Oh, I see, proprietary hardware and CMOS protections then... Like the old days of pulling the board battery to disable or reset the CMOS, or needing to change jumpers on posts to make hardware work right.
Thank you for sharing, it will be something I have to factor in going forward with my Linux experience. Yep, I have tried all the major Distros and have finally just settled on Mint as the go to. But... They too are now starting to follow the MS example of changing versions and stuff that does NOT need changing too often and dumping old versions way too soon.
Right now 18.3 and 20.0 have been the best and most stable I have used and they have already eliminated availability of 18.3 and dropping support and availability for 20.0. The 19.x series was a disaster with drivers not working right and bugs because they changed things from 18.3 they should have just left alone.
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it... Just supply the minimal security updates and minimal Kernel support for any new hardware that comes out. That is it, don’t break nothing else, leave what already works alone as a permanent solid foundation. If AI doesn’t turn me off computing altogether I am considering building my own distribution and doing exactly that...
However, I would be incorporating AI tools. I've created a neat little Bash script, layered over Daniel Miessler's 'fabric' tool, that dynamically builds AI prompts based on traversing the directory structure appending context files it finds along the way. I've also created some AI 'prompt fragments' that provide other support for authors. It's pretty powerful stuff for serious authors.
I use Mint for laptops (with one legacy Kubuntu install - which I don't hate at all) - and Lubuntu for servers. Recently I obtained a 128G EVO X2 that I'm using mainly to run local LLMs under Lubuntu. Actually I've got that set up for dual boot, just in case it tickles my fancy to do something with WIN11.
Speaking of AI, I conducted an interesting AI experiment last night. One of Free Republic's great contributors from years past was the amazing 'Firehat', who sadly passed away some years ago. Firehat had a most distinctive "punch-in-the-gut" writing style. Last night I fed a number of Firehat's legacy postings into AI and asked it to create a commentary on today's government shutdown using Firehat's writing style. The results were just amazing. I'm in the process of tweaking that article now before sharing here on FR.