I am a network engineer and have used Linux as my primary desktop os since 2000 or so. With the bona fides out of the way, I picked up an Acer Chromebook Plus from Costco for $250 and I think it’s a great deal for the money (it’s currently on sale for $200). It has 8 gb memory, 512 gb storage, 8 cores, etc. Most important, it has a native linux environment that lets me install Linux apps, including GUI apps in case you prefer other browsers like Librewolf over Chrome.

Is it the best laptop on the planet? No. Is it the best laptop you can buy new for $200? Probably.

I got my license in the early 80’s, and at that time the cheapest cars were older american beaters with utterly terrible 2 and 3-speed slushbox automatics. The alternative were Japanese cars like Honda Civics, small, reliable, manual transmission cars that got great gas mileage and were way more fun to drive. All these years later I’m still driving a manual, currently a 2021 Toyota Corolla. It’s paid for, it gets around 35 mpg, and with regular maintenance it will run until the end of time.

I know American cars have improved a lot since the malaise era but you generally can’t get them with manual transmissions, so I’ll stick with the imports for now.

We’ve had the youtube premium family bundle for several years, mostly for android auto in our cars. I switched to Firefox around that time as well but found it didn’t work as well for youtube. So I compromised by using Chrome for youtube and Firefox for everything else. I will continue this way for the time being, but honestly getting rid of Chrome completely would not be a big deal at this point.

I used Boost for years on Reddit and switched to that as soon as the Lemmy version was released. It’s stable and works well.

I like Acer 27" 1080p monitors in this price range. I got two for my wife’s work from home setup a couple of years ago, no issues.

I bought an HP m281 mfp printer 3-4 years ago and disabled automatic firmware updates when I was setting it up. Not too long after that I read that a new firmware release prevented 3rd party cartridges from working.

Anyway I bought new ink cartridges a couple of years ago after getting pop-ups saying the ink was getting low. Thing is, I haven’t had to install them yet because despite the warnings the printer has been printing just fine with the original cartridges.

So in addition to blocking 3rd party cartridges HP is also lying about how much ink their cartridges contain.

F.U. HP.

Thoughts and prayers… ;-)