u/Shadoglare

I've gotten my kids out kiting this year a few times, and my 8y/o somehow ends up letting go of his every single time. Out of our last three outings he's lost two kites and recovered one but the string is so tangled it will need to just be replaced.

Are there some types of string handles that work better for the youngers? So far his have all been the "handle with a place to wind string on the side" type that seems to come with all lower end kites (that's at least one good thing, at least when he does lose one it's like a $10-15 kite).
For my kites I use one of the large reels, but those get tangled up so frustratingly easy that I wouldn't want to have him try it (plus they're not cheap so I wouldn't want to watch one float way if he does let go).

Do the spools with handles work better for this? Should I just tie the thing around his wrist like I did with balloons when he was a toddler? 😄 He's at the point where he doesn't want to do it any more for fear that he'll just keep losing more kites, even though he seems to still like the idea of it.

Ok, so admittedly the main reason I lean towards Mint is because of how good it usually is at "just working." Aside from a few tweaks here and there I can think of very few times I've had issues with it over the past decade or so.

Then, take a few days ago, when an update to the Nvidia driver rolls out.

To mention up front, my video card came out in 2012. Haven't updated because they're expensive and it still mostly does what I need it to as long as I can live without some of the newest game releases.

So I get the update prompt, see it's a new Nvidia update and figure great always good to see driver updates, and let it rip.

Re-boot, and *chaos*.

Starts booting, and all I get is a repeating nonstop wall of error text. Getting it to pause long enough to see what it's complaining about, it appears this update dropped support of my card's chipset, and it won't even touch it now. PC is basically bricked.

Using the advanced boot options I get the thing to load into the equivalent of "safe mode" and do some digging with AI... Apparently the last driver version to support my card was v.470, dropped with the new update (v.535). So AI tells me "just roll back to 470 then" so I go in and delete everything with a 535 reference, reboot, go back in, find 470 in the repository, and... It forces 535 instead.

So I go into Driver Manager to see what it says... And the newest it has is v.390.

So I install that, reboot, and.. Steam now won't load, saying the video driver is too outdated.

So.... I give up and install the generic Xorg driver that is the only other option.

Now... Most desktop apps work, browser works, etc... Most games don't. Those that do mostly run poorly.

The OS which partially has a claim to fame of "great for supporting old hardware" is basically forcing me to trash my video card that mostly worked fine.

And I can't even imagine what someone with less experience would have done after that reboot with the wall of error text. Probably find their Windows install discs.

So... Maybe it's not easy to do, but is there no way to code in during a driver update a check to verify the update is actually compatible (such as some kind of integration with the driver manager?).

I know some of the hardcore will just go RTFM and say I should have checked the documentation before approving the update, but that's not realistic.

Thank you for allowing this vent.