If you don’t have to deal with kids it’s hard to explain how dominant Fortnite is. The problem with Fortnite here is that it’s essentially crack for kids, and when I hear people saying “they should make Fortnite work in Linux” I hear “drug dealers should sell their goods in nice places”. It’s not in the pusher’s interest to make their pay-per-hit product usable in any way that empowers the addict.

As I said to the other almost identical comment you made defending them and criticising everyone for not being as wise as you: you can’t buy Netflix for 107.88. That’s just not an price they sell anything. But you can buy a whole selection of products from these dicks for .88 prices, which is a fixed price they specifically picked. Not a coincidence, a deliberate and conscious decision. As you rightly said, most businesses would have picked a .99 price or even a whole dollar amount. These people picked .88. What kind of person picks .88?

Netflix do not sell a product that costs $107.88. There is no option to spend that amount on their website. No sniggering 4Chan gremlin set the price of Netflix to a number that is used as a call sign of Nazis.

These cunts have a whole menu of products that all have fixed prices that they specifically decided should end in 88. They could have rounded up or down to the nearest dollar, or use the same .99 price as everyone else, but they didn’t and, the more I read of these people, the less I’m thinking it’s accidental. And you’re defending them.

You want to criticise other people for their maths skills, maybe brush up on your reasoning skills first.

Uuuuhhhh… those prices… kinda have a, um, theme.

I see the issue compounding too. Back in February, 1Password raised subscription prices, taking effect at renewals from March 27. Individual plans went up 33 percent from $35.88 to $47.88 a year, and family plans went up 20 percent from $59.88 to $71.88

I got out of it about three years ago. I’m pretty proud of what I got done but I cannot say I miss it.

Kids of a certain age would often be issued a device for their exclusive use - that’s not all that uncommon - but requiring them to lug it home is a bit much, especially if they have a useful computer at home already.

I also hate Chromebooks. I’m not against the idea of a super simple boot-to-browser type device per se, but the artificially limited lifespan of the devices is ridiculous and ChromeOS is a pain in the ass to manage compared to other OSs. In the end, we actually found we were better off running Windows or MacOS and applying policies that limited use to a very specific set of applications. Also, we found that running Windows with only Credge available was usually snappier; you know ChromeOS is utter dogshit when it get outperformed by Windows+Edge on the same hardware, and it comes with the added benefit of being able to lift the policy at a moment’s notice, returning the device to a full OS.

With regards to the VPN and filtering thing, it sounds like they’ve done half a job. Depending on when you are, the school is likely ultimately responsible for what happens on a school-issued device, and that usually does mean having an always-on VPN that routes all traffic via the school’s web filtering/logging appliance of choice. I used Headscale for our VPN and had a couple of VPSs running FortiOS for that purpose. I get that you want to apply your own filtering, but the school probably just doesn’t have the time or staff to deal with supporting complicated home networks. That said, is absolutely sounds like they’re failing in their duty of care if they’re allowing unrestricted all-hours access: the default policy I set was a very restricted set of teacher-picked sites when they were out of school unless the parent/guardian specifically signed a waiver saying they’d take responsibility: even then, we still had to apply some filtering and logging and we offered to limit the number of hours per day.

Don’t get me started on those fucking apps.

I posted a rant above, but 100% this. You can put users into a particular group in your directory and then they’ll get their required screen reader, high contrast theme, large text, visual queues, native language, etc, on every Windows, Android, MacOS, ChromeOS or iOS device they use out of the box, no further tools needed. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora? Not so much.

Fuck it, rant time.

I was IT lead at an education trust (kinda like a school district but bigger) covering K-21 for a long time, managing a few thousand endpoints for a few thousand students. Laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones, digital signage and embedded; devices belonging to schools, partner organisations, staff BYOD and student remote learning; structured IT suites in school campuses, stateless networks for anything portable, antique appliances that simply must work but also be accessible to particular people from anywhere; it goes on and it never ends.

No-one has time for that.

From a few central interfaces, I could deploy an application to every device. And, I could make sure that a particular website was accessible to every student from their fifteenth birthday, not a day before. And, I could make sure that any device a Ukrainian refugee logs into speaks Ukrainian. And, I could remove any bloatware. And, I could make sure that when a brand new laptop is drop-shipped to a teacher’s home address directly from the distributor it will automatically configure itself with everything they need the second they connect it to their home Wifi without me even having to touch it. And, I could apply a photo-of-the-month to every device, even overlaying it with the appropriate school’s logo. And I could disable (or force enable) any unwanted hardware or software features on any device. And I could make sure that every student’s web traffic was appropriately filtered and, if nessecary, scrutinised.

And I could prove that all of it was working: I could prove it to staff, to parents, to governors and, when it came to it, I could prove it to the police and to lawyers. “When”, not “if”.

Forget schools for a second, look instead at big corporations. They are ruthlessly profit focused, but they all run Windows, Office, SharePoint, 365, etc because even though it costs money, it’s cheaper overall and comes with a lot of protection, both technical and legal. Schools get that stuff basically for free, and it just works. Linux isn’t there yet, not by a long shot, and no education authority worth their salt is going to take the risk of being the first to experiment with their student’s wellbeing, let alone curriculum, for effectively - in their eyes - zero benefit.

To be blunt: when one of the children you are responsible for safeguarding is the victim of an attempted kidnapping that was only possible because of lax data security, no-one is going to have any tolerance for your personal philosophy about software licensing or your home-spun scripts. Ask me how I know.

Also, if your schools are letting advertisers/social media/whatever inspect student’s data, that’s nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with mismanagement: forcing them to manage yet another OS isn’t going to fix that.

TLDR: If you want to make Linux replace Windows in schools, you first need to figure out how to make Linux replace Windows in hospitals, call centres and Fortune 500 corporations.

MOS 6502 support when?

I kind of love how Mac OS X hasn’t been called that for over a decade and hasn’t been supported by Apple at all since 2018 but people still hang on to it over the childish jellybean-looking squeaky toy that is macOS.

Not a direct answer to your question, but assuming you have a switch that supports VLANs you don’t need a second ethernet port at all.

You’ll have to take my word for it, but I am pantslessly dancing in victory.

I read “I R Madlad” in the style of “I R Baboon”.

+1 for Ventoy. For anyone who hasn’t heard of it, the Ventoy utility sets up a USB key with a small bootable partition, then fills the rest with an exFAT partition where you can drop your ISOs. Booting from the stick just gives you a list of bootable images to choose from.

Eyyyy there are dozens of us! I used to manage IT for a school trust - about 2000 endpoints - and I actually pushed it out to every single one of them. They’re more pleasing to my eye, they scale perfectly and are easier to track. I got compliments from art teachers and SEND workers which is about as high a praise as you can imagine.

Generally build quality and repairability. Any IT department will favour devices that can have common failure points (battery, SSD, screen) replaced with a single screwdriver, and with that comes the need for stronger chassis and modular designs because you can’t rely on glueing everything in. Also, with the exception of Apple fanbois, IT techs are quick to condemn manufacturers who let pro grade kit standards slip, which could mean a few years of lost sales.

I’m on a variable rate electricity tariff and I use Home Assistant and iLO to power things on and off automatically, so most of the time it pulls 30-50W. At peak it pulls north of 1.5KW but that’s really rare.

Makes mine look boring.

Well a miscarriage is basically an abortion and an abortion is basically a murder.

/s, to be clear, but some people will say that sincerely and in some parts of the world they get to write the law.

Just stare unblinking at a clock. When it suddenly jumps forwards several hours subtract the difference. Easy.

Doesn’t work when crossing time zones or during daylight savings transitions.

The thing I find particularly annoying about W is that they could have just forked BlueSky and set up the first serious AtProtocol federation.