Computers Getting Worse (for the User) Over Time
ONE key requirement - or a set of core requirements - when I searched for a 'new' laptop last month was a functional optical drive, an Ethernet port, and a classic VGA port. Yes, they function as well as always (if you can find them). You need not be some 'neckbeard' to want them; it's purely pragmatic. I found one for £79 and put Debian 12 with KDE on it. Just to remove any doubt/s a priori and to avert baseless smears, it's not about paranoia or anything; I still have a large collection of CDs (they all work OK-ish) that I cherish, I have a drawer full of VGA cables (some from the 90s; they still work), and sometimes things might not work ideally (Wi-Fi is a "box of nets"!), so good ol' Ethernet may come to the rescue at minimal cost/burden. When I hosted Gemini from home (that lasted almost 3 years!) and a Debian update disappointingly broke Wi-Fi I just plugged a long Ethernet cable (one that is almost 20 meters long; my sister bought it for me, god-bless her) into the Ethernet port on the Raspberry Pi, which is currently in transit (to psydroid). Downtime was very short (as brief as mere minutes) because of that Ethernet port. It actually took longer to configure the router to send port 1965 packets (over TCP/IP) to another 'channel' than it took to pull out and stretch an old wire - one of many available (not obsolete) wires.
But we must also recognise the fact that most people don't buy a PC that way. They also don't pay so little. Due to marketing or supposed 'convenience' they purchase something with way too much RAM and many useful features removed... for supposedly fashionable reasons. This trend isn't new; it has gone on for decades and Apple with its "Air" nonsense took that to new extremes. Later we got actual tablets with no buttons on them (or maybe 2, at most). Those are a nightmare to diagnose and repair, set aside usability aspects.
A friend has just told me that "two USB ports on this laptop appear to have stopped working. It cripples my workflow, one of the apparently broken ones is the USB-C port."
This is like Windows-ism coming to "Linux" through the hardware (as it becomes inherently less reliable). Remember ACPI? "I will try a cold reboot later today," the friend said, "but it is a PITA to get going again afterwards."
The reboot mentality. If all else fails...
I've not rebooted this laptop for nearly 400 days: 04:30:30 up 392 days, 11:15, 44 users, load average: 1.11, 1.18, 0.98
Rianne's 2 laptops (she uses 3) had this issue. USB ports with built-in controllers break and they break even if treated gently. They seem to be made rather 'flimsily' or 'flakily' (she keeps having these issues on her laptops, but I never had such issues on mine; my laptops never lost a USB port, ever!).
Bad hardware components (or terrible-but-cheap pertinent materials whose physical attributes assure future problems/irreversible failure), which I sometimes call "plasticware" or so-called 'plasticware', isn't an obscure issue. It is a well recognised problem. This past Sunday I spoke to a friend at the market about how devices can no longer last decades. Many are made to fail (or let to fail) after a few years - even the expensive brands nowadays do this!!! - and repair is incredibly expensive because of proprietary components, proprietary bolts/screws, and growing difficulty of navigating the insides (repair shops also charge more than the price of brand-new 'plasticware', lessening the incentive to fix stuff). That's all factual and one can verify these assertions - sans citations - based on reliable sources, but the issue I have is that newer laptops have too few ports!!! Especially too few USB ports. Usually 1 or 2! So there's too much competition for these ports: external mouse, external keyboard, 1 or 2 external drives, sometimes a good camera and a microphone. Half a dozen USB ports ought to be enough, but a laptop would not "look good" with them (even if that's not expensive to manufacture).
"I have extenders," the friend told me, "but the one is a USB-C based extender and thus has stopped working now. USB-C supports a 'heavy' load, however the other port which appears to have died is a USB-A port. USB-C is a computer shaped like a cable, USB-A is just four wires."
In a lot of ways, USB got worse. It got more complex (and proprietary, of course) and it's not even a proper port anymore. You plug a small computer into it instead of a cable. Those cables are error-prone, just like *HDMI (Trojan horse for DRM; bad for reliably relaying/transmitting signal with acceptable means of fault tolerance).
Similarly, UEFI is utter garbage in a cowboy's suit or a trench coat, it is not BIOS. They try to force everyone to use it and nowadays they falsely call it "BIOS". They lie to us...
The friend told me that "the lies backing UEFI were called out at the time as lies. However, it was nonetheless shoehorned into hardware and now 'required'..."
I will keep purchasing 'old' hardware because old typically means more robust (resilient to damage; VGA cords with imperfection deliver a poor picture; HDMI typically gives none at all!) and measurably less user-hostile. Sadly, however, eventually the supply of old hardware will 'run out', so no alternative routes/options will exist anymore. What to do then? Ask Digital Vegan (Andy Farnell). █
Cartoon credit: Digital Vegan