I answered this separately, but I think secure by default should apply here, too.

I know many small businesses and non-tech people who give away or sell their desktops without wiping (or knowing that they need to). FDE would largely prevent that problem.

I think too often we take for granted that as more tech-oriented people (making an assumption since we’re having this conversation on Lemmy), we forget that we are in the minority. We are more than capable of turning FDE off, but a lot of people aren’t capable of turning it on.

What about when non-technical people give away or sell their computers?

Why is there zero need in desktops?

That’s fair. I mostly use plain vim, and should branch out more. I hadn’t considered the extensions it provides.

and since we’re here… vim > emacs 😉

I like vim, too. However, isn’t it a text editor?

I classify emacs as a full-blown IDE.

It’s not just the initial install - some game updates absolutely thrash your CPU/drive. I’m looking at you, Epic (unless it’s better in recent years).

Downloading 5-20 GB updates was the easy part.

The local bar (I live in a small town).

I’m not really sure what some modern games are doing (compression and deltas?), but they can be extremely read/write heavy after the download finishes.

It’s almost like they’re decompressing a 20 GB file, then applying deltas against an 80 GB file by pattern matching or something obscene.

Chrome has it down pretty well, but I feel like the game studios just said “to hell with it, everyone has a high-end rig anyway.”

My heaviest-use machines are an M1 Pro for development and AMD Ryzen (Windows) for gaming. My general guess is that both are so much faster than their predecessors, I don’t notice any hit if there is one.

I have assorted OpenBSD machines using softraid encryption, but the OS is so lightweight (along with the software being used on them) that I haven’t noticed a disk speed hit so far.

I think macOS takes a similar hit. I thought it was pretty negligible with hardware acceleration baked into CPUs for AES these days, but I guess the drives have gotten so fast that they haven’t kept up.

I had to search for how far back support goes for Sonoma, and it was surprisingly short.

I think Apple is intentionally shortening the support cycle right now to get everyone on ARM chips for a variety of reasons. They come with neural cores and are incredibly fast to their predecessors.

It’s tough to change architectures, and I think we’re frustratingly caught in the growing pains right now.

Can you name a major commercial OS that doesn’t do this?

My BSD and Linux installs will run on anything, but last I checked that wasn’t true of Windows or especially Android.

(Okay, you can technically install Windows on old machines, but is so incredibly bloated now that it’s impractical)

Haha this is so true.

This is 70-80% of my thinking as well. I purposefully held out for an M1 Pro for a couple extra years. I expect it to be good for at least 5.

I run Al Dente on it, and the battery is still sitting at 100% health (I ordered mine on release day).

It’s light years ahead of the Lenovo X1 I had been using, which lasted me quite a while.

My standard method is to remove the battery, resistively discharge, and drive a nail through it. I do this when I’m not able to recycle for whatever reason.

In your case, it might be best to drop them off at a specialized disposal facility. I think you can search for these online and mail them in.

I think generally you are correct, but I’m wondering if they are going through the “normal” certification process or utilizing some potential loophole.

We need to find one of these people and interview them! 😜

I had another comment, but I know of municipalities where you can get an exception to drive golf carts on roads. Some people have used this to purchase Chinese EVs and liberally stretch the allowed driving zones.

I don’t think necessarily. For example, I know I can register certain electric motorcycles as street legal in the US (maybe just certain states?) without undergoing any kind of inspection. I’ve also seen people import “crate” electric vehicles that can be plated through certain clauses.

I’m not sure what EU regulations are like comparatively.

Do these vehicles comply with safety regulations?

Rock, paper, scissors