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What are the worst tech purchases you or your family have ever made?

I watched a video recently and wanted to know what other have bought over the years.

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[–] Watermark710@piefed.social 14 points 5 days ago (3 children)

My wife and I bought those stupid Surface tablets. Not really sure why. Too big to be comfortably portable, too small to be useful at home. At least the magnetic keyboard thing makes a good mousepad for my desktop PC.

[–] djdarren@piefed.social 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I keep pondering grabbing one of those to put a Linux on. I want a tablet that isn't an iPad, and isn't Android, and those seem like the most cost-effective way to achieve that.

[–] luthis@lemmy.nz 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Same.. I reckon they would be pretty good if they aren't locked down

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

Most models are just PCs. The cameras in my Surface Go 2 don't work out of the box on Linux, but everything else is fine.

[–] YeahIgotskills2@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I've got several, as I work in IT and we got a bunch returned that weren't windows 11 compatible. We just downloaded Rufus, which skips the TPN check and all good - a fully supported windows 11 build. I use one as a music centre. Just plugs into my old analogue hifi and runs Spotify. As it's touchscreen it's perfect for that purpose. I'm tempted to use Linux instead, but imagine to would be a hassle to get the drivers. Might try a distro on one of them this weekend and see how it goes.

[–] QuadratureSurfer@piefed.social 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I actually had the opposite experience.

It was the perfect device for going through university for me. I mostly used it for note taking and homework with OneNote. For something like proving my work with matrices I could just copy the last matrix, paste it, then replace the one column/row that I was working on and repeat. In that case, work that took other students an hour or more would only take me a few minutes.

Additionally, since it wasn't just a tablet, I could run whatever software I needed on it for completing projects.

Of course a somewhat recent update from Windows bricked the device, and I haven't gotten around to switching it over to Linux (like I have with my other devices). It does look like there's a great group helping to support that transition though: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface

[–] chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 days ago

I had the original Surface in college and it was excellent at the time.