you should be able to ‘rufus’ an installer for that. the instruction in the ‘new’ minimum requirement dates back to 1st gen.

i just directed someone to a 12th gen laptop (i5-1235u) with 16gb ram and 512gb nvme at dell for $430 in a ready-to-ship configuration, search their site for nn3520gsbbs to find it.

you’d be surprised at how many people look for lowest price and fail to read even part of the rest of the item’s page below the item title at the top.

kindle. check.

lowest price. check.

buy now.

click-click-done.

(oops. they just got a ‘trial’ to prime, too. that takes actual reading of pages to find and click-through the cancel process before the payments start)

you mean debian, right?

amazon still sells the ad-supported versions of kindles. and not just the fire tablets, but the readers, too.

they count clicks on a distro’s page on their site, not usage or anything else.

if they dared put hanna montana linux on there, it would be the perpetual #1 listing.

for every person that figures out how to disable this stuff, there are many thousands of others who don’t, don’t bother, or don’t even know it might be possible to… which is why they pull this shit in the first place–and (usually) get away with it.

i use private windows mainly so i don’t clutter up browser histories with useless stuff i won’t go back to (if i do run across something to save, it gets bookmarked or printed to pdf).

i had just looked that up on verizon here. you can configure it to be whatever you want (with some limits), and it’s what gets sent with your phone number for caller id to compatible mobile devices/plans and to landlines with name & number caller id capability.

of course i learn of this today, a day after i just spent $10 each to ‘recycle’ a bunch of dead monitors.

it’s not just apple anymore. all the major ‘pc’ makers have non-upgradeable laptops now… just not across their entire line-up (yet).

a pallet of 4th gens? i have a dozen left here from around that era that i can’t get rid of without literally giving them away. they’re ‘tolerable’ for a gui linux or win10 with an ssd, but the ‘performance per watt’ just isn’t there with hardware this old. i used a few of them (none in an always-on role, though), but the rest just sit in the corner, without home nor purpose.

these 800 g1s are, iirc, 12vo, so upgrade or reuse potential is a bit limited. most users would want windows, and win10 does run ‘ok enough’ on 4th gen, just make sure they’re booting from ssd (120gb minimum). but they’ll run into that arbitrarily-errected wall-of-obsolescence with trying to upgrade or install win11 when win10 retires in ~ 18 months (you can ‘rufus’ a win11 installer, but there’s no guarantee that you will be able to in the future). that limits demand and resale value of pretty much all the pre-8th gen hardware.

the ‘problem’ is: you can’t upgrade; you’re stuck with that 8gb.

want more in a year or two? you have to buy a new mac. and that’s apple’s goal–sell more product. buyers will be back (because they’re hooked on the platform and ecosystem) to buy a new one sooner than they otherwise would have.

if they put all their tv/cable channels online and had a comparable ease-of-use of turning on a tv and flipping channels (without jacking d+ rates up–except espn; sports channels should be separate), they’d see a huge influx of subs and higher long-term retention of them.

but, they won’t do that. they have the cable and satellite companies by the balls, and they squeeze regularly. gotta extort higher overall profits from that dwindling customer base–and they do.

so, tom’s swings-and-misses… again?

if it supports the basic hardware, there’s nothing wrong with peppermint for basic stuff like your use case. after the base system is installed, add a browser and libreoffice and you’ll have a nice little system for writing on.

if you want to keep using windows on it, you’ll probably have to ‘start over’ with a plain install of windows (without hp’s junk, and to a clean–partition table cleared–‘hard drive’), uninstall the useless crud like candy crush that comes with the base windows install, ensure compactos is enabled (it should be automatically enabled with those specs), install your browser and word processor. you shouldn’t have to do thing where you connect an external drive for ‘working’ space for updates (something i’ve only ever had to do twice on 32gb emmc models) anymore as long as updates stay relatively current.

but with only 2gb ram and a 10 year old ‘atom’ based cpu, i’d probably go straight for peppermint.

i personally bought them. no i don’t have money. didn’t then either. they were about $200 each, just prior to when vista started shipping (they were on sale). ram was upgraded from scrap, so was one of the video cards and one of the cpu (they were both originally windsors)–the other was bought new for ~$50 in late 2008 or so.

i have a couple dual core athlons (windsor and brisbane athlon 64 x2) at the office from that era. they are still used, even. have 8gb ddr2, dvdrw, and dx10-capable geforce cards.

and this is why i refused to give you my social back when i lived in your service area and had a land line installed.

just put a big pillow ‘on’ the external hard drive.