My point is that here, someone asked for "mechanic" powers without being willing to do "mechanic" work. My point, my only point really, was to point out the valley and why it's not such an easy problem, and that the path forward on their side of the divide is "buy new and accept updates."
If it is required to not buy new and not have automatic updates, then it is required to be a mechanic. It takes more skill, and more bullshit non-generalizable skill to hack around in Windows to do shit like that than it takes to learn basic mechanics of a Linux system.
Your original point was this:
If you really want a system which doesn't break when it updates, move to Linux.
I replied by pointing out why nobody takes heed of your recommendation.
And why I say "if you want that feature, be a mechanic. Otherwise..." Is because I don't expect people to "heed" my rhetorical "recommendation" because it's more a statement that their option is most likely going to only be "buy new hardware".
Hence why I point out the valley where, on this side of the valley, high in the peaks, lives The City of Deprecated Hardware.
It's either updates+EoS, mechanics, or the badlands.
Let's do another lap. People don't want to be mechanics. That's why all Linux distributions collectively own only 2.8% of the global desktop operating system market despite being freeware, while Apple's OS has 14.5% and Microsoft's share is 75.3%. To connect a printer or a NAS to either of the latter two does not require any special know-how, nor does it take long to create the connection. After unpacking the gear, connecting the cables half a dozen point and clicks with the mouse will do either job inside two minutes, maybe five. In my experience anyway, and I am fairly sure in the experience of millions of other computer users.
This cannot be done with Linux. Again, in my experience.
Despite numerous, time consuming attempts I never got my networked printer connected to my Linux box even though it took me just a few minutes and a few mouse clicks to have it printing from my Win XP desktop (in 20) and my Win 8 laptop (in 2012).
I had to google for instructions on how to get my Linux Mint 17 box to connect to my WD NAS. Eventually, I found
this 17 minute video. After noting down critical numbers, editing one file and creating another from scratch, which took about half an hour, I had success at last. Well partial success. As I mentioned before, not only did the file manager freeze with great frequency, but more than half the time it froze the entire system. I could not even close the manager. The only remaining way out was to reboot the computer via the hardware switch. I put up with this for months. The upgrade to Mint 18 created no problems, but when I upgraded to Mint 19 the connection was lost for good "for security reasons". No solution for this lack was forthcoming on the Mint, Ubuntu or any other Linux themed forum. That's when I decided Linux was wasting my time.
As for "buy new hardware" it does not work for me. I bought the printer in 2008, the laptop in 2012 and I am currently typing on my main workhorse, a 2014 vintage Dell Optiplex I bought at an online auction along with mouse, keyboard and two 23" monitors for $490 delivered in 2019. The laptop is around ten years old, and since Microsoft's free upgrade offer running on Win 10.
I still use a Win XP desktop. (It's not connected to the internet.) I occasionally need it to digitise tapes via a $1000 (second hand price!) JVC HR-S9600 video tape recorder, a $600 (again, second hand price) time base corrector and an ancient hybrid digital/analogue TV dongle. The reason for persisting with the old box (age uncertain because I cobbled it together from several other old computers, but I think the mobo might have been made around 2006) is that much of the filtering and other software I process the tapes' contents with does not function on more recent operating systems. It is very, very slow, but I just leave the box chugging along quietly on its own for hours, sometimes days, while I go about doing other things. Only some of the software is point and click stuff. Some of it is purely command line operated, but then this is not what most people want to do with their computers.
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