Man... updated mozilla,toyed with my ad blocker, now updating the os. Never crossed my mind this was a 'them' problem.

I had the 17" XPS, which was lovely. A nice 16:10 screen, which was the main thing I was looking for. Battery was easy to replace. Easy memory and M2 drive replacement. It was a pretty good laptop for x86. Main issue was heat/sound. Linux was pretty easy to get going on that hardware. You could get at the internals - so cleaning out the fan was doable. (order new screws, as they ship with silly soft metal on the orignals)

https://i.imgur.com/4SdAQu9.jpeg

When they released the 16" series, most of the updgrade features were gone. Memory was tied to the CPU, which puts you in the same position that Apples does. Not a fan. I swapped out the 17" for a 16" macbook. I doubt I'll look at an XPS again.

What is the difference between software and car sales? The car sales knows when they are lying.

Likely reddit

Many folks left Dig for their primary feed when they did the UI update. I think I switched over to Slashdot around that time. The multi selector for karma, on the comments and them changing usernames so my original no longer worked drove me to reddit as that prime feed for me, for about 10 or so years.

As reddit exploded... that main home switched to here. Not quite that same sense of community and always a grab bag of subject, so much closer to Digg/Slashdot feel. I never ended up doing facebook or some of the other social media sites. As reddit tried/tried to become that sort of space (with monetization!) it became something I was not looking for.