You are in fact correct. UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is the modernized version of the very very old BIOS (Basic Input/Output System).

It brought a parade of improvements including the GPT (GUID [Global Unique Identifier] Parition Table) partition table replacing the old MBR (Master Boot Record) partition table.

No EFI environment detected?

Sounds like someone deleted the EFI partition maybe.

Or the machine is so old it still has a BIOS.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1436186

Rufus Pollock’s math agrees. I am so bummed he recently took this down from his personal website where it had been available for 15 years

Now it just resolves as a 404 not found:

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf

It happens anytime between a few seconds after the OS loads, to hours or days later.

That will tell you relatively quickly if it’s a hardware problem or a software problem.

I mean, potentially not that quickly if they have to wait days for it to happen. Good low-investment-of-personal-time-and-effort suggestion though.

the /var/log/ folder would be the best place to start.

1. When a random freeze occurs note the time. Try to be as accurate and close to the time it happened as you can, including day, hour, and minute.
         A. If possible, do this for multiple instances of this happening

2. Check various log files starting with syslog and look at the times noted above. Look for any relevant errors being thrown by the system at these times.

Agreed on that, it’s not the best solution, but for people who need access to computing and whose devices have aged out of other support, it’s pretty much the only option available.

I’m in the minority who thinks Linux isn’t for everyone and that people who approach computing from that standpoint should really stick with macOS or Windows. Linux gives you more freedom to be in control, but that freedom to be in control also demands more knowledge and involvement to be able to be in control. “With great power comes great responsibility” kind of thing.

For an analogy Windows is like being a passenger in a car with someone else driving, and Linux you’re in the drivers seat of the car. You simply are required to be aware and involved in driving more because you are in control, and that control requires knowledge. You don’t get to sit back and go “I don’t need to know what all this stuff does because I don’t want to.” Understanding how the pedals and steering wheel work is a requirement for driving, as is paying attention to what is going on around you on the road. As a passenger, you aren’t required to know or pay attention to as much because you’re not being given the freedom of control, you’re just along for the ride. Linux is giving you that freedom of control of being the driver, but you have to know a lot more to do it than you need to know just being a passenger (Windows).

I know everyone else thinks Linux is ready for the prime time and ready for regular users who don’t want to have to learn and just want something that works… but I personally don’t. Simply because Linux is a lot less guaranteed to “just work” than the other options.

It’s basic in the sense that Linux is always a work in progress and no matter how hard you try, you’re going to need it at some point.

When your system randomly turns on to a black screen and there is seemingly no way to log in, knowing how to switch to the command line and at bare minimum back up your settings and documents before you wipe and start over is pretty key. To be clear, I have been in that exact situation and even more confusing situations where the PC has basically become unusable but I was able to fix it via CLI.

Just imagine losing months or years of work because you don’t know that you can probably fix it all from command line and likely don’t even need to wipe your computer and start over if you can narrow down what is going wrong and remove it via the command line.

I dunno seems pretty important to me.

Graphics driver installation is pretty key on any system but AMD graphics systems.

For example if your parents want to watch any videos without them stuttering or being weird, whether Intel or Nvidia, they will need the non-free graphics drivers installed so it doesn’t run like shit.

To my knowledge nearly every AMD chipset already works out of the box on Linux.

At least a basic primer about finding your way around in Linux in command line, and where various configuration files live.

When shit goes wrong (and it likely will at some point) knowing how to dump to another tty and log in via the console and fix issues via command line is pretty key. This has saved my ass more times than I can count now.

Having trouble finding a CLI focused course, but this is a free course that covers a lot of basics:

https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/introduction-to-linux/

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1436186

This paper used to be available on Rufus Pollock’s own website but today returns a 404.

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf

In 2009 Pollock did the math and concluded that optimal copyright length for artists to recoup investment in developing the art balanced with making art available in the public domain was about 16 years.

This paper’s math isn’t easy to grok if you’re not an economist, but it’s a good resource that balances the need for copyright with the need for public domain knowledge and art.

Just don’t… roll your own encryption. Use a trusted standard and roll out your own self-hosted encrypted comms service.

For sure, but like expecting average people to understand the more technical side of Linux right off the bat, expecting average people to even understand that is an option is, frankly, elitist. The vast majority of humans just don’t even fundamentally understand the difference between “Windows 10” and “Windows 10 LTSC” and we’re not heading into a future in which they will all suddenly turn around and become computer literate when a vast amount of the world is barely regular literate.

We have got to stop expecting so much from average people and do a better job helping them.

I know maybe that’s what you intended to do, but if I was an average person, I wouldn’t have had any clue what LTSC and IOT meant without a lot of filling me in. Just food for thought, we have to spoon-feed this stuff to a lot of people, and be kind to them when they struggle with it.

but I have been assuming this is because my VPN shows me in Europe.

Glad you found the info yourself, but your version of Windows will still register as a US version. Being behind a VPN doesn’t change your OS fingerprints, especially since a VPN is layered on top of your OS, and MS essentially has direct access to your OS underneath that VPN layer. Unless you’re running your VPN on your router and all your traffic in and out of your router is pushed through the VPN, then it might make a bit of a difference.

or they are in Europe and they get to wait an extra year.

This is being offered in the USA, too, you know. You have to submit to logging in with a Microsoft account and allowing them to back up your system preferences to the cloud.

Secondly, the onerous TPM 2.0 requirement is actually what is going to stop a lot of those low-end computers from upgrading. I recently was helping a friend with what seemed like a relatively recent machine and I was shocked to find it still has a BIOS and not a UEFI and I had to redo my installation disk to support MBR partitioning instead of GPT partitioning. People like that will be SOL and simply won’t be able to upgrade, even if they want to.

As I have been saying for a year now, I foresee a Windows 7 situation all over again that despite Microsoft’s best efforts to bully people into upgrading, that eventually they will continue offering updates for Windows 10 that they didn’t want to have to offer simply because so many business machines will still be running it to support other legacy software.

If a third of Steam users are still using it, you can bet that it’s a similar number of small businesses without the resources to upgrade, especially when the real economy is in a free-fall.

I wouldn’t consider any Linux phone ecosystem developed enough to consider a “daily driver” phone yet. If you need a phone to be functional at pretty much all times as a phone, but you don’t want to give into smartphones, I honestly would suggest a VOIP landline (that you potentially roll out and serve yourself, depending on your level of technical ability and available resources).

Americans can’t have that, and are forced to upgrade regardless.

No, I’m in the USA, this is what they’re offering in the USA, a year of extra security updates if you log in with an MS account and backing up the system to the cloud.

I’m actually a bit surprised the EU would allow it instead of just forcing MS to give everyone another free year of updates.

But I still see a potential Windows 7 situation happening, where they try to force the change, but so many people stay on Windows 10 and just accept the lack of updates that Microsoft will be eventually forced to push more security updates to not appear to endorse letting millions of machines become parts of botnets.

You can still get an extra year of security updates, though

If you submit to Microsoft and log in to your Windows 10 machine with a Microsoft account and allow them to backup your system into the cloud.

https://github.com/hippie68/gogcheck

Use this to check GOG installers before installation. Should still be accurate and active most recently updated 3 months ago.