Really depends on what the “old tech” is and who those people are, but the majority of people, the average person with average equipment, they’re not going to regret it at all.

Most of that old tech equipment is essentially just junk taking up space to the average person. Even if they had a use for it, new stuff (particularly low-end new stuff) is still relatively cheap. Like a quick peek at corporate retailer #4’s website and I see brand new tablets for less than $200 and laptops for less than $300. May not be good stuff, but generally good enough for typical non-techie users who are just simping for MAGA on Facebook while watching the Baby Yoda on their Disney+ account.

Best Buy broke the power button on my laptop when they replaced a faulty screen and then refused to fix it for free. It took so many phone calls and emails and in-person visits to get them to take care of that shit, it was like a part-time job. In the end they framed it as “this one time we’ll make an exception and do it gratis” as if they were doing me a huge favor by addressing their own fuck up.

At the time, they very carefully crafted a mirage hidden behind carefully worded messaging and the appearance of an in-house workshop for computer repairs, when in fact, the overwhelming majority of the time they were just sending the equipment out to a 3rd party repair warehouse (sometimes in another country) that clearly did not care about the quality of the work.

As an old person who knows a lot of old people and has to deal with a lot of other old people, you’re in a bubble. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and you may already be aware.

By and large, early gen X and older have a very difficult time discerning what materials are AI generated. Then when you get to a certain age range, maybe 70+, AI to much of that crowd is just another buzzword they know nothing about.

Now, in the pedantic sense of the word “increasingly”, if literally one more old person is against AI or doesn’t trust AI compared to last year, then that’s increasing. But on the whole, I’m not seeing it. In fact, as AI gets “better” and harder to detect, I’m finding that more people just go with it. You basically end up with camps of “the person who accuses everything of being AI”, “the person who has no clue what’s what and doesn’t care”, and “the person who can’t tell if something is AI regardless of how obvious it is”.

To me, an American, here’s how this reads: In past economic downturns, the US government could at least construct a plausible story of our resilience and strength because of things like “inflation is high all over the world, but ours is lower than other trading partners” or “unemployment rate is higher than we’d like but still lower than other developed nations” and things like that. This time around, it’s clear in many ways that our federal (and often state) governments are making things so much worse for us than necessary, not doing anything that’s effective to fix the problems, and other developed countries / trading partners / former allies (even those who are facing similar issues and/or dealing with Trump’s shenanigans) are doing better than us in metrics that are important for the working class.

Believe me when I say, I’ll be pointing this out and rubbing it in MAGA supporters’ faces along with everything else. Even a mediocre president and incompetent congress could have maintained the slow but steady recovery we were in the midst of before Trump took over.

Instead, they supported and elected a terrible president and malicious / complicit congress, and the resulting damage to our country, the economy, and our reputation is now cemented in. They voted to fuck everybody over, which tracks with the rapist and pedophile supporting crowd.

While it sounds great in practice, I find it suspicious that they never mention the the final bill.

I like Linux, use(d) various flavors of it, and have had experience with / exposure to it for over 20 years. But no, I’ve never had a remotely flawless experience with it on a desktop or laptop environment. Wish I could offer more help or encouragement, but figured I’d at least chime in with some emotional support by affirming that you are not alone in that experience.

I would recommend Linux to technologically adept people (ex: tech professionals, computer science students) and only indirectly to less technically proficient people in the form of suggesting something like a Steam Deck for portable PC gaming to someone who might be interested.

But for an aging parent or my best friend’s kids? No. Sometimes I already feel like I’m a free on-call 24/7 IT support tech for friends and family, and that’s with mostly Windows and Android devices that pretty much just work the way folks expect (even if that way is broken/crumby/irritating/etc).