Eli5: Call company that installs solar panels. Give them a bunch of money (thousands to tens of thousands depending). Wait 20 years to get that money back on the lower energy bill. Replace the whole system because it is obsolete. Rince repeat.

For real totally disconnecting from the power grid is a bad idea. That means you need a lot more equipment and battery storage. This increases the investment significantly, without much upside. It also prevents you from selling the power you generate but don’t need back to the power company (but depending on where you live this might not be a thing due to overproduction).

Also depending on you latitude and local climate it may be nearly impossible to go fully off grid without a huge system. Where I live we have about 6 weeks of very little to no sun (low sun combined with a lot of clouds and snow). That means all the power you need during that time needs to be collected previously and stored. This during a time it’s cold af so the power usage is high (using heat pumps for warming the house, which is very efficient). This means a lot of batteries and a lot of solar panels, just to get through these 6 weeks. It could easily triple the costs or more, even if you have the room for it to begin with.

I would analyse the power usage and see where you can save money on. 300 per month seems very high. Where I live energy is much more expensive than in the US and my bill is closer to 100 per month.

Just call a company, have some panels installed for say 2500-5000 bucks depending on how much room you have on the roof and if you need upgrades to your power system. This will save you at least 50 per month on the bill. But be aware the ROI will be on the order of 10-15 years at least and more if you are unlucky. Saving energy is free and means money in your pocket right away.

It has Blast Processing!

Windows 11 has changed this, many many people now warn other people about not using Windows 11 because it is such shit. Doesn’t matter what you run, just don’t run Windows 11.

Just because it works, doesn’t mean it’s right.

I think Crowdstrike has many many customers who use their Linux solutions, so you would have to ask them.

They provide corporate products, I don’t think corporations have anything even close to a conscience.

Yeah, I mean Microsoft can release something like Windows 11 and still be in business, so I don’t expect a lot will change. But if you had any stocks in Crowdstrike, RIP.

They are suffering from fallout because of media outlets like the one linked in this post that point the finger at Microsoft and Windows, but I feel this isn’t really fair.

If the kernel module Crowdstrike uses for Linux systems had failed everybody would rightfully point the finger at them for screwing up. But it probably wouldn’t be news since their Linux solutions aren’t as widespread as their Windows solutions are.

If a Windows update would have caused this kind of thing, pointing the finger at Microsoft is justified. But Microsoft has many policies in place that prevent this kind of thing from happening. Their ring based rollout for Windows Updates pretty much exclude this kind of thing from happening.

100% agreed, Crowdstrike fucked up with this one. I’m very interested to hear what went wrong. I assume they test their device drivers before deploying them to millions of customers, so something must have gone wrong between testing and deployment.

Something like this simply cannot happen and this will cost them customers. Your reputation is everything in the security business, you trust you security provider to protect your systems. If the trust is gone, they are gone.

Agreed, but again these updates were done by the Crowdstrike software. Nothing to do with Microsoft or Windows.

In this case it was an update to the security component which is specifically designed to protect against exploits on the endpoint. You’d want your security system to be up to date to protect as much as possible against new exploits. So updating this every day is a normal thing. In a corporate environment you do not want you end users to be able to block or postpone security updates.

With Microsoft updates they get rolled out to different so called rings, which get bigger and bigger with each ring. This means every update is already in use by a smaller population, which reduces the chances of an update destroying the world like this greatly.

More likely people switch from Crowdstrike to another security/audit software provider. And not to put too fine a point on it, but Microsoft will probably sweep up a lot of fleeing Crowdstrike customers with their Sentinel products.

While you are right, this outage has basically nothing to do with Windows or Microsoft. It’s a Crowdstrike issue.

I started with Suse 5 when it came out, as something I was interested in fucking about with. I didn’t have internet access at that time, but I did had a couple of books about it (the distro came with a book as well). It was a couple of CDs and a boot floppy disk (booting from CD wasn’t really a thing).

I used it for years for software development and simple tasks like Word processing. Getting my printer working on the thing was a chore, as was basically anything. Especially without internet solving issues was sometimes simply impossible. My scanner simply didn’t work. Getting the desktop environment to run was very hard, I struggled with it for a long time. And once I got it working properly, I got a new videocard and it broke the whole thing again.

The system was very painful to use, it was super cool, but almost nothing ever worked right. And trying to fix shit usually made it worse. But once you did get it working right, it was simply awesome. And the feeling of accomplishment was awesome after finally getting something right. For software development on the terminal it was pretty awesome though. Back then I did almost everything in text mode, as I was used to DOS before that. Going into Windows was something you did only sometimes with Windows 3.11 (and even 95) and I did the same in my Linux environment. The desktop environment used up a lot of memory and was pretty slow, so I preferred the console. It was only later booting into the desktop became the norm (around the Windows 98 era).

I used Suse till version 6.1 (still have that box). I bought version 7 (still have that box as well), but never really used it.

Back then I used Debian to create small internet routers for my friends. I got an old compact computer, put in a floppy with Debian, a couple of network cards and created small NAT boxes like that. This was before NAT routers were the norm, people just had internet on 1 machine, connected directly. But as computers became cheaper, a lot of folk had more than 1 computer in the home. With no real way to share the internet connection between the different computers. Microsoft created the Internet Connection Sharing feature, but that was pretty slow, disconnected often and ate resources on your “main” PC. So my little boxes worked great, I helped people setup a home network, connected my magic box to get every system online. Also helped them setup some port forwarding for the stuff they used.

Because I used Debian a lot, I switched over to Debian for my main rig when Suse 7 released. Used Potato, Woody, Sarge and Etch a lot. Switched around between Debian and Ubuntu in the Lenny and Squeeze era. Have been using Ubuntu ever since, never really had a reason to switch. Debian compared to Suse was so nice, I really liked the way Debian did things. It made a lot more sense for me in my head compared to Suse.

As I fucked around with computers a lot, I always had both Linux and DOS/Windows machines running and even had a couple of dual boot systems. For any kind of gaming DOS/Windows was required back then and I did love to game. I do think Windows 10 will be my last Microsoft OS, since Windows 11 absolutely sucks (use it at work, I hate it). Work stuff has become less and less of an issue to get stuff done on Linux just as well as on Windows. And gaming has come leaps and bounds due to the work on the Steamdeck.

So hope to fully ditch Microsoft in the near future, even though my first ever computer in 1984 ran Microsoft firmware with Microsoft Basic being the default user interface.