Hello welcome to the first BLOG thing that I'm putting together. I was around, at least a little bit, contemporarily with ye olde neocities but I don't distinctly remember any... bloggy type places. It feels weird to "blog" on a site like this, but maybe that's just some sort of market based mind control. YOU CANNOT BLOG UNLESS YOU ARE ON BLOGSPOT. OR LIVE JOURNAL. OR MEDIUM!!! SIGN UP FOR THE BLOG ACCOUNT TO WRITE BLOG STUFF. YOU NEED TO INSTALL GHOST AND A WHOLE DATABASE ON YOUR WEBSITE FOR IT TO BE A BLOG. IT NEEDS TO HAVE AN ADMIN PANEL.

... anyways...

That's not off topic for what I want to write about today.

Two weeks ago or so work forced us to upgrade to Windows 11. Huge bummer. Like, really huge. I know there are a lot of reasons to be upset, but the most apparent is the taskbar. At work, my taskbars are vertical. I have spent a significant amount of time in this configuration. I sit through the two hour upgrade of Windows 11 and spend time digging through the (horrible) settings app trying to find out what I can do to move the task bars around. I know that people have talked about the taskbar not being customizable. I don't believe it. Panic fills me as I toggle each option and see nothing I want to to happen, happen.

Time to search "windows 11 move task bars." I read a few results and see the classic help forum "PLEASE POST WINDOWS MINIDUMP FILE FOR US TO HELP YOU" style response. Absolute garbage. More searching takes me to Stardock. For a mere $8, I can pay to make windows function like it did one version ago. Incredible. I don't mind giving developers money for good software. I'm frustrated I MUST pay money to get my old workflow back. Stardock software published Galactic Civilizations 3 and 4. That's why it's familiar, huh.

Anyways - I've been investigating moving to Linux or some other kind of system for a long while now. At a glacial pace. At a pace where I'm sure we'd be on Windows 12 before I changed anything. I've always orbited linux - run msys2 or wsl or whatever cursed subsystem of linux on windows so I can have a terminal and use git. I bought a "Linux for Dummies" book when I was 14 and read the first foreward paragraph more times than I want to admit.

I want something different, and for the longest time I've convinced myself that I'm not capable of running my own system. What if I install something wrong? What if it's not 'the right' package, editor, window compositor, system clock??? WHAT IF?? It's my damn system. Nobody is going to see it. If they do, they'll be in arms distance. That will greatly filter the kind of conversations that will be had.

I installed Linux Mint on a spare PC a few months ago to try some things out, and given my penchant for just accepting defaults (when I'm not already entrenched, this is an important note), it'll probably end up as my daily driver until something happens and I get angry again. And that's okay. Whenever I do any amount of research on what desktop environment or distro, my head spins. I've even had arguments about it. I have installed something and it works nominally enough for me to turn on my computer and play a few of the games I'm interested in, and then compile ESP32 code that makes a piezo scream. That's what I want.

My fantasy is much more. I want to build the airplane as I fly it on SerenityOS or Haiku or IronClad or DuskOS. I'm a long way from there, but I think I just need to jump in. I'm terrible at jumping in. I need to spend two hours standing with the water up to my thighs before I sit down into the pool and go AH! for a moment. Then it's not so bad. Maybe someday I'll learn.

Uhh, anyways, I guess the moral of this story is: fuck you windows 11 you fucking piece of shit unlock the damn task bars. Oh also, I don't know if it's windows's problem, or the Stardock toolbar dealy but when I click on an icon that has multiple windows, then click on a window, there's like a 20% chance it just flashes the window and doesn't focus. Oh also also if I click on an icon that has subwindows, and then DON'T click on the icon, the stack of windows never dismisses. Oh also also also, if I click on an icon that has multiple windows, sometimes it takes 5+ seconds to open the stack of windows.

... literally written on linux! 5 months since the last blog post is probably the best pace I have ever maintained on any sort of personal writing project thing. I shouldn't celebrate too early considering I have a whole two posts, this one included, but I dunno, this is MY BLOG and I'll do what I WANT!!!!

Anyways, major life changes! Or at least, major tech-life changes. I've been running Linux as my full time personal OS for... a month now? Two months? And it's been great! Like seriously, I don't know if there's much to detail about me not liking it.

I got a fresh SSD some time before the RAM/Memory armageddon, perhaps a few months, and it sat on my desk staring at me for the longest time. I absolutely loathe turning my computer off and I'm one of those people who taut the 300+ days of up time screenshots while my computer wheezes and begs for sleep. My computer started crashing a bunch and I realized that one of my RAM modules was very, very sick. Thus, impetus to bring my computer offline and poke around on the insides.

Working on my computer is an absolute, horrific pain, and changing any component requires me to remove all of my case fans and RAM, and sometimes even my CPU cooler to get things put together. While testing my RAM to determine which bit of it was bad, I swapped in my neglected SSD and decided that that would be a great time to try Linux out on my main machine. I chose Linux Mint with Cinnamon since that's what I used on my other PC and I liked it enough.

Pretty much anything that I've wanted to play or run has worked out of the box on Linux without much exception. Every steam game I have installed has run perfectly (except for Skate 4... damn you EA) and everything else has worked with whatever Lutris install scripts were available.

Quick list of stuff off the top of my head that totally runs with no issue:

• Guildwars 2: Install through Lutris. Just works.
• Divinity: Original Sin 2: Steam. Just works.
• Wakfu: Ankama Launcher is provided as an App Image. Wakfu installed through it works easy peasy
• Arturia Audio Plugins: Extremely easy to get running. Just install the arturia software manager with wine and everything downloads fine through that. Small caveat of needing to run ya-bridge to get the VSTs to bridge, but you run it one time anytime you have new plugins and that's it. The plugins work flawlessly in REAPER!
• Rider editor: Just works from the website, even integrates nicely with Unity for debugging on Linux. The same can't be said for Unity's editor but I was still pretty surprised at just how well the IDE part worked.

I won't write an exhaustive list - most stuff works on Steam, and a lot of other surprising software just works, or requires relatively minimal effort to get working. I've since been expressing to friends that they should give things a try in the least committal, non-threatening way. I understand it's not for everyone, but I've run into friends that talk up that Linux is impenetrable and you can't do anything on it and that is... increasingly becoming not true. Easy AntiCheat and BattlEye now have Proton ports that work in those games, ports are becoming available for artistic software and other stuff. I understand switching operating systems are big, but so far most of my challenges have been the same level of difficulty as getting random stuff to run on Windows. How many times do you have to crawl forums and steam guides and follow strings of incredibly bizarre cargo cult style instructions? "Oh yeah, delete this random folder in /Local Low/ and again in /Roaming/ and then open the game and then change the resolution and then close the game and then reboot windows and next time you open the game you'll be able to join your friend online again" - madness.

Linux isn't perfect and I've had to chase down some things before, maybe it's scarier that you have to compile things on occasion, but I've found that most projects that I've had to do this for you just... follow directions and install the dependencies and cmake build . && cd build && make install and wow you have that application you wanted and it's in your app launcher menu.

I think I'm becoming one of those "JuSt InStAlL lInUx" people. Nothing is a silver bullet and all software is awful and we should have never invented electricity. I don't think there's any moral high ground to using Linux above Windows, or Windows above Linux, or MacOS or Unix or FreeBSD or whatever - everyone should use the thing that they want to use. I feel like there's a lot of fear in the average user that Linux is an uncomfortable or unwelcoming experience, but so was Windows when you were 10, or driving when you were 16.

tl;dr: I'm using Linux on my non-work PC (because work domain controller and Microsoft ADS blah blah) and it's great and I don't know why I waited so damn long to do this.

Cheers, Deer (did you see what I did? did you like that? was it funny? please clap...)

Here is where I would put a blog post if I HAD one