Appreciate y'all. Hope it doesn't ever come anywhere close to that though.

Truly the end of an era... I think the RuneScape forums might have been the first forums I ever used

The new GTK one isn't bad, but it's also not half as pretty as this.

I just use the OpenVPN files on the Linux machine

Don't forget "I thought Republicans were the party of states rights? Why are they trying to ban abortion nationally after some states held elections to protect abortion in their state constitution?"

I had a buddy who was a Linux ARM laptop fanatic back in like 2014. Microsoft had been trying to make Windows on ARM a thing for years before that.

Apple was the first to popularize it but it's been a work in progress if you've been paying attention for a LOT longer. What helped Apple is all the work they did on their own ARM chips for iOS. They managed to get pretty close to x86 performance in an ARM chip. They also had an app store of apps that could run on them and an emulator for things that wouldn't.

Every time Microsoft tried nobody would release ARM builds... People just bought the x86 laptops. It's the same chicken and egg problem desktop Linux has had for years.

Apple didn't invent the ARM laptop

Yeah, I've run into this before as well. I had a post I made in the standard notes community about a sale get down voted...

I made another post asking what happened and that's how I found out it was down voted by a bunch of people that weren't even part of the community because "it looked like an ad on their feed."

I also had some user error on my part when I added the Zed RSS feed to Auto Post Bot without taking enough precautions to make sure it wasn't going to post ancient stuff... Got some pretty heavy down votes presumably because it took about a page and a half of the "all" feed. I cleaned things up within 15 minutes, but it was definitely like "man, can I just not deal with people that aren't even community members?"

Don't get me wrong their frustration was valid, I screwed up, but also... I just don't understand browsing all.

Consider TrueNAS Scale with mirrored drive pairs DIY.

Gamers don't understand software development and it shows

(You're absolutely right)

GAMURRR aesthetic either

Yeah, I've been happy that's been toned down more recently in general with gaming gear ... everything doesn't look like some ridiculous "if hasbro designed a computer peripheral/component/case/etc."

A lot of gaming stuff was just ugly and lacking any good design elements for a loonnngggg time.

Battery life always goes to crap almost exactly 2 years after purchase

Disposable battery technology is disposable. We don't have truly rechargable batteries yet ... and the EV batteries only last longer (AFAIK) because they've got better cooling systems and are higher grade -- read more expensive -- components.

Appliances use plastic parts and come with a plethora of unnecessary features all on one circuit board so when one feature breaks the appliance is dead

That's not the entire story there ... it's just cheaper to make it one board. You can eliminate some points of failure by using one board as well.

It's definitely ridiculous appliance companies aren't providing parts. I'd also like to point out ... I was specifically responding to the widespread e-waste from the mobile devices sector. Not "all things that could possible become e-waste in 2024." GUARANTEED planned obselence is what has been happening there for years with "2 years of device security updates" and that nonsense is ending.

There’s even a story going around about a business-class HP printer

Yeah, don't buy HP.

It’s gone long past planned obsolescence at this point. Whether it’s software or hardware, companies want you subscribed for life. Anything less and they break the devices that were able to dupe you into thinking you owned.

Subscriptions aren't necessarily the enemy when it comes to e-waste. They're bad for ownership, but they're not bad for planned obsolescence and e-waste. If your subscribers need your device to keep working to keep paying you, you've got a much stronger incentive to keep the device working vs just abandoning it.

This already happened with software, there really isn't "buy once then buy again and again and again" software anymore, the vast majority of software has gone subscription. This is also true of online games like CSGO, Hunt Showdown, Fortnite, etc.

It's just a matter of making things into subscriptions that are mutually beneficial. Your printer being an InkJet printer with a vendor locked in subscription that doesn't offer any real service is absurd and should be illegal. Your smart home camera having a subscription to store cloud video, provide new features and security updates ... that's a reasonable service that a lot of "normal" people don't want to do themselves (and incentivizes manufactures to keep their devices working so you keep paying).

A big part of the problem with e-waste is that companies setup fancy features to sell a product but didn't plan for how to support that product's software for the life of the product (because they're not making any more after the point of sale) ... so we end up with a very insecure piece of unserviceable e-waste.

Don't get me wrong we've still got a long way to go before we find a solution that handles the problem for all the various devices being manufactured these days. However, credit where it's due the mobile devices sector / "big tech" is doing better than they have for the last 15 years, and that's all I'm trying to contest. There IS change happening.