This morning someone sent a message in chat that they were concerned for me and suggested engaging in hobbies and interests as a distraction from my dumb gay tranny problems. They put it more nicely than that, though. This is I guess an attempt at doing that. Recently I switched over from windows 10 to linux. Here’s how it’s gone so far:

First, a bit about my background.

I’m not particularly experienced with linux, but I’m decently familiar with command line in general, and I have used linux plenty of times for certain things but I’ve never really used it as a daily driver. I used debian for some classes in school, and I like to do dev work in an ubuntu vm bc developing anything on windows is actually fucking hell on earth, but that was only ever really super basic stuff like directory management, installing packages, running programs, etc. Simple stuff.

A while back (I think maybe before I actually started using ubuntu wsl for work) I realized my old chromebook still worked so I got a new charger for it but noticed it was running super slow and security upgrades ended for it. I didn’t really give a shit about the security updates bc i didn’t have anything on the drive that was important at all, and i wasn’t super concerned about getting a virus on the network from a computer i rarely used and was basically dead anyways, but I had nothing else to do so i started looking into seeing if you could install linux on one. And apparently yeah, you can (see docs.chrultrabook.com for detailed info). I got lucky and the model i had just had a write-protect screw so I didn’t need to get any new equipment which was nice. Anyways I followed the instructions in the chrultrabook docs and installed custom firmware which allowed me to then flash an OS onto the system and overwrite chromeOS. Again, I had nothing better to do so I installed arch.

The process of installing arch was tedious, and annoying, and very time consuming, but in the end i got everything set up right, and it was pretty nice actually. I riced up my setup a little too, and things were running faster than they were previously. Still not exactly fast though. It’s an old laptop with 4 gb of ram and an old, probably dusty cpu, so it’s obviously not gonna end up being too fast, and the fact I installed it with KDE wasn’t helping bc of how low-speced my machine was. I didn’t really use it for like a month and then i figured I should probably update it (horrible mistake) broke everything, and then decided instead of bothering with fixing arch i’d just install a new OS instead. So I decided to install Ultramarine.

I hate ultramarine. It’s great in theory. Like fedora, but with everything preconfigured to work real nice. Fantastic. Great. Not a rolling release distro like arch so you’re less likely for a temporary lack of maintenance to break everything. Awesome. Ultramarine Linux has literally never worked for me. It worked for like a day and then decided to shit itself. After that, I tried out Pop!_OS for like a hot second but the screen rendered upside-down so i decided to install OpenSUSE instead.

It’s occurring to me now that these operating systems sound like they’re just being picked willy-nilly. The reason I was following this weird list was because the chrultrabook docs recommend these distros over others.

Anyways, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I actually really like tumbleweed. It’s a rolling release distro but it’s not quite as bleeding edge as arch so things get tested more before release. It’s really lightweight but user-friendly enough for someone who’s not an expert, like me, and it has the open build repository which is like the arch user repositoryso it basically has all of the advantages with fewer of the disadvantages that matter to me. Also it’s super easy to roll back, and ik you can do the same shit with arch but i’m literally stupid and openSUSE is easy and i’m stupid and i think brownies from a box are maybe just better sometimes and that’s okay. That reminds me, I’ve been getting into baking recently and maybe I should talk about that in a separate post, but whatever that’s besides the point. I still have tumbleweed installed on my laptop and I like it well enough. It does everything I need it to. Though now i use GNOME instead of KDE as a DE (desktop environment, forgot to define that term earlier) which is more mac-like which is fine but it’s more lightweight which is good for an old laptop i don’t use that much except to browse the internet.

I also previously installed EndeavourOS as a dual boot on my desktop PC. It was fine until I tried to test if I installed the nvidia drivers right (bc i’m a chud and I have an nvidia graphics card) and I guess I must’ve not bc I tried opening Disco Elysium and it got stuck loading forever and I had to manually reboot my pc and decided I didn’t care enough to get rid of windows yet and just went back to win10.

Windows 10 End of Life

Recently Microsoft put into action the end of security updates for windows 10. My computer was built in like 2016 so it lacks a tpu module that would enable it to upgrade to windows 11. I could easily bypass this and be fine, but “upgrading” to windows 11 with all its fucking copilot shit sounded so fucking infuriating that I decided to just switch to linux. Right now I’m dual booting still in case I need any data on my win10 partition, and even then I don’t have to fully commit until a year from now because they have extended security updates for windows 10 users so the real end of life is october 2026, but I figured I’d get used to it now because I really really really really really don’t want to “““upgrade””” to windows 11. I know people who use win11 and every time i try and help them troubleshoot anything I just get fucking pissed off because it truly is just win10 but worse in every conceivable way and i already fucking hate win10.

Anyways I decided to try out Bazzite which is an atomic distribution of linux based on UniversalBlue/Fedora. That’s a lot of words to say basically, it’s babyproof. Atomic distros are distributions of linux where there are certain things that you can’t change, making it easier to roll back to a previous version if you accidentally manage to break something, and making it easier to update without stressing about something breaking. That all sounded great to me bc like, I really just want my computer to work at the end of the day. I don’t need it to do anything fancy, just run git, godot, krita, steam, and firefox and I’ll be fine. Bazzite sounded great because it also has automatic nvidia drivers installed and stuff and a bunch of tweaks with proton and stuff so if you want to play a game it’ll generally just work. And in my experience so far, it has with minimal configuration. Though if you have an NVIDIA GPU it’s not at the point yet where I would recommend switching. If you have an AMD it’s a-ok tho, and honestly will probably run your shit better than windows since AMD’s drivers are open-source instead of proprietary like NVIDIA so there’s a lot more support for AMD drivers on linux. Also bazzite comes pre-installed with distrobox, so if you really need to do something you normally couldn’t on an atomic distro, then you can just use an integrated virtual machine to do it anyways. It gave me a little bit of a headache at the beginning, but it works perfect now, so I can work on the same environment I worked on when I daily drove windows (an ubuntu vm lol), but the integration makes it easier to connect external devices for debugging as well so it’s really nice actually. But right, problems with NVIDIA. Bazzite only uses Wayland (which is basically a protocol for displaying graphics on-screen) as opposed to X11. X11 afaik (and i barely have looked into any of this) is made by windows, whereas wayland is a purely linux thing. For the purposes of NVIDIA GPUs, this means wayland is a little bit less supported and so there can sometimes be weird little graphical glitches:

  • On kde, tooltips are sometimes stretched or shrunk when i hover over a program on the toolbar. This corrects itself after a second, though, and doesn’t happen very often.
  • When my cursor changes states (like when changing when hovering over text) it glitches out for a fraction of a second before returning to normal. It’s really small but just a little bit annoying.

That’s basically it. Also with NVIDIA it on average runs games a little slower than win10 but my monitor can only display a max of 60fps anyways so like, i don’t really care. If I was the kind of person who cared about perfect smoothness I wouldn’t be using a PC from 2016. But games all still run. I can play 2077 and get really agp about panam and meta about river, and I can run tabletop sim to pursue my other malebrained interests. So overall, I like bazzite, but I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, though it’s definitely getting there, compared to most other distros I’ve tried.

average linux user

new valve hardware announced, linux standing strong with 3% of desktop users, huge day for autogynephiles everywhere also mogs me