@noracodes this said i think ed is a lot less focused on hardware and operating system software and a lot more on the Internet and Web

FLOSS, FSF, GNU, etc have historically been abysmal at the web. they haven’t had good ideas and they haven’t had successful projects. if the internet was good, the fact you were accessing it thru a shitty version of Windows on a shitty laptop wouldn’t matter, because the internet is designed to scale down to be accessible on even the slowest and worst hardware. that isn’t the case and nothing out of FLOSS has come close to changing that

@Lady @noracodes I think in some ways they *are* worse.

Obviously they don't have less RAM, slower processors, less storage. And obviously the old ones are less usable now because of changing standards and heavier software.

But newer shitty laptops can be more locked down, harder to fix, harder to hack into something usable. It can be designed to be useless without "the cloud". Think of how hard it is to replace the OS on a cheap phone, and all the limitations those have; that is a chromebook.