Thank you so much for this! It reminded me to revisit my library’s general resources and look specifically for which archive collections they had available. I’m 1 state over, so I figured there was a good chance we would have Newspapers.com Library Edition access here.

The main/default collection my library sent me to was no help, but they had a Newspapers.com Library Edition portal listed further down. Final-fucking-ly got it. I really, really appreciate the help.

I’m sure it’s a fine service, if you want to use it regularly, but I just wanted 1 tiny thing. If they had a $1 for an obit or a page deal, sure. Instead, there’s this whole microcosm of bullshit where some are archived, others available, some omitted from public collections, some on different 3rd party sites, etc.

The family paid for an obit. It wasn’t in the 1800s. The paper has been digitized. I should be able to go to the paper with the name, exact date, and city and find it. They literally say it doesn’t exist. Not that it’s on our archive site or our partner site, just nothing.

I would have thrown a couple bucks to any of the sites for access, but no, I need to sign up for a subscription, give them all my details, get spam calls for the next 100 years, just no. Super frustrating.

I looked into this before with a similar deal by a 3rd party seller on Amazon. The enterprise drives (I was looking at those EXOS drives, too) must be sold by the manufacturer certified reseller or you run the chance of getting zero warranty. That being said, I’ve seen plenty of conflicting stories by people that bought them and needed to submit an RMA. I’d say it was a 60/40 split of honoring the warranty to not honoring it.

Long story short, it’s a gamble. They’re likely good drives, but you’re rolling the dice if something goes wrong with them.

Mint is very easy to transition to from Windows and pretty stable. I’ve probably used that the most in the last 5 years and my only gripe is that it’s a little out of date (but that adds to the stability) and configuring sound has been a bit annoying.

I was considering it, but I’ve done little auditions of Ubuntu over the last 10 years and something doesn’t feel right. It was awesome in the late '00s, but it hasn’t clicked with me since. Maybe it was the 1-2 pow of trying to make a phone OS and then the phone-looking launcher.

Thanks for the tip, though. I’ll give it a go if my next candidate gets too messy. (Yes, it’s definitely the distros’ fault, not mine. Okay, maybe 20% mine. Or 95%. Something like that.)

Not gonna lie, that did make me feel like a badass. Plus, there was the added surprise challenge of finding half the online help was in German.

And just like that, my attempt at Linux on the desktop (take #4123), which was going to be Fedora, is back in flux. I don’t want to start investing time into a learning project in major transition and an uncertain future.

Ironically, I’m looking again at OpenSUSE, which I had left back during the SuSE-> OpenSUSE period. (You can tell I’m OG because I’m one of the few that uses the correct capitalization! haha)

Kinda on topic, there are 2 really good deals running right now. 1 for the Surface, 1 for the Lenovo Yoga.

https://slickdeals.net/f/16728539-thinkpad-x1-yoga-gen-6-14-3840x2400-oled-i7-1185g7-16gb-ram-512gb-ssd-1099-free-s-h?src=category_page
and
https://slickdeals.net/f/16727681-microsoft-surface-pro-8-13-2880x1920-i5-1135g7-8gb-ram-128gb-ssd-610-free-s-h-w-amazon-prime?src=category_page

The Surface might be too bare bones for some, but $610 is decent. (Also, there are several “generations” in the store now. This is the middle, non-ARM flavor with 11th Gen Intel. The Surface 9 has the current generation.)

The Lenovo is a much bigger discount and better specs, but I’ve heard worse stuff about the Lenovo support. Apparently Lenovo’s consumer support and build quality is very different from the business offerings.

I hear the bus width is actually more important…

I’m generally a Windows user, but on the verge of doing a trial run of Fedora Silverblue (just need to find the time). It sounds like a great solution to my… complicated… history with Linux.

I’ve installed Linux dozens of times going back to the 90s (LinuxPPC anyone? Yellow Dog?), and I keep going back to Windows because I tweak everything until it breaks. Then I have no idea how I got to that point, but no time to troubleshoot. Easily being able to get back to a stable system that isn’t a fresh install sounds great.