Pretty sure China is behind France

At least if you want to play with it in XP, install mypal browser https://www.mypal-browser.org/ I have had success with it on a XP machine, it loads facebook, reddit, lemmy.world, etc.

For an old distro, have you tried AntiX 32 bits?

In Canada it's tap to pay for ~8 years now, never saw a QR code to pay. However when I go in USA, every stores is tap to pay, except one, there's one store in USA where there is no tap, it's Walmart, inconcevable.

Few years old Dell laptop, they are incredible, even easy to open and repair, parts available everywhere, BIOS update even after 5 or 6 years.

You can buy a few years old Latitude for maybe $200, 14", i5 8th gen, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, wifi, bt, webcam, usb-c, name it.

Being 8th gen it runs win11, but they also run Linux pretty well, I'm running MX Linux (debian based) on them and everything is supported.

example https://www.ebay.ca/itm/115672158079

Well, on MX I'm using "MX Live USB Maker" which can flash any ISO on thumb drive, it's a built-in tool.

Now I'm using Ventoy, you just put multiple ISO on the thumb drive and choose it when you boot the USB drive, it's wonderful, no more "1 OS per drive", you just take a 32GB USB drive and you can put 10 distro on it.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/screenshot.html

We can't go anymore, first, tickets are expensive, like starting at $200-300 in Canada. Then the minute they go on sale, they are all sold to scalpers who resell them $2000 on kijiji. Madonna tickets reached $6000.

So I stopped caring about live concerts.

There's even a MX release for Pi https://mxlinux.org/download-links/

CP/M, GCOS, DOS, Windows, BeOS, Debian a few years, Ubuntu (a lotttttt of years), Mint (~3 years), MX (6 years now).

I played/installed with a couple of distro like Mandrake, LFS, CentOS, Arch, etc and basically all distro in the 90s were a bunch of floppies for the kernel and gnu utils, a bunch for X, that we downloaded from university usenet.

LFS was nightmarish, so is Arch a little bit when you install everything from basically scratch, now I prefer something that is working fine, MX AHS is a really good distro.

I also always prefered simple window system, coming from mwm/twm. Cinnamon was pretty but in the end I hated it, Xfce is my DE of choice now.

S0idle is a real problem.

Years ago you put your laptop in sleep S3 mode at 5PM, put in the backpack, resume it at 9AM the next morning and it lost maybe 10% battery.

Now S0idle is like a cellphone, always powered, so you put your laptop in a backpack, windows/Linux half support a botched S0 so some devices are still powered, either your laptop overheat or dies because battery reach 0% during the night.

Sleep in RAM, meaning only the ram is powered/refreshed, everything else like cpu or SSD are unpowered.

80s/90s was the good old time, no web, only irc, gopher, usenet, things like this

Absolutely, I'm in QC and we had a couple of way to sell things, lespac, kijiji, etc. but Marketplace is now 100% the king of it, it's quite incredible especially in big city like Montréal. Others platforms to sell are quite dead.

The other thing I'm using FB for, is groups, that replaced good old web forums... On FB there's group of everything, costco addicts, dollarama addicts, plants addicts, with ten of thousands of locals people.