Yeah, I bought my first laptop, a Thinkpad T43, in 2005. It had something like 512MB-1GB of RAM, a Pentium M processor, and 156 GB of HDD (not SDD). Very good for the time, but there are Raspberry Pi’s with better specs these days.
I’m pretty sure Microsoft can tell them to fuck off. Maybe they pay millions, but even then MS has to weigh the possibility of bad press and lawsuits against a relatively paltry sum. The larger problem will be if someone finds a workaround or simply ignores the terms of service, I think. This article talked about the “United States Police Department,” but there is no such department. Law enforcement in the US is highly fragmented across the federal, state, and local levels. Any of them could just decide to break the terms of service.
I found it was useful for learning bits and pieces of the extra knowledge around working on a Linux system. Yeah, you’re not going to learn how a kernel works or how anything about data structures. But you will learn how to apply a patch, be exposed to a lot of work with the shell, and come to appreciate the work that goes into a modern distro.
There’s no level of package management, binary or source. There’s no practical way to uninstall or upgrade. It’s a toy for learning about Linux, which is great, but don’t expect it to have anything else.
Edit: I seem to remember some third party package managers, but then you’re going beyond the base level documentation. And at a certain point, then you might as well just use a distro. If you want to have a very minimal package manager so you can learn about package managers, sure, it’s a learning tool.
I have one from 2015 that is literally falling apart, but it still works okay. I’m going to be sad when I have to finally give up on it. Unfortunately, it’s not great for repair. I was going to replace the keyboard because some keys are malfunctioning, but it requires basically pulling apart the whole computer including some parts that are taped on.
Is it too much to ask for a car that doesn’t spy on me, is reasonably comfortable, is efficient, and maybe has a few extra “smart” features to help me not run into other people? I guess my bike will do for now.
The committee that heads it and sets policy has 5 members. It has hundreds of employees. This is comparable to other key commissions like the Federal Election Commission.