Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Because this thread is Deadsville, and because I was talking about it earlier, let me dive a little deeper into my first impressions now that I've installed and used Bazzite for a little bit.
First off, the good:
- The desktop isn't fucking Cosmic. I could say a Lot about this, and maybe I should, but for all its (alleged) strengths, Cosmic has been a massive headache for me as a desktop. Granted, it might well be better with a fresh install, but I still think it's inexcusable that my desktop session can slowly grow to hog all of my available system memory, which is a particular WTF given that it's written in bloody Rust of all things (please, potential Rustaceans, I am well aware that it's not the fault of Rust, that the coders are Doing It Wrong, because of course they are, that's what fucking happens when coders have the option to create unsafe blocks of code as opposed to getting gud at Rust), silently fail to black screen when Dumb Shit happens like power saving overriding an active full-screen game, be bad at keeping screen settings for modern games, generally, and not just with Steam games either, create both graphical and alphanumerical screen glitches with alarming regularity, along with countless other small annoyances like the file manager not properly dealing with MTP devices, leading to my need to use the Gnome Files app to be able to copy shit to my phone. I'll take Gnome back over this mess any day of the week.
- It's container based. 'Nuff said.
- It speaks volumes to me that I spent ~4x longer waiting for the stock Windoze install to copy off onto a backup drive than I did installing Bazzite and getting it off the ground. Moreover, after getting over my Linux-land autism (see the Meh, below), said install was quick and easy-peasy compared to all of the hoops I'd have to jump through to get to a Win 11 desktop like tell it not to "help" me by tracking everyfucking thing I do and driving the point home by going and telling it everywhere else to kindly shove its telemetry crap right up its /dev/null, let alone the extra crap I'd have to do in order to avoid creating a Microsoft account. For bonus points, it's not shoving Copilot down my throat either. Fuck you, Micro$oft, in particular for unleashing that fresh new hell upon your users, especially the ones with <16G of system memory and/or the ones that don't want a bloody Microsoft account.
- Speaking of installation, installing ollama and oss-gpt:20b for teh lulz was painless as well and fun for five minutes or so. Now to mess with it in detail...
- And speaking of ollama, Bazzite handled going with my iGPU for display flawlessly, letting the dedicated GPU do its LLM thang right out of the box, or at least AFAICT. Will have to try switching to a game and using a port on the GPU to see what kind of an impact that has, some time...
The Meh:
- BTRFS -- Seriously, has this actually, finally, gotten to be decent? I wanted to believe in BTRFS around about a decade ago, but as it languished in its half-baked state, I eventually gave up on it and moved back to XFS or ZFS, depending. The last thing I wanted to do when I was installing Bazzite was to dick around with doing my own system partitions and file systems by hand, so I ultimately rolled with it, but it still seems a little slow to boot up after POST compared to the last-gen system that I'm writing this on.
- The Bazaar -- not bad, but pretty sparse compared to the OOB software available in most Ubuntu-based distros.
- OpenRPG is (still) a PITA--not really Bazzite's fault, per se, but they're pimping it out in the bazaar, the bastards.
- Flatpaks -- again, not Bazzite specific, and I understand why they're the New Hotness, but they can still be a PITA as often as not, too.
- Steam -- I get why it's here by default, I'm not mad, and I may even go back down that road some day in the not too distant future, but for now stop popping up a bloody login screen every time I fire up the desktop! I'd like to keep my old pusher at arm's length if I can, pls, kthxbai
The Bad:
- Lack of desktop options -- If left to my own devices, and all other distros being equal, I probably would have tried Hyprland, but for now I've got enough stuff to worry about without tinkering with another desktop. Again.
- The learning curve -- The last time I was using a Red Hat based Linux distro with any regularity, Firefox was still easily the best browser around, so there are going to be places where I have to slap my own forehead and go finding the right switches to add to dnf to make it Do Right as opposed to the much-more familiar apt or even dpkg. Guess we'll see how that goes.
And that's all that I can think of for now. I've rambled on for long enough, but my goal here is to play around with it for the next couple of weeks and see what works well, what crashes, and what havoc I can wreak with it, so I might just have more to say next week!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
16hr ago
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
16hr ago
Never played Thracia, but I am old enough to have played plenty of OG D&D/AD&D, and two and a half hours just to get a little bit into it sounds entirely reasonable, especially given the whole equipment kerfuffle. A good all-day session for us would net about a floor of a dungeon, and my favorite DM was a gleeful sadist who expertly created all sorts of diabolical traps and general mayhem that he used to take down higher level PCs with otherwise unimproved orcs, goblins, kobolds, and ogres.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1d ago
Yeah, I expect that pretty much comes with the territory, but I've got it up and running and I'm still interested in kicking the tires and playing around a bit!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1d ago
It's been a fascinating rabbit hole for me personally, both because I am well aware that Science™ advances one funeral at a time, and so had been looking at alternative hypotheses for Alz/dementia, and also because out of the blue my dental hygienist started discussing the topic on her own as she had recently gotten the infodump hereself.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
No, neither of them ever were. Ironically, my wife's maternal side of the family has a history of Alzheimer's, but thus far her mother's siblings seem to be dodging the proverbial bullet.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
It's still a relatively understudied potential cause/risk factor, due mainly to a preoccupation with the amyloid tangles and plaques in the brain, but it's gaining momentum and mainstream interest, especially as said focus has yet to produce effective treatment.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
It does indeed, for the both of them, and I appreciate your well wishes. The scary part is that my family had no previous history of dementia or Alzheimer's, so now I'm pretty freaked out about my own chances. That said, dad did have bad sleep apnea, and taking care of a spouse with dementia makes for a massive risk of dementia in its own right, though watching them both go through it one after the other has definitely increased my receptivity to the brain infection hypothesis...
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
I come from the Before Times, when Autism wasn't a Thing at all, and then it was Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, but when I was told that I was probably autistic by a licensed mental health professional a few years back, I just laughed and laughed. My own mental model of myself was that I didn't have any wetware that ran human social skills, and had to learn by trial and error how to emulate these things, which could be pretty painful and also seemed to involve way too much of the, "oh yes, the Emperor's fine and gaudy new clothes look especially extravagant today," style of discourse for my taste. When Asperger's became a Thing, it seemed trendy and I never paid too much attention to it, although I did identify strongly with the idea of neurodiversity because I knew damn well I was not normal and never had been. Discussing what autism actually was with her, and subsequently doing my own deep dive into the actual condition and diagnosis, was revelatory to say the least.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
Almost finished with A Parade of Horribles (Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 8) by Matt Dinniman. It's definitely delivering the expected goods, and the only reason that I haven't already finished with it and moved on is because despite being somewhat ridiculous from a strictly gaming standpoint, The system of Nil series that I was reading turned out to have enough meta-level commentary that I ended up finishing that out first.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
It was my late thirties when this became a Thing for me. Dad was in his early seventies and starting to exhibit signs of cognitive decline, and mom started exhibiting signs of her own several more years down the road.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
I've talked about it here several times in the past, but yeah, I've been there. My own particular realization didn't hit until my mid-forties and took some seriously and pervasively bad behavior on the part of my mother to illuminate the reality of the situation (BPD Queen), so if you're catching it at the age of 18, you're way ahead of the game on that front. For me, the revelation as as dramatic as my first pair of glasses in terms of finally being able to see fuzzy things clearly. The one thing that I want to add to all of the good advice below is that the deconstructing what you've learned from them is going to take a long time, but will also probably be the best possible thing you can do for yourself in the long run. It's taken me years to start bringing my life and my personal relationships into some sort of better balance, and a lot of the time my honest answer to what I want or what I think is best for me is still an, "I don't know," but one of the things that I do know is that if I pay enough attention to what I'm experiencing, as opposed to just stuffing it into the closet and hyperfocusing on $Thing_In_Front_Of_Me, I can have enough of a sense to understand what's generally good for me versus what's generally draining and exhausting. And if it's the latter, then I have to ask myself why I'm in a situation that's draining and exhausting, and whether or not I'm setting myself on fire so that I can keep a loved one warm for a time, which is to say that at least I no longer give until it hurts and then some purely out of habit based on previous expectations.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
2d ago
It is to my great shame that I have to admit that I'm out of beans at the moment and need to roast more. If things go exceedingly well for me in the work/play department today (details to follow), I might just roast up one of several Ethiopians that I seem to have over-ordered recently, but we shall see how the day goes. Anyway, I'm glad to hear that you've been able to cut your expenses and that you're enjoying your recent bean! If I actually achieve my ambitious goals, I should be able to post a coffee hater's club thread later this week.
To be fair to myself and my lack of roasting, I just got home from a trip and my intention to roast has been complicated by both an issue with my VPN setup that was down to an outdated key in my original downloaded configuration that needed to be updated (doh!) as well as what has proved to be an irresistible urge to start playing in the deep end of technology again, however expensive and ill-advised said urge might be. The latter has involved trying out Bazzite, which will be my first Fedora-based distro in over a decade (and how different even is Red Hat land these days, anyway?), and will probably involve installing gpt-oss-20b today to kick the tires and play around with because I've been hanging around here for too long now now that my work responsibilities are more right-sized, I've recovered enough from burnout to start to be interested in tech again, though not quite enough to write any one of several effortposts that have been kicking around in my mind, including one about said burnout. Hmm, maybe I should poll our fellow Mottizens to find out which subject would be most interesting...
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
10d ago
In our case, we've kept our finances largely separate for our entire marriage, and it continues to work relatively well for the two of us. When we first started dating, my wife had a sizable inheritance that I was conscientious about leaving in her hands and not accessing, so we just split the bills and evolved into each of us paying for certain things and not questioning the other's spending habits too awful much, excepting some big ticket changes, of course. If we had managed to have kids, that probably would have changed things, but here we all are.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
10d ago
A mundane example would be something like identity theft. Freezing/closing compromised/fraudulent accounts can be time consuming, and paper currency can bridge the gap until new accounts can safely be established.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
10d ago
Currently, we have two male cats, both around six years of age.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
10d ago
I have a few thousand, which might be too much, but zero feels like too little.
Same, and my brain won't shut up about how it would make much more sense for me to add it to my mad money brokerage account and reap the extra GAAAAINZ. But then, it's emergency money, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
16d ago
About to start Shatterdark: System of Nil book 2 by Tim Paulson. Still would rate the first as 3/5, but want to see what the author does with the world and the characters he created. Of course, I had to devour Out Law: A Dresden Files novella by Jim Butcher, since it just dropped, and I'm happy to recommend it to fans of the series.
Finally, shout-out to @FtttG, who let me beta read the book they'd been working on. Fun!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
21d ago
Have I got a link for you!
I mean, the Irish are the blacks of Europe, and the Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland, so...
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23d ago
Baneslayer: System of Nil Book 1 by Tim Paulson. 3/5, mostly because the MC is progressing unbelievably fast by defeating mobs that are much higher than his own level. Normally I'd probably dip out on reading the larger series but alas, I bought 5 of them on Kindle Countdown Deals so as long as it stays decent, I'll probably continue to read it. Alas.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
24d ago
It reminds me of all those show runners that end season 1 on this show altering cliff hanger/climax, and then completely chicken out and backtrack in the first episode of season 2.
Preach!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
30d ago
I remember back during the war on terror, one right wing blog or another, maybe Little Green Footballs (whatever happened to that guy?)
He ultimately went back to hugging his television and deciding never to fight again.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
30d ago
The Pilgrims of the Damned: The Assembly Book 3 by Steve McHugh. Book 1 never did get too political, and the writing is still pretty snappy, so we're going with it. MC is looking more and more like an expy of his previous MC as time goes by, but it's been long enough since I've read the Hellequin chronicles that this isn't an issue for me.
Agree with the below, option 2 is the correct answer. The trick, of course, is that our lizard brains will conspire to convince us that we can't really retire just yet, now can we, not with $Bill to pay for and $Thing to afford.
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