I’ve done an update and suddenly bluetooth doesn’t work. Or audio. Or the network is fucked. Or there’s no display on soft reboots, and you have to completely shutdown, turn off and restart to get video again.

One of the current Microsoft-induced selling points for linux is that it’s supposedly a great alternative for hardware that doesn’t support TPM, particularly for people who wouldn’t know how to disable that requirement on Win11 and above. Well, guess what? All that equipment is old. So all the arguments that it’s a hardware problem are not great for linux, since it’s linux that doesn’t play nice with it without fiddling.

For a time I was able to turn this machine into a Hackintosh that ran MacOS well with everything compatible, including the video card before they switched to metal and discontinued support for nVidia drivers. That was easier than getting linux to work and stay working properly, and it’s well documented how much of a pain Hackintoshes were to get working right.