I died in that game from reading a book that was too sad lol

Yeah same here, I’m on lemmy.ml using Mullvad and never had an issue. If an instance ever did block it though I’d just leave, that’s also why I never use reddit anymore lol.

One thing I’ve been trying lately that’s a bit different: I happen to have an old SSD that had an enclosure with it (kind of like this) which essentially turns it into an external USB drive.

I then used Rufus to install Windows on that drive, using the “Windows To Go” option and also checking the option to not allow Windows to access the internal drives. That way, my laptop can just happily run Linux by itself, and if I need to use Windows for anything I can just plug the drive in, hit F12 on boot and choose to boot from that drive instead. The added bonus is that Windows also can’t mess with anything on my regular system or monkey about with the boot loader.

I’ve only had it on there for about a week but it seems to be working perfectly fine so far!

Oh and also Rufus gives you the option to start with a local account already set up, so you don’t have to do the MS online account bullshit. And then after install I used ShutUp10 to turn off as much telemetry as I could.

And also if your goal is just to emulate old games you might not even need the extra boost anyway!

I dunno, isn’t £588 more than a 512GB Steam Deck would cost? That seems like the safer bet to me.

I did! I know where they are and which scripts they point to, but as for going into the scripts and trying to remember what they’re actually doing… I’ll get to it some day lol

I pretty much did just go full office space on it lol. Here’s a fun thing I just learned:

Windows 11 apparently defaults to a tiny fraction of space for system restore points, and if it runs out of space it just deletes the old ones without asking or telling you. Because it defaults to a tiny amount of space, it apparently only ever keeps one system restore point on hand.

This means I made a manual one on a clean install when I’d got my settings sorted, so I can hop back to that when Windows inevitably fucks up. But because it’s Windows, what it did was apply a big update, fuck it up, then save that fuck up as the only restore point.

I restored it anyway just to see what would happen, and that broke even more stuff. Back in the drawer!

I recently discovered that Rufus has an option to set up a Windows ISO as “Windows on the go” so I dug out an old 500Gb SSD that had a USB adapter with it and installed Windows on that. So now instead of dual booting I can just hit F12 and boot from USB on the rare occasions when I need to run something in Windows.

It’s also quite satisfying to be able to physically remove Windows and shove it into a drawer when it goes full Windows too lol.

One of the biggest things that helped me was setting up virtual machines and installing different versions of Linux in them and just playing around. I found it super helpful because it makes you learn different things (for example you mentioned reading the Arch wiki which is a good resource, but not all of it will apply to Mint necessarily) and as an added bonus, it doesn’t matter if you break everything. You can just restore a backup, or better yet, reinstall from scratch so you get used to the process or better yet, keep breaking stuff until you come out the other side and get things working again!

It took me longer than that to figure out how to get out of Vim

Yeah I’ve been running it in one of my little VM specimen jars for a while now and I don’t remember it crashing or doing anything weird so far. Pretty good for a first alpha!

I like it as an alternative to GNOME that’s not quite so GNOME-ish, if that makes sense. I do like GNOME but I find it a bit idiosyncratic sometimes, IE they seem very “my way or the highway” about some design things, and it often feels to me like you have to hunt down and keep updating endless plugins to do basic things that feel like they should be included.

If they can land in a spot where COSMIC looks as nice as GNOME but is also a bit less of a hassle to get set up the way you want it, I feel like they could occupy a nice middle-ground between GNOME and KDE possibly.

I wish KDE had something like that! AFAIK I think most tiling things are still broken and haven’t quite caught up to Plasma 6 yet.

Yeah I feel like especially when it comes to something like art, it becomes extremely subjective.

For me personally, I’m not a fan of using AI to create art itself, but I can see a good use case for it in supporting an artist. For example, a lot of artists I know are notoriously bad at things like marketing, or writing grant proposals and mission statements and all the other bits of miscellaneous paperwork that seems to be required. So I think AI has some value there, to facilitate artists getting their work out there, rather than creating the actual art.

But also having said that, on a more fundamental level I guess you could argue that any bit of art that lights someone’s brain up has some sort of value, even if it only works on one person and everyone else in the world thinks it’s crap. It still made life a little bit brighter for that one person, which I suppose is the point. So in that sense maybe it doesn’t matter where it came from at all?

Anyway, that’s a bit rambly and esoteric for first thing in the morning, sorry!

I’m not part of the typical group that gets drafted (presumably young men) but my argument has always been that my country doesn’t own me, I’m not its property. If I want to fight for/serve my country I will, but IMO it has no right to just use me at will like a resource.

This especially goes for times like these, when everything is unaffordable, nobody can get a house, you can barely see a doctor, the police don’t even bother solving most low-level crime and the rich are lining their pockets with our money. The system is not upholding its end of the social contract at all, so why should it expect any extraordinary measures from us?

Alright, I’m gonna try it and see how long this takes!

edit: about 8 minutes. Not as spectacular as I’d hoped lol

It’s funny how often Microsoft manages to accidentally do things that just happen to make life more difficult for Linux users. They sure do seem to have bad luck with that.

In the mind of Microsoft, Windows is the only OS and all things on computers exist to facilitate Windows.

And the solutions to Windows problems are almost always ludicrously esoteric and stupid anyway lol. It always turns out to be something like “the CPU usage went up because the clock in the taskbar on this specific version of Windows syncs to a different server that closed down so it tries to ping it 400 times a second for some unknown reason and that’s why you get a 78-character hexadecimal error code and all your USB devices disconnect whenever you render a video.”

I’m not even sure what that would do! Presumably list every time the word alias appears in every file across the whole home directory or something like that?