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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I disagree with dual booting at the early stages. I like dual booting (or even better a VM if that covers you) once you’ve figured out what works and what doesn’t (assuming something vital is in the “doesn’t” category); but, if you are trying to decide if it is right for you, I don’t think it does you any favors to be able drop back into old habits so easily. My recommendation is drop a bit of money on a second hard drive, pull the windows drive out and install just Linux. See if it works for you, if your “must-haves” are running painlessly or not. You still have the safety net if things go REALLY badly of just popping in the old windows drive and changing your boot options in the BIOS, but you will be less tempted to just boot Windows every time you use the computer - until you really have to.

    For a start, in practice you aren’t likely to actually reboot and load into a different OS very often. You can’t really give something new a fair shake while you are still spending most of your time somewhere else. Minor things, like how you like your system to look/work will just push you back to windows because it’s easy and you won’t ever look at the options to find out that it can do what you want (and likely more). Second, there is the pesky windows updates that likes to fuck with the boot loader.

    This is really only advice for an enthusiast that really wants to try Linux. I know some will disagree - everyone’s experiences are different, but it is definitely my preferred methodology and helped me make the leap.









  • I didn’t think either were noticeably worse than in gimp for my use, but you might be comparing to a higher bar (or your use is more intricate than mine), lol.

    I have quite liked the ability to turn on snapping for lining things up, and managed recently to freehand a very nearly perfect hexagon with it’s help… But I really wish there were some options for drawing polygons though… Even mspaint has the option to draw some basic shapes like stars and arrows and various polygons with just click and drag.



  • Garuda Linux hands down. Arch at its core but has just enough hand-holding for me to be comfortable and able to do most things via a GUI out-of-the-box.

    I might not have made the switch when I did if I hadn’t found this distro.

    Bazzite for an honorable mention, running it on my laptop and recently had some update troubles as it hadn’t been booted up in a while and ended up rebasing to the newest image (and discovered there was a specific image for Asus laptops with nvidia GPUs). The rebasing process really WOW’ed me…



  • Anti-cheat doesn’t actually need to eliminate cheating, it just needs to make the masses think it works by slightly raising the bar for entry into cheating. Cheating is still rampant, players just feel better about it and complain about smurfs more because they dont think its possible to get around kernal level anti-cheats.

    Honestly I’d be much happier if the industry moved away form terrible anti-cheat software in general.



  • I just don’t agree. First, I don’t think a monopoly is an inherent part of nature, and further I disagree that monopolies exist because some company just makes the absolute best product and people end up always choosing it. A monopoly’s key feature is not giving the consumer a real choice through shady and unfair business practices.

    Also, windows is not the better product. They don’t make the best OS. Arguments could be made that they have a better OS for gaming, but for almost everything else they are worse than basically every alternative (not just Linux) but still dominate market share due to lack of consumer choice. At the retailer, hardware is tied to an OS - if you want macos you have to buy Mac hardware. If you want chromeos you have to by an underwhelming netbook.

    IMO, keeping windows around just in case a company does some underhanded shit like kernal anti-cheat or invasive DRM so you can give your support to the company doing the underhanded shit is a detriment to progress.

    I’d rather struggle to learn freecad than keep windows around even though fusion360 is easier (for me) to understand, because I don’t want to reward bad behavior. If those of us that can switch don’t, then things don’t get better. I couldn’t have made the switch if thousands of people more knowledgeable and talented before me hadn’t taken the first steps. It’s soapboxy, I know, but I also feel it’s important.


  • It’s all about where to draw the line, and what you are able to tolerate, I guess. The biggest problem with that though is continuing to support a game / Dev / publisher that is consistently doing these awful things.

    If you aren’t able to tell your friends “no, I’m not playing that game, and here’s why” then the industry will just slide deeper into these terrible practices and the entire games industry gets worse. Some people don’t even understand what anti-cheat is doing (and think it works), and if those of us that do, that they trust, don’t explain it to them, they won’t have the opportunity to make an informed decision of whether to support it or not.


  • Yea, but honestly that’s not a Linux problem imo. Invasive anti-cheat has been a deal breaker for me since its inception. It started as “I don’t want to deal with your shitty software always running in the background eating up my CPU cycles, need maximum performance baby” and then quickly became “I’m not giving your shitty software kernal access to my entire machine, I don’t trust you”.

    It’s made so much worse when you realize it doesnt even actually stop cheaters…


  • My install does not seem to do this. I removed the windows drive when installing Linux on a new drive. Put both drives in and select which one to boot in the bios. Its been that way for about a year and, so far, grub updates have never noticed the windows install nor added to grub.

    That’s with bazzite, can’t speak for any other distro as that is the only dual-boot machine I own. Bazzite does mention they do not recommend traditional dual boot with the boot loader and recommend the bios method so maybe they have something changed to avoid that?


  • Printed a sun visor extension out of PLA in my early days of printing. Had to run out to my car at like noon to grab something and it was deformed and droopy and could be reshaped as easily as a piece of leather… I learned a lesson that day, lol.

    I printed a test piece (something much smaller) out of PETG to see if that would handle it. It would not, also got soft and sloppy after a couple of hours in the car.


  • Get whatever printer fits your budget and needs. You don’t have to have a prusa printer to use prusa slicer, and even if you don’t want to use prusa slicer; Cura, super slicer, and orca slicer all work on Linux natively as well. You shouldn’t have a problem with slicing software at all.

    Also, as a tip, whatever printer you buy probably comes with an installer for a proprietary fork of (an old version of) one of the main slicers. Skip it. Go download Cura or prusa slicer and there will likely be profiles available during initial setup for your exact printer. Definitely if you stick to the bigger, well-known brands.