dropped support for. Even when using the proprietary driver, I couldn’t use Wayland or KMS. During that era, it took a while for font rendering to look as good as Windows, and it never quite caught up with font rendering on Macs.

Then I bought another laptop and had to deal with trying to get the user experience with High DPI screens not to suck (it’s OK now, but took a while to get here). I don’t have a Wifi 6E access point yet but I’ve seen from the forums that it’s sometimes buggy with the 6E channels.

Basically, Linux support for laptop hardware and experience seems to lag behind, and actively selecting for best Linux compatibility is also a seriously limiting filter when buying hardware.