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Good thing the end of Windows support isn’t the end of the story for PC at least.

Tape is rated to a 30-year shelf life under ideal conditions.

Good luck when SSDs are less reliable when powered off than HDDs, and still pricier for huge capacities.

This was bound to happen, someone was going to attack the Nazi propaganda platform formerly known as Twitter at some point.

At least you can still use your older hardware, and at least Radeon cards as old as GCN1 are still actively supported outside of Windows.

Also, old games still exist and will continue to exist in some form into the foreseeable future, legitimately or not.

Like, if you’re not into multiplayer games, the Mesa drivers last time I thought still work well, great even, on Polaris and Vega cards as well as even legacy GCN on the Linux side of things, you can still use your RX 580 or 590 with full support going that route, for example.

You can always build a PC and not have to deal with that UEFI signing stuff as you’re expected to provide your own OS still, that option hasn’t been eliminated yet.

Also, AMD cards are more friendly to Linux users than Nvidia cards are, even with the existence of NVK for the latter; NVK only supports Turing and newer cards and Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta are too old for it, and since Nouveau is broken on Maxwell and newer by firmware signing, once those cards lose support in the proprietary drivers, unless NVK gets backported to them somehow, you’ll be SOL in the near future for 900-series, 10-series, and the Titan V, while Kepler and older is still supported by Nouveau, meanwhile over at AMD, Mesa actively supports Radeon cards going back to GCN1.

Basically, if you still have an R9 Fury or an RX 580 sitting around, for example, those cards will still be actively supported by Mesa open drivers for the foreseeable future, meanwhile your GTX 980Ti or 1080Ti, at least currently, are fully at the mercy of Nvidia’s closed drivers.

And so far LibreWolf and Icecat have both worked fine for me.

Wouldn’t that also block Firefox by proxy?

It’s going to get to the point where you might be better off going back to dot matrix if tank-based inkjet printers are somehow locked down via chemical DRM too.

In the US at least, the courts are seemingly bought out.

Icecat’s good too. In fact in some ways, eg. cutting Sync out entirely where LibreWolf disables it by default but lets you enable it if desired, it’s even better than LibreWolf.

LibreWolf, or if you can tolerate some breakage, PaleMoon or Basilisk (I say ‘if you can tolerate some breakage’ because Goanna is hard-forked from old ESR code, and PaleMoon and Basilisk are both Goanna-based).

Good thing LibreWolf and other forks exist, including hard forks like the Goanna browsers.

Plus RawTherapee and DarkTable are pretty good, and actually free, Lightroom alternatives to boot.

Good thing whenever I set up Windows, Notepad is one of the things I nuke, using Geany to replace it.

This is a bad sign if MS gets emboldened and starts paywalling basic OS functionality at some point in the future, though.

If this doesn’t help physical book sales, nothing will.

Because look who’s running it, that’s why. If Musk isn’t a full-blown Nazi, he’s at minimum a Nazi sympathizer, which is still really bad.

Canon’s recent paywalling behavior if other companies start copying them, would be a good argument for picking up film again if you don’t care about video capabilities and only need stills - due to film’s analog nature, it and the gear that uses it, is immune to paywalls/DRM, and you actually own hard copies of your shots to digitize at will to boot.

Also, don’t expect Kodachrome to ever be rebooted as its process, which was proprietary and thus died with that stock, was too complex to try and bring back in the present day (although some people have tried to reverse-engineer it to varying success before).

To add to this, the same advantages of being immune to paywalls/DRM and actually owning hard copies of your work that you can digitize at will also applies to, say, drawing using real materials vs. using a digital program - your paper and pencils/crayons/what-have-you will never be affected by paywalls/DRM as they’re analog in a sense as well, and you have a hard copy you can digitize at will.

This is just going to push people who aren’t locked into Windows, away from Windows, and Linux is making a pretty good argument for itself as a viable alternative atm, particularly for gaming.

Although another option would be to virtualize Windows on a Linux host too, that’s what I’m doing right now /w Win10 LTSC for general apps that aren’t entirely WINE-friendly, and then Win8.1 for some older games that aren’t entirely WINE-friendly, and the Win8.1 VM has my R9 270 being passed through to it over vfio-pci for graphics for that reason.

The Win10 VM is using VirtIO paravirtualized graphics because its intended use case doesn’t need anything more than basic acceleration as it was spun up mainly for running CUETools on for the things that app can’t do in Mono, eg. like transcoding FLAC images to Vorbis or Opus.

As for gaming beyond the few edge cases that don’t run well in WINE that are due to just being old code, I don’t play anything that has an anticheat so 99% of my gaming is easily doable in Proton.

It’s only on Linux though, for Windows, CUETools and CUERipper are some of the most powerful OSS tools for ripping CDs you can get.