Random Dent

Since OP mentioned that they used Plasma in the past and don’t like GNOME, it might be worth mentioning that KDE is developing their own OS which should be immutable.

Might have to wait for a little bit though.

I like the M Plus Code Font personally.

I have some mapped to super simple aliases too like e1 to reboot, e2 to shutdown etc. I don’t remember why I started doing that, but that way I only have to remember which number does what lol.

Yeah that was it for me. Just keep regular backups and bear in mind that you’ll probably break stuff at first. But once you get the hang of it, it’s like a whole other level of control over your system.

Also I’m not dyslexic but would things like tab completion and aliases help maybe? I sometimes shorten often-used commands with aliases just for convenience (as an example, I use rsync a lot, particularly the command rsync --ignore-existing -ravwhich I just shorten to rs to save time) so maybe that could also be used to avoid mis-spelling?

I use BorgBackup with Vorta for a GUI, and I keep the 3-2-1 backup rule for important stuff (IE: 3 copies, 2 on different media, 1 off-site.)

Yeah on my Linux desktop, it’s plugged into the TV for watching shows, so I sometimes switch between the PC Line Out and HDMI audio. The Linux audio logic seems to be “I’ll stay at whatever you last set me to, until you set me to something else”, which makes perfect sense.

On Windows, it seems to be some combination of whatever device Windows thinks was last plugged in (which is very rarely what was actually plugged in last) whether it’s an audio device or not, combined with the phase of the moon in whatever location Windows thinks it’s in (which is also rarely correct.)

I recently had a spare machine sitting around doing nothing and was feeling a bit masochistic, so I decided to install Windows 11 on it just to see what it was like. I’ve used Windows 10 a tiny bit but essentially haven’t touched Windows in years. A couple of the fun things I noticed:

• After installing, I was going to set a new wallpaper. I double-clicked on a jpeg file and instead of opening it, it popped up with a window asking me what I wanted to do with this apparently unknown file type. I literally said out loud, “what do you mean, it’s a fucking jpeg.” Then it did the same thing for a .zip.

• I also made a restore point once I had all the basics installed, so I could roll back when Windows inevitably fucked up doing an update. I then did the first big update and it fucked it up. “No worries” I thought, “I made a restore point!” I went to restore it, and discovered that for some unknown reason Windows only saves one restore point. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that Windows had decided to fuck itself up, and then automatically overwrite the manual save point with it’s own save point from immediately after it fucked itself up, leaving that as the only thing to restore to.

I then quite sensibly formatted the drive and went back to using Linux.

My secret Linux shame is that however much I try, I just can’t understand Docker at all. Like I get the general idea of what it is, but I can’t visualise how it works if that makes sense.

I have an app that runs in Docker, that I installed by just following the instructions, but I don’t know where it is on my computer or what exactly it’s doing, which I don’t really like.

Seems like a pretty solid update! The only downside for me was that it broke Klassy (apparently because 6.3 uses KDecoration3 instead of KDecoration2), but that’s not their fault and I’m sure it’ll sort itself out eventually.

Yeah the problem I had with Manjaro was that in trying to protect me from breaking it, it also made it difficult for me to fix it when it broke by itself. I much prefer regular Arch where you can just get in and pull all the important wires out lol.

I’ve been thinking about doing this too! I have a RPi 4 that’s not doing anything, and I don’t really have a great offsite solution for backups and I have family in another country. Maybe next time I go over there I’ll see if they’ll let me set one up lol.

Yeah I have a Steam Deck with a dock and bluetooth mouse & keyboard, it’s basically just a desktop PC lol.

Although the Deck does struggle a bit with super high-end games, so a similar thing with beefier hardware could fill a niche there I guess?

When the first Steam Machines were announced years ago, I assumed they’d all be running the same hardware like consoles do, and I thought that was actually quite a good idea because it could give game devs a sort of “baseline” set of hardware to aim for, as opposed to the sort of “vaguely make it run on Windows” system we seem to have currently. So if the new ones are all more-or-less the same kit like the Steam Decks are, and they take off well enough, it could be handy in that way I guess.

Plus it’ll presumably run SteamOS so more Linux exposure which I always appreciate.

Once you wrap your head around it, Rimworld is great for stuff like that. Once you start thinking outside the lines you can perform the most outrageous war crimes for literally no reason other than your own entertainment.

Like, if an enemy sends a raiding party you can nuke half the map with nerve gas to kill them, then skin them, eat them to keep the colony growing, then load all their skins into a pod and fire it back into the enemy base. The game doesn’t encourage you to do stuff like that, but it also doesn’t stop you lol.

Or you can use the skins to make hats and trench-coats.

I don’t know the name of it, but I really enjoy the sort of gameplay where you roll up to an enemy compound or something, and then you just sort of chip away at it and cause chaos until it all falls apart.

The sort of thing you’d do in Farcry, where you’d snipe some dudes, plant traps, shoot the tiger cage so the tiger would get out and eat people etc.

From what I’ve read, the problem at Bioware seems to be with management. IIRC the last Dragon Age was started as a live service game, then scrapped and restarted, and I believe Anthem was also scrapped and restarted at least once, and Mass Effect Andromeda had a bunch of its creative team quit halfway through. So management getting rid of most of the staff for Mass Effect 5 (which was announced as being in development back in 2020) doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

I use Quickemu for mine, makes it really quick and easy to get a new system up and running.

It stopped working for me recently. It’ll play the first 5 seconds or so of the video and then just freeze up.

Yeah I would classify it as sort of like if they released a new version of Windows where they removed all the bloat, made it not look hideous, and fixed every annoying decision they’d made over the last 30+ years in all aspects of everything across the entire OS lol. So basically if they removed literally everything that made it identifiable as Windows and replaced it with something not shit.

KDE linux definitely seems interesting, since I run Arch (btw) and KDE anyway. Unless they end up doing something weird with it lol.