I Hate The Person Linux Turns Me Into

Saturday April 12th, 2025

Tags: archive, LinuxSaga, rant, tech

I don't have anything planned this weekend outside of the usual chores, so I embarked on the project of setting up linux on my computer. I had made the decision weeks ago, but I wanted to wait until we finished this round of archipelago streams, because I knew it might take days or weeks to get my streaming setup working and stable again. We finished on Thursday, so on Friday I backed up all my essential files, and today I did a clean install. I had stuck with Windows 7 as long as possible, but it's time to finally pull the plug.

Archipelago is the thing that finally convinced me: most of the game integrations don't work with Windows 7, and the April 1 update killed Windows 7 support completely. I could've stuck with the old version--none of the newly supported games are in my wheelhouse--but my options would still be extremely limited. Most supported games that otherwise run fine on 7, like VVVVVV, have randomizers that require windows 10. It doesn't make sense to me, because you can write a program for Windows 7 and it'll still work on Windows 10. There's backwards compatibility. I don't know why people use new APIs just because they exist.

Anyway, the installation went fine, all my hardware seems to be supported (it's a Thinkpad, so no surprises there) but every single facet of using the software has required painstaking research to figure out what I'm supposed to do. The app store on this version of linux (fedora XFCE) is called "dandified yum dragora", a terrible and meaningless name I'll never remember, so it will always be duke nukem forever to me. Some of the programs I want to use are on there, but a lot of them aren't. I installed VLC to watch videos, and it didn't come with any of the codecs it apparently needs to work. Codecs? I thought the whole point of VLC is that it doesn't require codecs. I was thrilled in 2009 when VLC came along and I no longer had to mess with "k-lite codec pack" and the like.

After googling and finding dozens of forum threads for ways to install the codecs and trying 3 or 4 of them, I finally gave up and took someone's advice to install VLC from "flatpack" instead. Flatpack is like DNF, but different. It doesn't have a UI, so I had to use a command prompt to install it.

The two main uses for a computer are 1. using the web, and 2. watching videos. Linux came with firefox, so #1 was at least taken care of, but I shouldn't have to go into the command prompt to do the very next thing on the list. Off to a bad start!

Once it said it was finished installing, it wasn't installed, so I had to google what to do next. I logged out and back in. It's there now.

Next I had to install Chrome for when my spouse wants to use my computer. This was a piece of cake! I went to the chrome website, I clicked the "get chrome" button, it downloaded a file, I double-clicked it and installed chrome. I hate chrome, but you gotta hand it to them, they make it easy to use their program. If only every program cared about whether people use it.

Next I needed to install bizhawk, for games. It's not on any of the app stores, but it wasn't too hard to set up. I downloaded a .tar.gz file (which is like a zip file but worse) and extracted the contents into a folder. I tried running the executable, but nothing happened. This took some figuring out, but basically the program doesn't run if you click the executable directly, you have to make a desktop shortcut. So I did that, and it launched, but I couldn't play any games. As it turns out, this version doesn't come with any of the firmware you need. Everything, everything on linux requires at least two or three extra steps nobody tells you about.

I googled the bizhawk firmware and downloaded all of them. I got a couple NES and PSX games to work. When I tried to set up the PSX controller, the icons for triangle, square and O don't show up. Just X. So I'll have to trial-and-error to figure out which fields correspond to which buttons. But first I have to figure out why all of the buttons on my controller aren't working. When I first tried to configure it, start and select weren't working. I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Now L and R aren't working. When I use hardwaretester.com, all of the buttons are recognized, so I don't know what the problem is. AFAICT, Linux doesn't have a gamepad configuration tool, so I have no way to even troubleshoot it.¹

Okay, let's forget about programs for a minute and talk about UI: at a glance, modern linux desktops don't look too bad. Some of them even have themes where everything doesn't look completely flat. Nice! Way better than modern Windows.

However, even on themes modeled after Classic Windows, the illusion of user-friendliness shatters as soon as you try to use it. You immediately find yourself confronted with missing UI functionality you weren't even aware you need until it's gone, at which point you realize how indispensable it is.

For example, on my default installation, the color of the active window's title bar was the same as inactive title bars, no matter what theme I used. Not being able to tell which window has focus meant I would start typing a chat message in Discord, and suddenly whatever I had open in Firefox would start responding to a bunch of hotkeys I didn't intend to press. Maddening!

There are about a million different settings menus that sound like they might let you change UI colors, such as "Display", "Appearance", "Color profiles", "Desktop", "Panel", "Panel Profiles", "Window Manager", "Window Manager Tweaks", "XF Dashboard", etc. etc. Can you guess which one of these has the option to change the active window title bar color? If you guessed "none of them", you would be correct. I had to go into the folder for the theme I'm using, create a CSS file, and add a line of CSS I'd have never known about if I didn't happen to find a forum thread where someone asked this question. There isn't even a placeholder file with a bunch of example code I can uncomment, I have to somehow know what the elements are called.

What about the taskbar? Looks normal, but observe: The Firefox taskbar item isn't all the way to the left, even though it was the first program I opened:

The web browser has been the main program I use on a computer for at least 20 years. I have 20 years of muscle memory that says the web browser is always the very first thing on the taskbar. If this is ever not the case, I drag it all the way to the left so it is the first thing. On linux, of course dragging doesn't do anything.

I stumbled on the answer on my own, which is good because I have no idea what these things are called or how to google them. They're not icons; they have icons, but what do you call the thing the icon and text label lives on? The answer is "window buttons", apparently, but I've never consciously thought of them as "buttons" before now. I didn't need a name for them, because they worked the way they're supposed to.

Anyway, you have to go into "Panel Preferences"--"panel" is what the taskbar is called on linux, even though the word "taskbar" isn't trademarked and they could just call it that--and enable the setting for the "sorting order" to "allow drag-and-drop". Why isn't this the default? Why do I have to request special permission?

You are a computer. Let me drag. Let me drop.

Speaking of dragging, here's a UI thing no amount of googling or experimentation is helping with: when you move or resize a window, it has this little tooltip in the middle showing the current position and size of the window. I see how this could be useful in some circumstances, but there's a bug where it doesn't properly erase and redraw the tooltip when you move the window, causing this "snaking" effect I find incredibly annoying. So I'd like to turn this feature off please.

I had to take a photo of my screen with my phone, because there's no way to make the screenshot key take a screenshot. Pressing it opens the screenshot-taking program, but it won't let you open this program while a window is in motion. Want to take a screenshot while you're moving a window? "Fuck you", that's what linux has to say.

I can't find a single piece of documentation or official communication that acknowledges this feature exists. I found one reddit thread with someone asking how to turn it off, and no one had any idea what he was talking about. What are the magic words I need to find a solution? "XFCE window size tooltip" seems like a good bet, but googling that brings up nothing but unrelated problems using the same words. Is it not a tooltip? What is it? I want to throw my computer from the window of a moving train. I want to walk into the sea.

I hate what linux turns me into. I turn into a gibbering problem-solving maniac. I can't cope with everything being broken at once. It's not just adjusting to a new workflow, it's building a new workflow from scratch atom by atom. My brain wants to fix everything at once, and it's so hard to interrupt the doom cycle. My spouse practically had to physically drag me away from the keyboard so I could get to the laundry room before it closes. It's ADHD kryptonite.

It's like being overwhelmed by sidequests in Skyrim, except I get a new sidequest when I open the menu. I get a new sidequest for every page of the inventory, every tab on the skill tree, every item slot I try to equip. I press the "jump" button and I'm given a sidequest to complete before I unlock jumping. No quest targets appear on my compass except the ones to the north. I have to do sidequests to unlock east, west and south.

I would not play this game. I would uninstall it immediately. But this isn't a game. It's the software I need to do literally everything. No one should have to endure this.

Well, I could complain about broken UI literally all day. The whole reason I'm here is because of archipelago, so let's fire up the new version and have a lo--

Fatal Python error: init_fs_encoding: failed to get the 
Python codec of the filesystem encoding
Python runtime state: core initialized
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'

Current thread 0x00007f215ebd95c0 (most recent call first):
  <no Python frame>

Apr 13 2025 See Kami's response to this post, I'm sorry, but you're holding it wrong, and my response, Linux Mint.

Like 👍 Share 📣 Save 🏛️ Reply 💌

Linux Mint

Sunday April 13th, 2025

Tags: archive, correspondence, LinuxSaga, rant, tech

In response to my last post, Kami wrote a reply which boils down to:

Just get Linux Mint.

A reader named Mark sent a reply with much the same advice. I appreciate both of your responses.

When I used Mint, I had a number of problems similar to the ones described in my previous post, but the worst is that the filesystem would gradually become more and more corrupt as I used it. I would randomly find myself unable to do anything because the entire hard drive would become locked down to "read only" mode. When I rebooted, the OS wouldn't load, and it would bring me to a grub prompt. I could run a fsck command, which would temporarily fix the problem and allow me to use the computer a little longer, but the filesystem would inevitably become corrupt again. Each time I ran fsck, it took a little bit longer, eventually needing 30-45 minutes to run its course; and each time this happened, I would have less and less time before the filesystem shit itself again. Eventually it would reach a point of unrecoverability, and I would need to wipe the hard drive and reinstall the OS. This happened about once a month.

Like 👍 Share 📣 Save 🏛️ Reply 💌

My headphones keep crashing

Monday May 19th, 2025

Tags: blog, LinuxSaga, tech

Occasionally my headphones will suddenly start repeating the last audio sample it received, machine-gun-like; this lasts about 10 seconds, then the headphones disconnect, then a few seconds later they reconnect. It sounds just like when a game crashes and your sound driver doesn't know what to do with the garbled data, so it just repeats the last sample over and over until you either kill the program or restart your computer.

It's tempting to blame this development entirely on linux, but it's happening with my phone, too. It's much less frequent on my phone, and I can go most of a workday with only one or two crashes, but at home, it's reaching a point where I can't even get through a 30-minute video without a crash or two. Linux seems to be the catalyst, but it's not quite so clear-cut.

If you're a regular reader, you might be aware that I use a somewhat specialized pair of headphones:

These are 3M Worktunes Connect headphones, and despite their poor rating on the product page, they're the best headphones I've found that meet my needs. They provide 24dB of noise reduction, they're fully wireless and they have a battery that lasts all day on a charge. They've really become an indispensable part of my kit. They protect me from the noise pollution of urban life,¹ but more importantly, they've improved my executive function tremendously. I can leave them on for most of the day and listen to things as I do what needs doing. I can listen to podcasts, videos, audiobooks and music all day at work. When I get home, I usually disconnect them from my phone and pair them to my computer. That way, whatever I'm watching or listening to, I can continue watching or listening to when I get up and do something else. I can make dinner, or wash dishes, or take care of Sunny's needs without it feeling like a chore, because my focus isn't interrupted.

I have a pair of wired headphones I use for streaming² and I've been using those until I can figure out what's going on with these. The cable isn't long enough to reach the computer on my desk, so I have my microphone on its tripod plugged in via USB, and my headphones are plugged into that. It works, but it's a lot harder to get up and do something when I have to pause whatever I'm listening to.

Bluetooth has always been a terrible unreliable technology, but I never had anywhere near this many problems before I started using linux. They never crashed like this, and I've been using them for a long time. I'm on my third pair. They typically last 1-2 years, and when they fail, it's always been a physical fault: the wire frame snaps from repeated flexing, or the button breaks. I've never had to replace them because of a software issue before. Sometimes they'll disconnect from whatever they're paired to for no reason, bluetooth is flaky, but never like this. The fact that it's also happening with my phone makes me wonder what in the world can be happening.

I don't know much about how bluetooth works, but here's my theory: the headphones must have some small amount of memory to store the device address of every bluetooth device it's been paired with. I believe this is necessary because every bluetooth connection is a handshake between two devices; even though they don't have a display and their input is limited to a single button, the headphones must contain a tiny computer to make this handshake, and because it would be annoying to complete the pairing process every time, it has a small amount of flash memory to store the device history. How many devices will a person pair the headphones to in the lifetime of the product? The headphones can probably store like 50-100 addresses, which the designers assumed is massive overkill, nobody will ever pair them to that many audio devices.

Well, the linux bluetooth driver, being open-source and thus not as purpose-made or well-tested as manufacturer's driver, may be doing something to cause this storage to fill up. It's not using a different address every time, because I don't have to "re-pair" the headphones each time they crash. There might be some sort of garbage collection that's not being done properly, causing the buffer to overrun and the headphones, not designed to deal with this failure mode, simply crash.

This is all conjecture, but that's the only story that makes sense to me. That would explain why they're much more stable with my phone, and why I never had this issue before switching to linux. All that said, I'm not sure exactly how I'm supposed to fix it. The manual says the headphones have a "factory reset" mode that can be activated by continuing to hold the button for 7 seconds after I turn them off, but that doesn't seem to do anything on mine

At some point I intend to get a dedicated bluetooth transmitter, like this:

That way I can just connect my computer with a 3.5mm headphone jack and hopefully won't have to worry about software at all. It'll degrade the audio quality somewhat, but I mostly listen to speech when I'm at home anyway, and if I'm listening to music, it's usually through my good speakers.

The transmitter pictured is currently $35 at the Bezos Bazaar, which is more than I'd like to spend just to get headphone functionality back. There are cheaper options, but they mostly seem designed for car use, so I don't expect the range will be very good at all. Having a dedicated transmitter with a proper antenna will hopefully give me a better connection, because it also tends to break up if I move too far away from the source, turn on the microwave, etc.

What's unclear at this point is whether I'll also need to replace my headphones. At this point in time they're working fine, I'm at work and they've been connected to my phone all morning without issue. But without the ability to do a factory reset, or troubleshoot them at a hardware level, it's hard to be 100% sure the crashing won't persist. I don't want to spend $35 and find out the problem really was the headphones all along.³

I say all this now before my next proper linux update, because this is the biggest issue I've experienced since switching, and I can't even definitively blame it on linux. But you have to admit, the circumstantial evidence is hard to ignore. Other than this, it's been relatively smooth! Tune in next time to hear about the good stuff! And a handful of minor nitpicks!

Like 👍 Share 📣 Save 🏛️ Reply 💌

Debian is my smoothest Linux experience yet

Thursday May 22nd, 2025

Tags: blog, LinuxSaga, tech

General desktop experience

It's been over a month since I made the switch to Debian from Windows 7, so how's it going? Not bad! I've been able to get a desktop experience pretty similar to what I'm used to, and in fact I like Bluecurve more than any of the styles available on Windows 7. My installation has been rock solid so far, and I don't believe I've needed to restart my computer once. Minor nitpick #1: I usually put my computer to sleep when I'm not using it, but for some reason it now always immediately wakes up when I try to do so. So I've been using "hibernate" instead, which means to wake it up, I have to physically raise the screen of the laptop slightly. Which isn't that bad, and it keeps me from accidentally waking up the computer by bumping the mouse, so it might be an improvement.

Once I got past the initial setup phase, I've barely had to type my password at all. I'm not installing or updating software at a rate anywhere close to where it'd be an annoyance. Critically, Debian doesn't constantly nag me to update shit. I can keep using the programs that work for me and update what I need, when I need to. This hasn't been the case even on other Debian-based distributions, so I'm very happy to have such a peaceful computing environment.

Nitpick #2: there have been a couple instances where the version of a program in the apt store doesn't work---yt-dlp comes to mind---but grabbing the binary and adding it to my path has been painless. This is a general linux development, not something specific to debian, but I'm pleased with how often I'm able to download a binary and it'll just work. The era of expecting the home user to compile shit from source to do anything appears to be over.

Games

Now, I haven't been doing anything all that complex yet. It's still a 10-year-old laptop, so the only games I've been playing have been NES roms and small indie games from itch, which have been working fine. I haven't been streaming or needed to edit video: I was disappointed to learn that most of the Archipelago randomizers that didn't work on Windows 7 don't work on linux either. I don't know why I didn't think to check this---I assumed that since archipelago is cross-platform, the developers would try to be cross-platform as well, and I just needed a current OS. Sadly, many of them seem built solely for Windows 10 or 11, even games that have native linux ports like VVVVVV and Rogue Legacy. I tried to get the randos working with proton but the whole arrangement is just too janky. Bummer!

Crafting

Most of my creative work in the last month has been this blog and website, and debian has been just fine. Filezilla doesn't have the weird development drama that the windows version has had, so that's been my ftp interface. It's missing a few nice features that WinSCP has, like I can't right-click in a remote folder and create a file directly, I have to make it locally first and upload it, but it's not a huge deal.

For editing I've been using mousepad, the default text editor for XFCE, and it's great. It's like notepad except that it has nice dark themes, line numbers and syntax highlighting, all the features I want from a full IDE without all the cruft.

Nitpick #3: the find-and-replace in mousepad is busted. I found this reddit thread suggesting this is a long-standing bug, so as recommended, I've been using gedit for my find-and-replace needs; but I don't want to use it as my default editor because the UI is awful. That thread is 6 years old, and when I tracked down the bug it does appear to have been fixed, so I'm going to try to update to a newer version of mousepad and hope the UI is unfuckedwith.

Nitpick #4: image editors

Speaking of fucky UIs, one of my primordial frustrations with linux is the lack of an image editor with a normal UI. On windows, Irfanview and paint.net have been indispensable parts of my image-editing workflow for over a decade. Irfanview is the best program for operations like cropping, resizing, adjusting colors, rotating, and exporting. It's unbelievably fast and lightweight. It's so good I even paid the voluntary 10€ registration fee, back when I was making more than a living wage and could support projects like this, that's how important irfanview is, and it has no equivalent on linux. I did get it working under wine, but it's janky. It takes a long time to start up. If I try to paste the contents of the clipboard into a new image, it creates a canvas with the correct dimensions but is completely transparent. Certain keyboard shortcuts don't work: I can't alt-click to create a ratio-bound selection because in linux, pressing alt and click-dragging resizes the window. Enough little frictions that add up to an experience that's sadly not really usable.

Paint.net has an intuitive paintbrush-like UI with essential features like layers, magic wand select, and plugins that enable feathering and stroke fill. For as good as Irfanview is for basic image editing, paint.net is good for intermediate image editing. It's a shame that it'll probably be forever windows-only: it relies too much on .net libraries to work under wine. It's theoretically possible to create a linux version with mono, that's how Bizhawk handles their linux port, but paint.net is free-as-in-beer, not open-source, and the developers don't seem to have any interest in changing that.

Pinta was once a workable paint.net clone, but it's always had issues. When I used it back in the day, it crashed a lot, and to this day, it doesn't support any scaling algorithms. It works for pixel art, where the only scaling I need to do is integer nearest-neighbor, but for any other use-case it makes images unacceptably crunchy. Recent versions have fucked up the UI, using small, indistinguishable monochrome icons, so it's no longer even a good paint.net clone.

There's the image editor with the shitty name. I've tried it. The less said about that one, the better.

Krita seems like it would be a great program for people who use a drawing tablet to create digital paintings, or are used to the quirks of this type of software; for me, the UI is unintelligible nonsense. Any image editor that requires me to look up a tutorial to figure out how to erase is, to me, a bad piece of software. I found a reddit thread titled I just want to erase something expressing the same frustration I was having. Here's the advice the person was given:

If you want an eraser to work on a click instead of sliding over the unwanted pixel you'll need to make an eraser brush out of a stamp. Stamps are designed to work without movement across pixels , brushes are designed to never do that, otherwise we'd all be making unintentional marks each time we positioned the brush.

Just pick any stamp brush at all, change the tip to the plain square or circle and change the blending mode to erase. You can then save this new preset if you wish.

Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.

I put out a call on fedi to ask if anyone knew of an image editor I was overlooking, and Rylie at Game Making Tools suggested LazPaint. It's the closest thing I've found to a normal, functional image editor. It starts up instantaneously, has most of the functions I need from paint.net, and has a UI that mostly makes intuitive sense. There are some quirks; for example, I'm used to having buttons to move layers up or down, and LazPaint seems to only allow me to drag them; when I save an image, the descriptions for image quality and bit depth settings are the same color as the background, so I have to kind of guess what I'm doing from the sliders and drop-downs; the way the color selector works is a bit wonky compared to what I'm used to; but overall, it's the first linux image editor I've found that's generally usable. All of this site's merch was made with LazPaint, which I know doesn't look that impressive, but it's the only way I could make it at all. It allowed something in my head to exist as opposed to not exist. To me, that's a win.

Videos

Youtube continues to be a nightmare website. I can barely watch videos at 480p in firefox; when I do, I have to use "theater" mode, because having other thumbnails on the screen drops the video playback to shoe size FPS.¹

Luckily, yt-dlp continues to work fine. I use whirltube to streamline the process, and most short videos download in less time than it takes the video page to fully load in firefox. If I stuck with Windows 7 it would only be a matter of time before the developers dropped support; the releases on the GitHub page now say you need windows 8+, so I think it already happened. I'm glad I no longer have to worry about that.

Nitpick #5: I'm having a surprising number of issues with VLC. Most youtube videos I download work fine, but any video from another source is a roll of the dice. When I was doing research and taking screenshots for the Ren and Stimpy post, videos would start with a strange "strobe" effect where it would show the video for a few frames and go black for a few frames; this went away when I scrubbed forward in the video and scrubbed back to the beginning. But videos also had a strange artifact in the form of a corrupted stripe at the bottom of the frame. Here's what the first image from the R&S article looked like before I cropped it:

No idea what's causing this. I've been watching Rocky & Bullwinkle with my spouse, one of her childhood favorites, and those episodes have the same issue. The built-in video player is called Parole, and it doesn't do this, but the UI sucks and there's no way to capture screenshots. I'm surprised it's so janky, I don't think I've ever had a single issue with VLC on windows.² It almost feels like some sort of PAL/NTSC conversion issue, but that makes no sense with a digital file, right? Even if they were ripped from PAL DVDs, surely there's no difference once they've been codec'd and deinterlaced, right?

Some videos won't play in VLC at all. The player opens and immediately crashes. For those, I have to use the built-in media player. It's called Parole, and it doesn't have any of the issues that VLC has, but the UI is bad. Scrubbing through the video is janky and imprecise. It can cause playback freezes and desyncs. It doesn't have a snapshot feature. Perhaps it's time to find a different program. It's hard to imagine VLC not being the gold standard, though. Even the android version, for how clunky the UI is, works.

Misc. nitpicks

The clock doesn't sync from the internet. I had to set it manually, and it drifts by several minutes over the course of weeks. If I completely shut the computer down, it'll be off by however many hours it was off; luckily, it seems to know how long it's been hibernating and adjust the clock accordingly. My understanding is that I can fix this by installing something called ntp, and it doesn't seem that complicated, but it hasn't been high enough priority for me to fix it yet. It's odd in 2025 to have a system that doesn't just keep the time synced out of the box.

The numlock state keeps flipping on its own. I always want to use the numpad for numbers, I'll never want to use those keys for navigation, so this is frustrating. I installed a program called numlockx, and followed instructions to add it to my xinit file (which works kinda like autoexec.bat) and that mostly did the trick, numlock doesn't get switched off every time the screensaver kicks on anymore; but I still occasionally try to type numbers and can't because it's been flipped. Idk why, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

Headphone update

I owe linux an apology, my theory was wrong and I'm almost certain my headphones crashing is due to a physical fault. This is because the crashes are strongly correlated with moving the headphones in some way, like pulling an ear cup to scratch my head, pushing the button, putting them around my neck, taking them off or putting them on. I had suspected this might be the case, but I dismissed the possibility because I couldn't reproduce it. No amount of wiggling the headphones or the wires could trigger an intentional crash. After spending some more time with them, it's too strong a correlation to be a coincidence. The reason it happens less often at work is because I move less: I spend most of the day doing the same work, or at least the same category of work, with minimal movement except when I get up for breaks. At home I move both myself and the headphones a lot more. It sucks that I need to replace them but I'm glad I know what the issue is.

Unknowns

In the late 2000s, I had a netbook, as was the style at the time. I went through a period, much like now, where my primary computer died and I had to use the netbook as my main system in the meantime. To squeeze more performance out of it, I used something called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which was a stripped-down version intended for low-performance processors and limited RAM. It worked okay for most basic tasks, but one of my most negative experiences with linux happened when I needed to print something.

I shit you not when I say it took the better part of the day figuring out how to do this. I spent a good 6-7 hours on one of my days off looking at forums, documentation and tutorials, trying to piece together contradictory information about CUPS, postscript, spoolers, daemons, and other assorted buzzwords that made no sense to me. I did eventually get it to work, but I vowed that once I got my desktop up and running, I would never touch linux again.³ One of the most unpleasant troubleshooting experiences of my life for what was, in my mind, one of the primary functions of a computer.

These days I don't have many reasons to print at home. In the rare cases I need to print something, I can usually do it at work. We to through so much paper and toner that the occasional personal document is unnoticeable. I ran out of toner at home and haven't bothered to replace the cartridge yet. I dread the day something changes at work and I once again need to figure out how to use my printer, although it has to be better now, right? God, I hope so.

Well, that's the long and short of it. I still don't know how my setup will hold up to more intensive games, streaming, video editing, etc. because the computer itself is the bottleneck. I talked a lot about nitpicks, but my experience has mostly been remarkable for just how unremarkable it is. The OS, for the most part, stays out of my way and lets me do what I need to do. I don't think it's a drop-in replacement for windows for most people, and I'm fortunate that I'm somewhat technically inclined, enough to make it behave the way I want---but I don't have to be a full-time, card-carrying certified Computer Toucher to make it work, and my hair remains untornout. I hereby declare Debian the winner of linux. Congrats to Deb and Ian for their success

Like 👍 Share 📣 Save 🏛️ Reply 💌