Java is bad but object-based message-passing environments are good. Classes are bad, prototypes are also bad, and mixins are unsound. That all said, you’ve not understood SOLID yet! S and O say that just because one class is Turing-complete (with general recursion, calling itself) does not mean that one class is the optimal design; they can be seen as opinions rather than hard rules. L is literally a theorem of any non-shitty type system; the fact that it fails in Java should be seen as a fault of Java. I is merely the idea that a class doesn’t have to implement every interface or be coercible to any type; that is, there can be non-printable non-callable non-serializable objects. Finally, D is merely a consequence of objects not being functions; when we want to apply a functionf to a value x but both are actually objects, both f.call(x) and x.getCalled(f) open a new stack frame with f and x local, and all of the details are encapsulation details.

So, 40%, maybe? S really is not that unreasonable on its own; it reminds me of a classic movie moment from “Meet the Parents” about how a suitcase manufacturer may have produced more than one suitcase. We do intend to allocate more than one object in the course of operating the system! But also it perhaps goes too far in encouraging folks to break up objects that are fine as-is. O makes a lot of sense from the perspective that code is sometimes write-once immutable such that a new version of a package can add new classes to a system but cannot change existing classes. Outside of that perspective, it’s not at all helpful, because sometimes it really does make sense to refactor a codebase in order to more efficiently use some improved interface.

The typical holder of a four-year degree from a decent university, whether it’s in “computer science”, “datalogy”, “data science”, or “informatics”, learns about 3-5 programming languages at an introductory level and knows about programs, algorithms, data structures, and software engineering. Degrees usually require a bit of discrete maths too: sets, graphs, groups, and basic number theory. They do not necessarily know about computability theory: models & limits of computation; information theory: thresholds, tolerances, entropy, compression, machine learning; foundations for graphics, parsing, cryptography, or other essentials for the modern desktop.

For a taste of the difference, consider English WP’s take on computability vs my recent rewrite of the esoteric-languages page, computable. Or compare WP’s page on Conway’s law to the nLab page which I wrote on Conway’s law; it’s kind of jaw-dropping that WP has the wrong quote for the law itself and gets the consequences wrong.

I’ve used this driver to stream a write to a disc. It’s unfortunate that we can’t have this technology, but it’s always been janky, and these days it costs less than $1 of RAM to buffer a CD or $5 to buffer a DVD before writing.

Put a rescue distro on a USB stick. When you first boot the laptop, use the rescue distro. Write down the USB IDs (lsusb) and PCI IDs (lspci). Read through the kernel boot log (sudo dmesg | less) and write down the names of any kernel drivers that might matter; WiFi, GPUs, USB bridges, and keyboard layouts are important in particular. For laptops, look up manufacturer-specific drivers for keyboards, fans, and power management.

Linux requires about 8MiB of RAM to boot. The entire netbook movement relied on machines with 2GiB or less; I remember putting Linux onto a 2GiB Sony VAIO that had struggled to boot Windows. Your laptops aren’t too small, but you may be choosing distros with poor hardware support or large monolithic packages. I bet that one of Debian, Gentoo, or NixOS would boot on those machines that still work; of those, Debian is probably easiest.

Old laptops sucks. Windows use to be very efficient. XP and 7 has held up very well after all these years. And most importantly Linux isn’t a one size fits all solution.

Nah, Windows sucked back then too. If a machine boots Windows XP or Windows 7, then it can easily be made to boot an out-of-the-box Linux distro. The Asus machine you listed might have some boot issues, but the Acer and Dell do not appear different from any of the Acers or Dells that I’ve put Linux on in the past decade. My daily driver is a $150 refurbished Dell Latitude 5390 running NixOS.

Walter Bright has fairly odious political opinions; like many social conservatives these days, he likes to complain about wokeness and communism, and I would completely understand a community fork simply to remove his control over various parts of the D language.

Also, just for a quick sanity-check: Which languages have you invested/migrated to, only to find that “political stunts” had a “negative impact” on your planned development?