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Comment by seafoamteal | Hacker News Reader

The old family laptop's Windows 10 license is about to expire soon so I took the chance to install Linux Mint on it for my younger sibling. From what they tell me, it's perfectly usable, though I don't know to what extent they're using it. If it's just logging on and going straight to Firefox, there's not much difference from Windows kn terms of what they're learning. I've been thinking about what I can do to get them to engage more constructively with the computer, but no concrete ideas yet. Any suggestions from those of you who've done something similar for your siblings or kids?

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Get them into game modding or the like, fuzzing around to get a mod working delves into a good amount of computer-y things.

I haven't used anything but linux on a personal machine in a decade.

When did Windows licenses stop being for the life of the machine?

Windows 10 EOL: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-of-support

Also a lot of very capable machines cannot run Windows 11.

I have a windows machine (windows 10) that I will never upgrade to windows 11, that’s the end of the line for me as far as Windows goes. I also have an old laptop that still runs windows XP, I turn on once in a while but I do keep it offline.

At work windows reigns. Im not looking forward to but soon they’ll install windows 11 on our dev machines. I’m really not looking forward to that at all.

Windows won’t stop functioning, it just stops receiving updates. Win10 machines will still work, and you can reinstall win10 if you like.

In practice, what usually seems to happen is Microsoft will begrudgingly extend security updates for a few years after official EOS, because most people won’t switch over that quickly and having all those machines with unpatched vulnerabilities would be a bigger pain that potentially more expensive than just keeping on for a few more years.

The first computer I remember having as a kid was an old DOS machine that was gifted to us.

I remember it had a command prompt and you had to type pop or something to launch prince of Persia. It was mind blowing, but led to trying to figure out what else you could input into this mysterious C:\ prompt.

add a chat gpt to the terminal with a prompt. "I want to dowload pictures of cats and opening them in an image program." and it downloads cats and installs and open gimp. linux can be very star trek nowadays.

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