Completely agree.

The only reason the relative had it at all was because of those old fears. As soon as I learned that they had it bundled with the computer (hate that. Malware’s gotta get in somewhere though I guess), I knew why it was being slow.

I hold this up as an example because even their own troubleshooting website and a program dedicated to the purpose above and beyond the usual uninstaller couldn’t do it though. Avast doesn’t even know its own malware.

Also this nonsense got me the chance to put mint on their computer, but the “switch to Linux” argument isn’t constructive in this particular spot. They didn’t end up sticking to it because a required-for-school piece of software for tests just doesn’t do Linux at all. Couldn’t get it to run in wine or even a virtual machine either, and they’re not great at the whole computer thing so I didn’t wanna be tech support for dual booting.

Here’s an example. I removed avast via the uninstaller on a relatives computer, it made it laggy as hell. I restart after as the uninstaller demands, but it was still there.

Searching, I find this official support option. https://support.avast.com/en-us/article/10

The official Avast Uninstall Tool, the tool to use when the included uninstaller didn’t work.

The official uninstall tool didn’t work either. I ran it in safe mode, like it said. Didn’t work, either, but it removed some stuff, and finally let me delete some things manually. Ran it again in safe mode after that, finally seems to have removed everything.

Anyway it’s a great example of if a company doesn’t know what they’re about, windows has no process to recover from that. Window’s process is identical to a Walmart employee saying. “I dunno, man, contact the manufacturer.” Genuinely, its usually enough, but when its not, there’s absolutely no recourse.

Well they still have a finite life and are less replaceable than a battery. Even if it quadrupled the lifespan (which is a reasonably generous estimate given OP’s 4-year duration and wikipedia telling me supercapacitors last 10-15 years), it would still eventually need to be replaced and that would generally require resoldering it.

I think a much better solution is 2 battery slots, one to be a backup battery, unused, and then when needed, an LED on the mobo can be turned on. Honestly OP could jury-rig up a similar system if he wanted to, although it’d be a bit ugly and anytime something is jury-rigged I don’t really think of it as reliable.

The only real solution is to make this an extended maintenance task. The batteries are cheap so an alert every 4 years is likely sufficient to replace the battery before it dies. You could do it every 2 or 3 years instead at your discretion.

The right app could make it into a security camera or a WiFi remote. A quick search suggests you could jailbreak it, although I’m not up to date on what that would offer you.

I’m not sure what prevented Delta from working, since it says it supports iOS 14 or later on an iPod touch. Maybe a factory restore or similar would let you take that route anyway?

A company with a public offering basically cannot refuse a large enough buyout because with a public offering comes a financial responsibility to the shareholders. Public stock is a contract saying give me money and I’ll do my best to make you money back, and it’s very legally binding.

You can avoid this by never going public, but that also means you basically don’t get big investors for expanding what you can offer. A public offering involves losing some of your rights as owner for cash.

When the legal goal becomes “money above all else”, it is hard to justify NOT selling all the data and violating the trust of your customers for money, customer loyalty has to be monetizable and also worth more.

Proton has given a majority share to a nonprofit with a legal requirement to uphold the current values, not make money. This means that the remaining ownership can be sold to whoever, the only way anything gets done is if this foundation agrees. It prevents everything associated with a legal financial responsibility to make money, but still allows the business to do business things and make money, which seems to be proton’s founder’s belief, that the software should be sold to be sustainable.

Seems solid.

It doesn’t change a ton, but the point was basically them putting their money where their mouth is and saying “now we can’t sell out like everything else.”

If you liked them before, this is great. It means google or whoever literally can’t buy them out, it’s not about the money. If you were iffy already because they’re not FOSS or whatever other reason, this doesn’t change that, either, for better or worse

Well if i double-click a file I’ve made executable, it will ask if I’d like to run it, and most software will have a github or downloads page that will give you direct downloads to the software.

In other words, I can successfully install things like a windows user, I just have to go the extra step to open the file’s properties and make it executable with the GUI first.

Apt is faster, and it’s also faster to do a direct download, make it executable, then execute it in the terminal, too. But I CAN do it.

Config files can be edited in the GUI text editor, it’s just slower.

To test my claim and prove your third point, this link is the repository for a samba GUI, found at https://www.samba.org/samba/GUI/. Specifically, it’s SMB4K, the first one.

Convenient? No. Would it update automatically? No. Do I want to do it this way, or recommend it? Still no. But it does function.