So you may have noticed that 2023 and 2024 have had quite a bit less content here on the blog than 2022 and 2021 did, and there's a reason for that.
Uh... I didn't wanna.
Anywho, that's all we're gonna say about that. In other news, my Pinebook Pro died a while back. I'm honestly not quite sure why. Sometime last year my internal OS got corrupted during an update and wouldn't load the GUI, but on a dev-oriented machine like the Pinebook that isn't a big deal. I just loaded a fresh copy of Manjaro onto a 64gig SD card and booted from that, copied my files off the internal storage, and went on my way. Then, a few months ago, I decided it was silly to keep using an SD card as my boot drive, so I followed the directions on the Pine wiki to re-image the internal storage. And the machine never booted back up after that. I've run through dozens of troubleshooting steps and like I said, never did figure out what the heck happened. But, as I said, it's hardly a big deal with a dev-oriented machine like the Pinebook, I was able to pull the SD card out and recover all my files using another machine. All I'm out is, uh... the actual laptop itself.
Huh. I guess that is a bit of a bigger deal.
The Story So Far
Not Quite Anarchy Just Yet
Listen, the Pinebook Pro was never my main machine. I used it for office and browsing tasks affiliated with my writing, and my Mac desktop for everything else. But I did do a decent amount of writing on the thing, like my Density TTRPG system and, oh, a few novels. All tallied up it saw something like 150 thousand words of mine, and the convenience of being able to take those lighter tasks away from my desk isn't something I'm exactly thrilled about losing. But replacing the Pinebook in my use-case is honestly as simple as finding any other laptop that can browse the internet and do basic office work.
But even beyond that, it turns out that the majority of my use-cases for a computer are surprisingly light. I was already poking around with using Musescore for composition on the Pinebook, and the design work I do in Affinity Designer is, generally, lacking the complexity that requires beefy computer hardware. In fact, my old 2011 MacBook Pro with a quad-core hyper-threaded Sandy Bridge CPU could probably do the lifting I need for the writing, composition, and design work. The issue there is that the OS is like 8 years out of date, which by now means I can't run even close to current versions of Musescore or Libreoffice, to say nothing of Affinity V2 which came out like 5 years after Apple sunset that machine.
But Windows 10, on the other hand, is a total champ for backwards compatibility. I mean, there isn't really much point to having an OS so bloated with legacy code if you're not going to enable it to power computers that were built before the OS was even a concept, so I guess good job on that Microsoft? Now explain Windows 11 to me, please.
Anyway, I was able to snag this old corporate Windows machine for 30 bucks. It's running a Haswell i7, which is to say a slightly better hyperthreaded quad-core than was in that old MacBook I thought probably had the juice I needed. It's an HP styled for corporate users and academia so reach-back support for drivers was pretty good. It didn't come with a drive, but given that it shipped with a hard drive I would have been replacing that anyway. So I chucked in an SSD, installed Windows 10, confirmed that the Windows 7 license key under the battery would not activate Windows 10 in 2024, which is a shame, and we were off to the races.
The Races
But Seriously Microsoft, Explain Windows 11
It's at this point you're probably wondering where I'm going with this story. Are we complaining about the Pinebook Pro, or praising this old HP? Are we whining about Linux? Or how Apple's OS backward compatibility sucks? Are we looking to recommend resurrecting old hardware for modern use-cases? Well, yes and yes and no and yes and yes. See, my experience here is a frame to a discussion on a larger topic surrounding sustainability in tech. I say discussion instead of rant despite the fact that I mostly have problems here and not a ton of good solutions to suggest, but I swear my main goal isn't just to rant. Despite what you're about to see for the majority of the remaining space here.
See, I have run up against a couple of walls during this period. The first was the lack of concrete resources for the Pinebook Pro itself, but I find it hard to feel terribly strongly about that. That laptop has always been more of a proof-of-concept than anything else, and the store page for it makes it pretty clear that what you are buying could be very buggy. Having it outright die for seemingly no reason isn't exactly uncommon, and honestly it's priced to account for that. Mine lasted me just over three years. So disappointed, yes, but mad? No. I'm not.
The second wall was software backward compatibility with older operating systems. Listen, this is an issue I bought into when I decided to use Macs, I've known that all along. But just because I knew it was a thing I'd have to deal with doesn't make it any easier to swallow that pill when a computer that still functions absolutely fine becomes essentially a brick for all my current uses simply because Apple decided they didn't want to bother supporting that hardware back in 2017. This isn't an issue I can't work around, however, because as always I'm a big believer in never becoming so entrenched in an ecosystem that you can't shop somewhere else.
And being able to bring back an old but still perfectly functional Windows machine with very little effort was refreshing! I was able to swap out the very dead battery that came with it, and upgrading to an SSD does a lot to make it feel like a relatively modern machine. The RAM is also easily exchangeable if needed, as is stuff like the Wifi card. I'm lacking modern ports like USB-C, but I do have a DVD drive. So take that. And with Windows 10 installed I was able to take this laptop and do just about everything I wanted to do on it. My office programs run absolutely fine of course, and current versions of Musescore with multiple downloaded instrument packs work decently well even on large scores. I even installed the Affinity suite and whipped up something to test my design workflows, and again it worked quite well for a ten-year-old computer! About my only complaint is that Musescore takes a while to load in instruments and I did have to keep merging shapes in Affinity Designer to avoid the math getting too complicated.
Of course, this still isn't my main computer. It can't handle the large layout files I work with occasionally and full-scale music production or video editing would bring it right to its knees. And it's heavy and the battery doesn't last very long. And despite having a discrete GPU it isn't exactly a gaming powerhouse, any integrated GPU from the past three or four years would probably roll it. Unless it's an Intel iGPU. In which case, uh... their new ones might do better? I don't know, I haven't seen them tested. It's kinda a sad time to be Intel, isn't it?
So it's not going to replace my desktop anytime soon, but as a portable, supplementary machine, this little dude is working just fine for me and I'm into it less than 80 bucks. So far, so many roses. But this process, while it has worked out quite well for me, laid bare a number of concerns that concern me even more concerningly as I concern my mind with them further.
Think Different
No, Wrong Different. Stop That.
First, there's the concern of why I had to spin up this Windows machine in the first place; that perfectly functional MacBook Pro that's been obsoleted by the company that makes the OS. I've brought that up a couple of times and it's at this point I'd like to address the people yelling that I can still use that hardware by installing Linux on it; ahem. We'll get to you in a minute. No, this bit right here is where I'd like to talk to the folks yelling that I can in fact install newer versions of MacOS on that hardware despite Apple's lockouts.
First off, that's illegal.
Okay, probably not technically illegal, but certainly against the terms and conditions you agree to under your license to use the machine. Not that I actually care about that, to be clear. What I do care about is the fact that I would, under that paradigm, probably have to spend a not insignificant amount of time actively fighting Apple's servers to do stuff like install updates and use basic system features like, oh I don't know, the webcam and wifi chipset. I'm not saying these things are insurmountable, I'm just saying that most of the time it makes no sense to surmount them.
Once you're down that road you've lost basically the entire advantage of it being a Mac at all, and you may as well just jump ship to a different OS on that same hardware. But if jumping to a different OS is an option, then it is again way easier to just jump to different hardware with more widely available drivers for Windows or Linux, which is of course what I opted for.
This is all down to whatever is the path of least resistance to getting a laptop rolled together that I could rely on, and while ease-of-use is usually a standout feature for Macs, once you get past the end of Apple's direct software support for a particular generation that tends to invert and bite you right in the face. I don't like that. It's bad for long-term sustainability of a system and forces people to upgrade when their needs otherwise wouldn't bear that out at all. Which is, of course, Apple's goal.
Trusted Platform
Module. Trusted Platform Module.
Should that have been in the main heading?
Second, there's the concern of how long this Windows machine is going to actually be a good solution for me given that Microsoft is going to stop supporting its OS next year. That's right, Windows 10 is on its deathbed already. Oh, I say already, but yes, Windows 10 is ironically coming up on ten years old. But as far as a corporate OS that's been a champion of the people... well, I'd still vote for Windows 7, but Windows 10 has been pretty good. Aside from trying to put ads in the Start menu and the utterly hilarious ongoing dichotomy between the Settings app and the Control Panel, Windows 10 does a great job of feeling like a fully-featured modern OS while still maintaining what has always been familiar to Windows users alongside a frankly astonishing commitment to hardware compatibility.
While it's certainly true that you won't get the full functionality out of all your dinosaur graphics cards and zip drives (why do you still have that thing?), Windows 10's default drivers do a frankly admirable job of taking whatever odd bundle of old crap you throw at it and initializing just enough of it to boot the OS and do basic things like word processing and web browsing. This allows old computers to get online and check email safely, with modern security patches and up-to-date malware protection, and the usefulness of that cannot be overstated.
I really admire Windows 10 in case that wasn't clear. Do I love it? Not really. But I admire it. I appreciate it, especially from the perspective of sustainability. And Microsoft is killing it in favor of an OS that adds very little functionality beyond whatever checks it needs to make sure you have a TPM in your machine to install. Mircosoft says they're requiring this to boost security, but given the general air of oligarchy we live under these days it would come as no surprise to me to discover that the executives that pushed this restriction didn't even know what the acronym stood for and they just wanted to give their hardware partners ammo to force upgrades.
And since Windows 10 is going to stop receiving security patches shortly after its discontinuation, that does sorta put a damper on my little sustainability hack I landed on with this laptop.
The Chosen One
We've Open Sourced This Savior Complex
It's been in alpha for fourteen years.
Third, there's the concern that the only viable option for long-term support of perfectly functional hardware like this continues to be Linux and Linux alone. Because yes Linux evangelists, I have been hearing you screaming at your screen. It's... temporally disconcerting. Sudo retroactiveFury, or something like that? Sorry, my command line grok is pretty weak. But again yes, I hear you. Linux could have resurrected that old Mac hardware. Linux can keep this Windows laptop I'm using going long past the deprecation of Windows 10. And for the most part you are absolutely right! I love the open source community. I do my very best to support and participate in that community, albeit from the position of a user, which means my contributions are relatively limited. But a lot of the software I use is either directly open source or was at one point, which means it all supports Linux.
There's just one, teeny tiny issue with that; Affinity. I use Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher on the regular, and there isn't a Linux build of those. And yes, I have tried Inkscape and Scribus, the associated open source alternatives. I go back and try them in earnest about every two or three years, in fact. So far they remain so utterly handicapped in both feature set and overall reliability as to render them basically useless to me, and thus for the foreseeable future I'll be sticking with Affinity. Where, as far as I'm aware, support for Linux isn't even on the roadmap, though I'll admit that could change given their recent acquisition by Canva and the associated influx of development cash.
But even if Serif announced Linux beta versions of the Affinity apps tomorrow, switching wholesale to Linux just for sustainability is a hard sell. And I promise I say this from a place of love, from a position of having just spent the past four years working with a Linux machine as my portable writing toolbox; Linux just... isn't quite there yet for general consumer computing. Don't get me wrong, in some specific use cases it absolutely is. I mean, just look at the Steam Deck. I know people who hadn't even ever used an Android phone because they thought that was too confusing who bought a Steam Deck and have been completely happy with it as a tool for playing single-player games from their Steam library on the go. As a handheld console they are completely happy with it, and that's awesome.
But if they were forced to use it as their general computing platform, they'd rebel. It's not that Linux isn't functional; it absolutely is. It's not that it isn't well supported; support is improving every year and it's stunning how many workarounds exist to enable unsupported stuff to work. It's not even that it isn't stable; stability issues general users experience on Linux tend to be caused by those very users, not the OS itself. But it's not easy. It's not approachable. There's just too much... friction, for lack of a better word, to the every-day in-and-out user experience for Linux to appeal to general consumers.
The Answer
...? (please?)
So, if Macs aren't sustainable because of Apple's rolling OS support schedule, and PCs aren't sustainable because Windows 11 is going to kill support for millions of PCs older than about 5-to-7-ish years, and Linux can't save all of them because it's just not polished for a general audience, what, exactly, am I saying here? What is the solution for long-term sustainability in our computing technology?
Ugh... I dunno, it depends? Like, maybe you're good with Linux as a long-term solution? Maybe you don't care enough about security to be bothered by Windows 10's end? Maybe you have a newer machine that'll run 11 already? Or maybe you never want to upgrade your software or change your use case in the future so your Mac sitting on the same OS until the heat-death of the universe doesn't bother you? Or heck, maybe you've tried out one of those modded Windows 11 installers that pulls the TPM check and lets you sign in without a Microsoft account and it actually works pretty well. Maybe I oughta try that out myself...
Look, I don't know what the answer here is. If you've got suggestions that aren't just "everyone's gotta make it up as they go I guess", stick 'em down in the comments. Because for my part, well... I'm still looking.
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