Eggplant out here catching strays.

I’m sure Mint is in a great place now, I enjoyed it when I tried it 8-10 years ago during my last foray into Linux. I looked at the reviews complaining about Mint as outliers, but did the same for Manjaro and PopOS and all the others. PopOS was what I was initially planning on for Nvidia support, but my 2080S started acting like it might be dying and I picked up a 7900XTX to open up my Linux options more.

BTRFS snapshots sounded like a good “training wheel” for easy restoration after I inevitably break something, which was a selling point for Manjaro. Rolling release is also both a plus and a minus. It is easy to get choice paralysis with trying to jump into Linux, especially if you don’t want to do a bunch of initial distro hopping to feel out the different options.

That is super exciting, I’ll give it a try. Thanks for pointing that out, I thought it was still in the rumours and supported speculation phase. If this trend continues then Linux will be more and more viable going forward. SteamDeck pushing the gaming scene has been huge, I hope the momentum just keeps increasing.

Thank you for the insight, that is actually useful information for me. I currently have a 4tb nvme with a small (250gb) C drive and the rest as an E drive (Program installs and Games) for Windows, the same general setup with a second 4tb nvme for Linux, and a 3rd separate SATA SSD that acts as my “home” drive with Documents/Pictures/Downloads /etc. I planned and sharing that third drive between Windows and Linux so I don’t require duplicating data.

A home server/NAS is also in the works, and I’ll be looking into Samba. It’s just been a bit enlightening finding out all the unicorns and rainbows on the Linux side of the fence are equines of indeterminate parentage with paper cones glued to their foreheads and RGB light strips soldered together with a “trust me” sticker on them.

Microsoft is still a ghetto, and Apple is a WASP country club where the HOA president lives next door and is “retired”. Computers are both at an all-time high for choice and in some of the worst states it’s been in.

There’s the rub. Every distro has vocal supporters and detractors, and appears simultaneously good or “dog shit”. Determining who is accurate is a crapshoot, and there apparently is no right answer. Manjaro was attractive because of built-in automatic snapshots for recovery when I inevitably break my installation. There was also previously a well reviewed gaming focused Manjaro fork, though I stuck with the main fork.

Mint had just as vocal of detractors saying it was unstable. Same with Ubuntu and I dislike the company focus anyway. Arch is Arch, and Manjaro is an Arch fork anyway. It’s the same problem someone looking at starting One Piece or Bleach or Naruto have: there is too much and even the fans appear to hate it more than anyone else, lol.

I don’t want to distro hop, that doesn’t interest me at my current stage. I want long term (at least a year) in between reinstallations. More self hosting is lined up for the future, so desktop is dipping my toes in the water as my server is piecemealed together.

I am mid switch, but it’s not been smooth or easy. I chose Manjaro and maybe I chose poorly. I am a lifelong techie, and have used Ubuntu and Mint in short stints in the past, but the transition is rough.

I didn’t attempt the switch before because I primarily played Destiny 2 and Bungie hates Linux. The enshittification of Destiny drove me away, and in theory the games I am playing now should work. I have had mixed results however.

I play Darktide and Vermintide 2 and heavily use their modding scenes to make them fully playable. Vortex mod manager is a huge bonus for this, and I still haven’t been able to set this up.

My Elgato equipment has community support, but has a bunch of steps to get working that I haven’t spent the time to fully research or attempt.

I still haven’t set up an automatic mount point for my shared NTFS drive to load on boot, both because I don’t have a good grasp on the fstab and because Windows does a chkdisk every time I mount it in Linux. Dual access storage still seems iffy as of 2025.

I am going to keep trying, because I hate Microsoft right now more than I dislike the learning curve and limitations. Not sure if that is enough to make this the year of the Linux desktop though.

You’re absolutely right, I feel almost as bad attempting to use Mac as I do Linux but it is a less powerful OS and I just accept there are things I can’t do. Plus it IS designed to be idiot proof.

For Linux, I run into the problem that there is a floor of knowledge assumed in every tutorial. Auto mount my secondary NTFS drive at boot? Just do XYZ in fstab. Don’t know where fstab is and where to make that entry? You’re SOL. I am comfortable in command line to an extent, but it’s been a long time since I dailied DOS, honestly don’t spend a lot of time in PowerShell, and networking equipment is a completely different beast.

Microsoft may suck, but I can usually find my way through a script or formula or something with their knowledgebase. My skill set doesn’t translate well, and I am finding it harder to learn than I probably should. I probably need to take an introductory Linux course.

This right here drove me to dual boot Manjaro. I can’t be the only person who has stacked monitors instead of side-by-side monitors. The UI is an abomination and the telemetry even moreso.

Linux is not turn key, and as a significantly PC gaming user it has limitations. I still have not set up modding yet, and whether Vortex mod manager will work or not is still unclear. I can’t get more than 60Hz out of my monitor on HDMI, which is required if I want 175Hz and 10bit color due to DisplayPort 1.4 limitations. Sleep causes my motherboard to permanently display a “CPU unknown” QLED Code. Instructions on simple tasks like creating a permanent drive mount at boot are confusing because there are steps that seem to be just assumed by everyone writing them. Etc.

I am working my way through these, but still find myself in Windows 11 most of the time because unfortunately it just works. Software is natively written for it, there is no searching for how to get peripherals or programs to work. I say this as a lifelong tech nerd who started on Windows 3.1 and DOS, and who’s job involves working with Linux based equipment. This shouldn’t be as hard as it has been to transition, but it is.

Only two ways to find out. Time to fire up universe sandbox, cause I’m fresh out of the ability to delete the sun in the production environment.

The real question is if the earth becomes a rogue planet or if Jupiter captures most/all of the remaining solar system. Jupiter is technically a failed star, so could it finally get it’s glowup from being the sun’s understudy and keep us all together until we fall into the gravitational well of a new star?

Voyage of the Mimi theme song intensifies.

The only caveat to that is that the card must be using x16 bus speed for the negligible impact, which only the high-end cards reliably do. A bunch of the 70 series and under cards are actually x8 bus speed, and then pcie 4 actually matters. ~20% vs 5% performance loss for 8x bus cards over pcie 3.

All the talk the last few months about SteamOS and Bazzite (plus Windows 10’s imminent death) got me to finally let up a Linux dual boot. Choosing a distro is a fairly contrary process with half the review lists being useless “tech media”, half AI buzzword word salad, and half distro stans trying to sell you on their version by pointing out flaws in the others.

I jumped in and am now on Manjaro as I use my computer primarily for gaming and media consumption. I originally planned this because of Manjaro Gaming edition, but Manjaro Gaming edition hasn’t been updated in years so looks like abandonware. Regular Manjaro it is, and add what I need as I go. I hope.

I decided to try Manjaro over PopOS due to enough anecdotal reviews about PopOS stability issues to make me second guess it. I have used Mint on old hardware in the past, and it was ok but I was concerned about gaming support and Nvidia drivers (accidentally jumped from Nvidia to Amd anyway, but that’s another story). Ubuntu has the same issue as PopOS on top of being the corporate distro. I also still have a bad taste from trying Ubuntu years ago and gaming attempts on it sucked.

I do not want to distro hop to find the promised land or just to see what the other grass is like, it’s just not something I am interested in and never have been. As bad as Windows can be, I have usually been able to ride an installation for multiple years barring external incident. I want to primarily sit down and use my computer. Reinstalls should be reserved for hardware refreshes and new builds.

If SteamOS can eventually simplify the decision paralysis involved in making the jump to Linux, it is going to be an absolute win. As a hard core techie with decades of experience building PCs, if I had this much trouble making the switch then I expect an even worse experience for the regular Joe.

A weizaird if you will. Fits the theme, carry on.

All great points and I don’t intend to get into any of the Israel/Palestine portion, but was interested in the statement that no ethnistate has a right to exist? Since there are many defacto ethnostates around the world, like Japan and China as easy examples, are you saying that these countries do not have a right to “exist” by setting immigration and other state policy to remain mostly homogeneous?

If not, what authority exists to declare and further to enforce this non-right. Is this belief about ethnostates coming from a free movement viewpoint against national/international borders, or a viewpoint that any mono-ethnic state is inherently racist, or something else?

I am not attempting to be contrarian or anything, I am genuinely interested in the thought process. I don’t think ethnostates are any kind of ideal or anything to aspire to, but also don’t see how I can say any other country doesn’t have a right to exist as the people of that country desire it to.

Behind the scenes Bungie decided they didn’t want to be a single franchise studio and sunk all the money from Destiny 2 into a bunch of failed projects. Something like 8 new IPs they tried to get off the ground and none have seen the light of day. Marathon or whatever it might be called now might get a release, but no guarantees. Basically squandered all the money and good will for the Destiny franchise trying to become the next Activision or EA and committed corporate suicide.

Add the new massively expensive campuses while having a mostly remote workforce, and the CEO buying millions of dollars in classic cars to display, and you have this worst timeline we live in. Expect Sony to replace the board and completely take over the studio soon.

Sunsetting killed the game for me too, I wasn’t able to replace ever piece of gear to keep my stat split correct and there were still entire element and weapon types missing entirely a year after it went into effect. I took a break, then a longer break, then never went back because I felt like I missed too much.

I heard they fully un-sunset everything they had sunset, but at this point I have zero desire to play the game anymore. This is after having played thousands of hours and having D2 as the only game I played for much of that time. As a 50/50 PVE and PVP player, the slow death of PVP and the removal of half the raids kills the game for me.

The sinking of the Going Merry. Oda made me cry for a boat, and I’m not even joking.

The US is over-policed, while simultaneously being under-policed for certain demographics, by a street gang operating under the color of law. We have an overabundance of bad shoots by the cops executing people for nonviolent propert crimes that needs to be dealt with. This is a real issue.

There is also a tendency for some to conflate that with self defense of/in a home under the (generally correct) idea that no property crime deserves the death penalty, like McDonalds managed to conflate the coffee burned old lady with frivolous lawsuits. I am saying that once you break into a home it is no longer “property crime” but something else.

I was more pointing out that there are legal and constitutional hurdles beyond the number of guns, the later of which you are hand waving away under a “the second best time is now” argument and ignoring the former. Especially with the current Supreme Court, we have at least 4 years before further gun control legislation attempts can be made. State and county guns bans and control laws are being struck down as unconstitutional left and right.

I am pro private gun ownership personally and believe in a legal right to self defense, but am not even talking about that. You are vigorously arguing for a pipe dream of seemingly “just make guns illegal, it will work out from there”, in the current political climate, while calling people with different opinions Nazis. All those blank steps before Profit are doing some very heavy lifting.