Have you run into the system clock issue yet?

I’m an experienced Linux user, I put Bazzite on my old machine that I’m using as an HTPC.

It’s imperfect. The install process is quite brittle, especially if you’re doing something as mundane as “I want the OS on this SSD and my home folder on that SSD”.

You can learn how to use the terminal. You have demonstrated the ability to compose a coherent sentence, you can learn.

Every terminal command is a program. Typing a “command” into the terminal is just typing the name of a program. If you type firefox, Firefox launches. If it’s installed, we’ll come back to that. Anything else in the “command” like if you see letters or words after a dash, something like ls -a is an option, it’s like ticking a box in a dialog window, but on the front end. I recommend spinning up a virtual machine or getting a Raspberry Pi or something you don’t care about, and following some tutorials. Learn how to move around the file system, install software, run some utilities.

About that “if it’s installed” part. You mentioned you run Zorin. Zorin is what I call a Trendy Distro Of The Month. I’ve been using Linux for twelve years now, this hasn’t stopped yet. There’s the mainstays like Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Red Hat, Fedora, Arch, OpenSuSe, there’s the niche special purpose things like Kali and TAILS and Puppy and Tiny, and then there’s the hundreds of quadrillions of “We took Ubuntu, put Steam on it by default, swapped SystemD for whatever.rs, swapped Firefox for Chromium and did a half-assed job at theming and extending Gnome that’s going to break every time they push an update.”

PeppermintOS, ZorinOS, ElementaryOS, Pop!_OS, Garuda, Nobara, Endeavor, Manjaro, Bazzite, Cachy, hundreds of others, are basically the same software in some slightly mutated permutation that most veterans aren’t familiar with. Invariably the veterans first hear about them from noobs who went looking for a distro that is “good for gaming” or “easy for beginners” and because SEO they find the Trendy Distro Of The Month. Which always offers some little gimmick that ultimately doesn’t matter. The process of getting a Bazzite ISO is taking a little Cosmo quiz about what you’re going to do, but then the installer is really borked compared to Mint or even Fedora.

A lot of instructions are written with Ubuntu or sometimes Fedora in mind, and then you pick a distro that differs from those, and then bitch that instructions don’t work.

Also, you need to upgrade your backup hardware if it takes 20 hours to image a drive. That should take minutes.

Artie! The coziest cat… …IN THE WORLD

I’m especially talking about smaller utility programs, like a USB stick formatter. If Gnome even has one of their own, it’ll be an empty window with a single button in the top bar that says “Format Drive.” There will be no choice or indication as to the name, the format, or perhaps even which drive to format. Turns out it will always do the removable drive that was mounted first chronologically. What the pity fuck do you mean you want to format a USB drive while your external backup HDD is attached? Who could ever want to do that? Oh and it’ll be carefully designed to be unusable if you use any theme but light Adwaita. If you want to do something specific, open the terminal and use dd.

KDE’s USB stick formatter will include several different wiping algorithms, you can key in a custom string to fill the empty drive space with with unicode support, settings for physical disks and solid state memory, the weird features of SD cards, it’ll support formats only used by Sun Solaris and OS/2, you can specify a maximum write speed, and it’s got a full set of drive encryption tools built in. All of this is perfectly themeable, but the UI elements are crammed a little too dense and not quite lined up right so it has a little bit of amateurish Windows 98 jank to it.

Cinnamon’s USB stick formatter will be somewhere in the middle. It lets you choose which drive to format, what name to call it, which of about 8 formats to put on it, whether to do a “full wipe”, and that’s about it. Made in GTK for Cinnamon’s design language, it looks straightforward but competent, like it’s from Windows 7. Does what almost all users need, almost all of the time, without getting in the way. The only snag I can think of is likely the Cinnamon menu’s fault: They provide a USB Stick Formatter, and a USB Image Writer. And it will switch places in the order it presents so you can’t memorize “for the formatter, type “USB” and hit enter, for the writer, type “USB” press down and enter.” They use the same icon so you have to stop and process the written language to get the app you want.

When I was in school in North Carolina, you could be on different “tracks.” Almost like a college major.

“University Prep” was for the AP kids who were going to graduate with a 5.0 GPA and half a semester of college credit. They took up through Calc 1, sometimes at the local community college, they did two extra semesters of English class (11th and 12th grade English were full year courses) and such.

“College Prep” was the “Hope you get good SAT scores” tier. A bit more room for electives, you were usually in “honors” classes, and graduated with no college credit to your name but ready to start in the fall as a Freshman at a state school. You typically took up through pre-calculus Algebra in college and Trigonometry or Calc 1 would be in your first semester of college. Two semesters of a foreign language were required, which is why I can kinda sound out French.

“College Tech Prep” was “Sew your name to your shirt because you’re going to trade school.” They had their own math classes which I think got most of the way through Algebra 1 and 2. They took shop classes, which didn’t trust the student to have ever been awake in a math class in their lives, hell I’ve gone to trade school at a community college, the first week they spent “teaching” us addition of whole numbers. Or, you were in JROTC.

“Career Prep” was the “You’re gonna be a parent before the end of high school, knock over an Advanced Auto Parts when you’re 20 and spend the rest of your life in and out of prison” tier. These were the kids that did eight semesters of PE, some of them could read.

Is there any part of Gnome that isn’t “minimal and not distracting?” In my experience, the ideal Gnome applet is a blank window with no features, only a burger menu that only has the About info and a button that says “Do Nothing” in the top bar.

I don’t know, I played with it years ago, didn’t need it and haven’t really touched it until now.

I use Syncthing for several things, especially syncing photos between my phone and desktop.

dammit I like Syncthing. does kdeconnect do a decent job at syncing files?

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To quote Brian Lunduke, because the GPL is viral and functioning systems licensed under the GPL have been published, if a future Rust-based MIT version of Linux ever comes out, we can just “Fork it, then we’ll have our own Linux.”

“Goodbye” used to mean that, though we’ve started to take it to mean “our relationship is permanently severed, I expect to never communicate with you again in my life.” Which, kind of amazing we felt the need to have a word for that.

“Twelve ninety-nine, first window.” is what usually happens. I’m not the kind of dork that repeats it as “One Two Decimal Niner Niner.” The ham bands are full of geezers that’ll happily play that game with me if I want.

So, per the Pilot/Controller Glossary, “OVER” means “My transmission ended; I expect a response.” Because the communique at the speaker is finished and I don’t expect a response, “OUT” would be more appropriate, meaning “Conversation is over, I expect no response.” Though on the air you’ll often hear “Good day” which isn’t in the P/CG but I think is nicer.

It’s a little hard to comment on high end 4 years ago with low end now because technology marches on, but no I don’t think it would.

I also built a PC with similar specs for my cousin (we’ll call her Lila) to that in October of 2022, Ryzen 5600X/Radeon RX6800 (non-XT). Built that rig for my cousin. Socket AM4 B550 chipset, 16GB DDR4-3200 RAM. I had a budget of $1500, $500 alone went to the GPU. The 6800 was two years old at that point. Solid mid-range PC that can handle 1440p gaming with no questions asked…okay one question asked: “are you sure you want ray tracing enabled on an RDNA 2 platform?”

You could go higher. 32 or even 64GB of RAM, a 5800X3D CPU, a Radeon 6950XT or RTX-3090 would provide much more solid 4k gaming with significantly better ray tracing…for a couple more grand.

The machine I built last year, a Ryzen 7700X/Radeon 7900GRE for myself. I spent $2000, I got socket AM5, 32GB DDR5-6000, a 16 thread CPU, and the third-to-highest GPU in the range. This thing does 1440p ultrawide or reaches into 4k with aplomb and ray tracing is worth turning on. You can still go up from here; the 7900XT and XTX are even more powerful and again Nvidia offers even higher, and there’s several CPU SKUs above me. Mine is a mid-to-high end PC, I expect it to be relevant for 5 more years, then I’ll buy a Ryzen 11800X3D on clearance for it.

Meanwhile, the PC I’m building now is for a 12 year old (Lila’s daughter, let’s call her Maggy). 16GB of DDR5-5600, a spec’d down 6-core without integrated graphics, the pack-in Wraith Stealth cooler, and a x600 tier GPU for a solid 1080p experience, more than enough for the hand-me-down 1080p60 monitor she’s gonna get with it. This computer is the same generation as mine, but less than half the price at $900 and change. And I honestly struggle to build much lower than that without resorting to used parts, new old stock, or jank.

Gilette gives away razor handles to men to encourage them to buy their blades.

Inkjet printers are often cheaper than a change of ink cartridges.

I think it was Standard Oil, gave away hurricane lanterns in order to sell kerosene.

Most video game consoles are sold for less than they cost to make because the company expects to earn more in video game sales.

I’m right now in the process of building an “entry level PC” from components, here defining it as new currently produced off the rack parts, no used, no refurbished, and with a Ryzen 7500F and a Radeon RX7600 “AMD can’t decide whether their cards get an XT or not, so why should I?” I price it out right at $900. To go much below that, I’m gonna have to resort to some jank.

Dumpster dive a core i5 10400F Optiplex, stick a GTX-980 in it, install Linux Mint and you’re making 120FPS in CS:GO for the price of a foot pic.

And a C suite that need to have their genitals kicked in.

I use a dishwasher. It’s easier and uses less water.

I’m a pilot. At a drive through, I read back the price as a matter of reflex.

This honestly isn’t my experience.

A couple years ago now, I went to install Windows 10 on a PC. It got partway through the install process, and then failed with an “Error 0x76A421B3E7291A” or something. Completely opaque, like the damn thing spat out a memory pointer as the only clue. Installing Linux Mint on the same machine threw an error, “Unable to complete installation due to BIOS TBS error. Check TBS BIOS settings and try again. For more information, see this wiki page” and it gave a clickable link, because this is running in a live environment and has a functioning copy of Firefox installed, and it gave a QR code so the page could be easily pulled up on a mobile device.

Windows is not inherently more user friendly.