CozyNet Blog

Monday & Tuesday Journal (20260804)

KitKat sitting on her favorite news papers.

Monday and Tuesday have been mildly busy days for me. Monday was a wedding shower for another friend of mine, which He'll be getting married this weekend. I feel like I've been writing about weddings every week now!

I got him some picture frames as a gift. I figured they would need some picture frames and it wasn't something too large or expensive.

Then Tuesday I was helping a retired co-worker setup a laptop for Windows 11. I doubt it'll support Windows 11 due to their arbitrary hardware requirements and granted the laptop is from 2018; it's as old as the one I'm writing from now! Unfortunately we left off late in the night letting it run updates for Windows 10 since MS front loads a bunch of junk before upgrading it to 11. I would have popped in a flash drive with a Windows 11 install already on it, but I don't possess anything of Microsoft except for my old desktop from 2011 and the official Windows 8.1 ISO. So the hard way it was...

He's been wanting Windows 11 and Microsoft Office for awhile now thinking he needs it, but I can't see him actually doing anything at all on that laptop. Most everything he does is on his phone, and he's never used Windows 11 before nor a modern version of Microsoft Office. The guy is in his 70's too; if I were him, I wouldn't even bother with computers anymore. He's kind of a susceptible person, so I'm afraid he's going to get fleeced by all the adware, dark patterns of Windows, and "Microsoft" Scamindian call centers. That's largely why I put my parents on Ubuntu MATE, but I will have to admit that not even Ubuntu is prepared for pedestrian users.

I can't tell you how many time that crummy app store crashes out on them, or how it used to not properly clean old kernels that would eat up the meager boot partition that then led to hosing up the package manager because it would bomb out if it couldn't apply the new kernel version. My mom has a real anxiety with that app store for updating the system too because it's so bad, but it's the only user friendly method of handling those. You can't trust the unattended updater either because it too would eventually bomb out at some point in the year. I think this is the last year for the release version of Ubuntu they're on to receive support, so I'll probably move them to Debian with the MATE desktop around Thanksgiving.

Thanks for reading my blog!