New Cheap PC for Windows 11 or supporting Discourse discussion {Also obsoleting Browsers & OP systems}

[DocCathode]

@puzzlegal

I have to disagree. I have a lot of stuff set up on my primary computer. Every time i get a new computer, there’s a “moving in” cost, which is substantial. (Although oddly, it’s not as bad as buying a new phone, which i need to do a lot more often.)

For me, what I described was the worst part. Transferring files via thumb drive took the most time. But, that was easy. Every program I use or could conceivably want to use in the future, every file I routinely look at or could conceivably want to look at in the future is on this laptop (the new one) now. I used the Firefox ‘save bookmarks’ feature to move all my bookmarks. There are only two things I could do on my old laptop that I cannot do on this one-

Use the touchpad. Touchpads don’t come with buttons anymore. I can mover the cursor around. I have some trouble single clicking. I have a lot of trouble double clicking. Highlighting things, or dragging things is impossible. My SIl gave me a really sweet mouse. It lights up.

Play and burn CD’s and DVD’s. Laptops no longer come with built in drives for that. I am looking into just where to buy a DVD Blu Ray read/write external drive.

@Babale

Really? The last three of four times I’ve gotten a new phone (which is probably 10 years) all I’ve had to do is plug them together with a 2 small ended USB cord and run an app that the phone comes preloaded with. And then my new phone is identical to my old phone.

I upgraded from an iPhone to a newer iPhone. It instructed me to hold the old phone over the new phone after pressing a few buttons. All my contacts and such were instantly copied.

[Babale]

NVM… Complete sentence

[BigT]

@Shalmanese

@wolfpup

In my view this an absolutely asinine move by Discourse which is very disruptive to users on older platforms and brings very minimal benefits (like, none at all that I can see). ⁢

Non-Windows 10 & 11 have a collective market share of less than 3% of just desktop windows and desktop windows likely is less than 50% of all access to this board. What’s more damning is that the market share of non-Win 10 & 11 appears to be very stable over time which means Discourse doesn’t gain much by dragging this out another year or two because it won’t substantially decrease the number of people it affects. They might as well rip the bandaid off now.

What you’re not seeing is the collective drag on software development speed from supporting a wider range of platforms. Every software development team constantly has to balance the tradeoff between supporting more users vs building more features. The costs are real, even if they’re invisible to the consumer. ⁢

This sort of thing would be a lot more convincing if, you know, it wasn’t just Discourse. Best practices for handling obsolescence are already in practice all over the web. Discourse’s attitude of either “full support or HTML only uselessness” has NEVER been the standard. HTML and JavaScript were designed around graceful fallback.

It’s not some inevitability that they have to deal with. If it were, you’d constantly be running into websites saying “sorry, we can’t work on your browser.” It’s a choice. They don’t have to constantly rewrite everything to use the latest and greatest.

It seems unlikely every other website is weighing the technical debt wrong. Ripping off the bandaid seems a horrible strategy in general (as users resist forced obsolescence), and especially so in this case, as message board users skew older and thus are more likely to use older hardware.

I get some hints of choice supportive bias when people defend Discourse for things that other websites and webapps don’t do.

[puzzlegal]

It’s not just Discourse. My husband is a web developer, and a lot of his work is updating old sites that use old code. And it’s not about selling new products. The system he works in (drupal) is open source and free to use. It’s about security and resiliency. Old software is full of security holes that modern malware targets, and also, doesn’t always play nicely with new operating systems that expect more from it.

Discourse is large and complex, and my guess is it’s easier and safer for them to impose minimum standards on the browsers than to not do so.

[BigT]

nm, obsoleted by the move

[BigT]

@puzzlegal

It’s not just Discourse. My husband is a web developer, and a lot of his work is updating old sites that use old code. And it’s not about selling new products. The system he works in (drupal) is open source and free to use. It’s about security and resiliency. Old software is full of security holes that modern malware targets, and also, doesn’t always play nicely with new operating systems that expect more from it.

Discourse is large and complex, and my guess is it’s easier and safer for them to impose minimum standards on the browsers than to not do so. ⁢

But, as I said, Discourse does it way, way more than anyone else, with very little fallback. The main issue is that people find that all the other web apps and sites they want to use work just fine, but Discourse doesn’t. They feel the need to be so close to edge, when they are a type of site that is more likely to want to be used by people with older hardware.

If other sites and apps can manage, so could Discourse. In my opinion, they are just overcompensating for what happened with some older forum software, where it became too obsolete. They just have swung the pendulum too far the other direction.

[What_Exit]

@BigT

If other sites and apps can manage, so could Discourse. In my opinion, they are just overcompensating for what happened with some older forum software, where it became too obsolete. They just have swung the pendulum too far the other direction.

This sums it up pretty well I think. Think about how far back even the updated versions of Vbulletin got, never mind the one we were on. About as porous as a cheese grater.

[Babale]

@BigT

But, as I said, Discourse does it way, way more than anyone else, with very little fallback. The main issue is that people find that all the other web apps and sites they want to use work just fine, but Discourse doesn’t. They feel the need to be so close to edge, when they are a type of site that is more likely to want to be used by people with older hardware.

Dude, the incompatibility we are talking about is Windows 7.

It is not unreasonable to no longer make your software compatible with such old items.

[Mangetout]

After a product has passed EOL, any lament about lack of support is superfluous.

[What_Exit]

@Babale

Dude, the incompatibility we are talking about is Windows 7.

Just so we’re on the same page here:
Microsoft ended support for Windows 7 on January 14, 2020.
I believe extended support gave it one more year. So over 4 years past support.

[SunUp]

@BigT

If other sites and apps can manage, so could Discourse.

That depends a lot on the resources available to the Discourse developers, vis a vis those available to those other sites and apps. Google web apps can support things way back because they can throw large numbers of engineers at the problem, and the overall market is large enough to make those efforts worthwhile. I don’t think Discourse has the same economies of scale.

[Atamasama]

@Mangetout

After a product has passed EOL, any lament about lack of support is superfluous.

Agreed. I thought of an analogy today… It’s like having a carton of expired milk in the fridge, and you keep sipping from it and it keeps making you sick. You go into the doctor’s office and ask them what medicine you can take to deal with it. The doctor says, stop drinking expired milk, it’s dangerous and can really make you sick. And you complain that the milk was just fine when you got it, and you don’t want to go buy a new carton because this milk has been great before, and you hate being forced to buy a new carton of milk.

[wolfpup]

@Babale

Dude, the incompatibility we are talking about is Windows 7.

The thing that I’m particularly enjoying right now about the Supermium browser is that it’s living proof that there is no inherent reason that Windows 7 could not still have fully supported browsers, and that the necessary support could be provided by one single individual who AFAICT is doing this in his spare time, since he’s not getting any income from it. But billion-dollar corporations just can’t see their way clear to justifying even this very minimal level of legacy support that’s basically hardly even a rounding error on their balance sheets. See the screenshot that I gleefully posted on the “Site Feeback” thread – Supermium, running on Windows 7, supports all the features that Discourse was demanding.

There’s also two very different definitions of “support” that are often conflated. One definition means that “we’re responsible for ensuring that your software continues to work, and if it doesn’t, we’ll fix it”. But there’s a much looser definition that means “we’ll make an effort to provide backward compatibility, but there are no guarantees and if you choose that path, you’re on your own”. I’m fine with that. What I’m not fine with is the edict that “as of {this date} your computer is now a doorstop – the fact that you have to take it to the dump, buy a new computer, and agonize over many months of application migration problems is your problem, not ours”.

Of course I may end up eating my words if this all falls apart, but right now I’m pretty optimistic.

[Atamasama]

I’ve been an IT professional since 1999. Back then, Windows 98 Second Edition was the latest and greatest OS. People still were using Windows 95. Windows 3.11, which had been released 6 years earlier, was already something nobody used anymore. Seriously, my job then was working in a computer store and I was dealing with the general public day in and day out, helping fix computer issues (software and hardware), upgrading machines, selling people components and software and even whole systems. So I knew what was actually in use, I saw it. Nobody had Windows 3.11 anymore.

Windows 7 was released 16 years ago. Back in '99, a 6-year-old version of Windows was no longer in use. And yet, people are wanting to use a 16-year-old OS and are complaining that these days, things get obsolete so fast… No, that’s not true. There is more support for legacy software today than there used to be.

The pace of technology and obsolescence hasn’t changed. Computers aren’t becoming obsolete any faster than they did decades ago. The only thing that changed is you. The passage of time doesn’t mean the same to you as it used to. Whatever computer you’re trying to keep functioning today, years past the time when it should have been upgraded or replaced, at the time you bought that computer everything was still on a ticking clock.

So let’s say you have a computer that you bought in 2015, and you have Windows 7 on it. If you took a time machine back to 2015, and you had a computer from 2005 that was running Windows 98, you’d have just as many problems.

Again, think about this. Windows 7 is 16 years old. In 2015, a computer still running Windows 98 would be running an OS at that time that is almost as old as Windows 7 is today.

The problem isn’t that suddenly things are moving too fast and you’re forced to replace a computer these days too early. This is how it’s always been. Computers haven’t changed. You have.

Another note… You do not have to pay $1,500 for a computer. I have never paid that much for a computer in my life. I know how much computers cost; I got into IT initially from sales. My first computer I bought for myself was back in 1998, and I’ve bought many computers since then. Laptops, desktops, and so on. I’ve never paid that much for a single computer. And I am a gamer, I play the latest games with pretty high settings. If you are paying that much for a computer, you either have some really high standards or you aren’t shopping properly. I know that I have the advantage of being very knowledgeable about computers, both from a technical perspective and a retail perspective, I mean that’s literally what I do and what I’ve done for decades. But the idea that a web site upgrade is forcing you to spend that much is absurd. That’s like realizing you need to buy a new car and lament that you’re going to have to spend $50,000 because that’s how much a new Lexus would cost you at a dealership.

[Babale]

@wolfpup

The thing that I’m particularly enjoying right now about the Supermium browser is that it’s living proof that there is no inherent reason that Windows 7 could not still have fully supported browsers, and that the necessary support could be provided by one single individual who AFAICT is doing this in his spare time,

Is Supermium on Windows 7 as secure as a modern browser on a modern OS? If a business was trying to produce Supermium as a product, rather than a dude putting it out as a fun project, what level of liability would they be subject to while providing an outdated and insecure browsing experience?

With all due respect, I think you don’t know what you don’t know here.

[filmore]

@thorny_locust

I might be able to get in on the iPad, which does take 16.7; but it’s a lot harder for me to browse the boards on the smaller screen, and a lot harder for me to type any responses.

One thing you can consider is to get a keyboard for your iPad. They even have iPad cases with integrated keyboards and touchpads. That will allow you to interact with your iPad in a macbook kind of way.

One option to get a cheap macbook is to look for refurbished and surplus sales. Businesses and schools often rotate through their computer equipment on a periodic basis. The older laptops are typically fine and still in the support window for the operating system. Schools may have regular surplus sales to get rid of the old equipment. Some computer stores in your city may sell used equipment bought from businesses. You can get a good deal if you don’t need the latest and greatest equipment. Don’t buy computers from sites like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace unless you’re really knowledgeable with computer hardware. You never know what you’re getting when you deal with an individual. But the stuff from businesses and schools is typically maintained by an IT department and will be in reasonably good shape.

[gnoitall]

@filmore

One option to get a cheap macbook is to look for refurbished and surplus sales.

I think that @What_Exit’s modnote above implies is that this thread is for solutions not requiring hardware replacement. Evidently all previous “hardware replacement” discussion got moved to this thread:

New Cheap PC for Windows 11 or supporting Discourse discussion {Also obsoleting Browsers & OP systems}

nm, obsoleted by the move

[We_re_wolves_not_werewolves]

@Babale

Really? The last three of four times I’ve gotten a new phone (which is probably 10 years) all I’ve had to do is plug them together with a 2 small ended USB cord and run an app that the phone comes preloaded with. And then my new phone is identical to my old phone.

modern iphones don’t even need to be physically connected, they transfer data just by being close to each other.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@wolfpup

But billion-dollar corporations just can’t see their way clear to justifying even this very minimal level of legacy support that’s basically hardly even a rounding error on their balance sheets.

Maybe that’s because they’re billion-dollar corporations, so they have a lot more to lose when somebody sues them because the browser they “support” enabled bad things to happen?

[LSLGuy]

The way you become a billion dollar corporation is through profitable volume.

If we were all still running XP Microsoft would not be a billion dollar corporation; they’d have been bankrupt a decade or two ago. For lack of revenue.

You can’t have it both ways. Unless you want all software dev to be hobby development.