right now is my year of the linux laptop :3

Feels like a pyramid to me. If I don’t have good sleep and good hydration I struggle mightily to control my food intake, and if I’m eating too much then I’m aching so badly and feeling so sluggish that I barely get anywhere at the gym.

Eating that will not make you happy.

It will give you at best a brief moment of pleasure, but the pain it will bring later is not worth it!

It’s not just ONE burger–that is yet another burger. An element of self-harm, another step on a journey that takes you FURTHER away from who you want to be! Don’t take it! Draw the line! Let this be the moment you STOPPED the trek toward ruin!

Skipping this one is not depriving you, you’ve had them before; they’re old news. You know what’s GREAT news though? Being able to tie your own shoe laces. Being able to WIPE YOUR OWN ASS. Being able to climb a set of stairs without feeling like you’re about to die. Being able to stand in place without becoming out of breath. Be grateful that you have not crossed those thresholds because YOU STOPPED NOW.

Oh indeed! And that’s why I love GOG! I actually try to check GOG first just in case I can buy a game I want there before I go through with buying it on steam. I would actually gladly pay MORE for the GOG version because it removes bullshit like DRM!

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You know sometimes I actually straight up FORGET that Steam is run by the same company that created Half-Life?

They:

1. identified a gradient of human wants
   (Video games exist; I want them on my computer)
2. Created a vector for that want to be satisfied
   (Digital distribution that conveys the games I want to my computer)
3. Stayed the FUCK OUT OF THE WAY

When you do something well, people don’t notice you’ve done anything at all.

Linux devs will NEVER suffer kernel level anticheat, so all games that require it will refuse to run. This is more of a problem with gaming industry culture at large, really. But it’s still only going to affect people who use Linux at the end of the day.

I have mint running on my laptop now.

Pro tip for anyone who wants to try Linux and maybe attempt to set up dual boot with Windows:

TURN OFF BITLOCKER ENCRYPTION IN WINDOWS FIRST.

IF you don’t, here’s what happened to me:

Mint live USB instance booted easily at first. I started the install process and selected dual boot. Mint setup then proceeded to prompt me to enroll a MACHINE OWNER KEY… And then realized that bitlocker encryption would prevent it from setting up dual boot.

It said, to paraphrase, “exit mint setup, log back into Windows, disable bitlocker, then you can come back and install”

Well that was a fucking lie because YOU CANNOT GET BACK INTO MINT!

WHY? Because mint FORGOT the MOK!

When you try to get back into mint from the boot selection menu, it says

Something has gone seriously wrong: import_mok_state() failed: Not Found

the upshot is that you computer will never let mint live USB session ever boot again UNLESS you disable secure boot in BIOS and rename grub to mmx64.efi in the ISO image.

And if you DO those things chances are mint will never present you with the option to detect and set up dual boot with you extant windows instance ever again.

I went ahead and nuked my windows 11 instance on my laptop because it was being a bitch and clearly was never going to be a good neighbor to mint. I have no major regrets because mint is nice and I like it. It just didn’t turn out how I would’ve ideally intended. But one way or another Windows 11 HAD TO GO. So, in the broad sense, I wanted to switch to mint… And I have! All good.

it happened with etcher, and then continued to happen with rufus. i didn’t even try dd flash mode at first.

what’s crazy is, it WORKED ONCE. ONCE!

I almost wonder if windows somehow detected that another OS ran on the silicon and said “ohhhh no you fucking don’t, FUCK YOU ONLY I GET TO BE YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM!!!”

… okay so uh

i’m probably gonna have to go somewhere more help-focused and immediate than this but

something weird happened.

i bought a brand new USB drive to act as my linux mint boot media and flashed the iso onto it.

it booted into the temporary instance easily! instantly! I started to install thinking i could just set up dual boot with the extant windows instance.

well… it got to the point where it said “hey wait you have to disable secureboot or you have to reformat your entire windows installation”

okay maybe i want to check ONE MORE TIME to see if there’s anything in this windows instance that I still want.

so i halt the linux mint installation process and go back into windows. I take one last catalogue of stuff i’d want to reference later, and then try to boot back into the linux mint live session straight from the usb stick

… nope.

it says ‘something has gone terribly wrong’ and ‘failed to load UEFI’ or something

but that’s not the thing that really spooked me because I thought I could go back into windows, reformat the USB key, and just re-flash the linux mint iso and start over from scratch

that’s all background stuff, here’s the important crazy thing:

the USB key is now reading that it only has a size of FIVE. MEGABYTES. FIVE.

EVEN IF I TRY TO REFORMAT IT, IT STILL IS CONVINCED IT’S ONLY FIVE MEGABYTES

the linux mint iso can’t even FIT on it now

i can’t even reflash it

i … but … how do i even …

WAT

yeah that ancient Sony Vaio is loooong gone. it was manufactured in 2008 or something and was a hand me down from my aunt. we haven’t had it since like 2021

but i do have a laptop outside my main rig and I’m gonna try booting mint off an external drive just to try it out and see how i like the feel again!

i appreciate the encouragement ^_ you know, maybe. I’m haunted by this fear (I try to tell myself it’s an irrational one) that attempting to get into linux now would mess things up for me and that i’d end up stranded and unable to get back but … mint is admittedly VERY APPROACHABLE… hm. Maybe I can drop by staples and buy a spare thumbdrive, put a mint boot image on it, and try it on my battlestation today.

i tried mint on an old laptop for a little while and it was nice. i’m thinking of adopting linux for daily-driving when windows 10 stops being supported entirely. But i’m considering going with Bazzite when that time comes, maybe…

If someone accused you of being an internal combustion engine and their only supporting evidence was posting a wikipedia article about internal combustion engines it would be equally as irrelevant as you pointing at someone, saying “You’re a tankie!” and then posting the wikipedia article about tankies.

I’m not gonna be equipped to make a nuanced and detailed take right now but in my experience hexbears are alright, fun to talk to, I can learn things from them, and at worst they’re spicy.

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what works for me is quietly telling one person that i’m leaving, just in case anyone notices, with the understanding that i don’t expect anyone to notice.

oh is it short for ‘manual’?

what the fuck is a man page

oh for fucks sake, now i suddenly remember how the timeline in the fallout franchise included the US annexing canada…

yep. we’re in the darkest timeline.