Try Linux in a VM (virtual machine) for a while.

• Low hassle compared to dual booting,
• no risk of Microsoft randomly doing something to windows that breaks your Linux install.
• low/No system downtime if you decide you don’t like one distro or another and want to switch,
• no loss of game data for your son (I’ve lost so many saves because of games putting them in nonsensical places in windows; why is appdata still the default for minecraft saves!?)

And Whatsapp. People seem dumbfounded whenever they find out Facebook owns it.

Password management is the one thing i don’t plan to self-host, on the grounds of not putting all my eggs in one basket. If something goes wrong and all my shit is fried or destroyed, I don’t want to also fuck around with account recovery for my entire digital existence.

Plus, if something is breached, im more likely to hear news about Bitwarden than I am about compromised server and/or client versions in a timeframe to actually be able to react to it.

Windows store apps are their own special pain in the ass for other reasons (patching on multi-user systems, as it installs apps to the user profile for some godforsaken reason)

I don’t think they care anymore. Their money makers are Azure and M365 at this point, and the OS is just getting ignored (except where they can make more money/data)

Deep Rock Galactic??

Oh definitely fuck the CIA and everything they stand for, they probably set the US back 50+ years at minimum, longer for other countries, with their bullshit.

The UK literally wrote the playbook for flooding regions with drugs to manipulate them lol

If there’s a Microcenter in the area, they do pretty great deals around tax return season (if in US), lots of cpu+RAM+MOBO combos for a good $200 off.

I have no idea what you’re referring to, diablotek is a perfectly valid power supply manufacturer (/s do they even still exist? I heard they were legendary for exploding)

Second the power supply. Nicer ones come with longer warranty (i think the Seasonic Titanium+ ones have a 10 year?). A bigger motherboard with more features/ports/slots can also be shifted to home server duty in the future better than say, an ITX board.

The HP G5 thunderbolt docks are (currently, at least) pretty stable IMO, provided the firmware is up to date on it.

NOT the hp g4 thunderbolt dock, that one the team I’m on is at a level 3 support ticket with HP for monitor issues that render my laptop basically unusable.

Never said I wasn’t considering it 😉

Be cool to have one, maybe as a Christmas gift to myself. I like me a thiccc keyboard that doubles as a bludgeon, Never liked the “reduced” keebs. Is the cable fully detachable at both ends?

Oof, the model F keyboards are beautiful (in the retro style) but damn that pricetag stings to look at…

3d printing != paper printing. It’s largely hobbyist ran technology, and almost entirely open source. You’re not going to get tracking dots or currency replication prevention into open source software.

Lol, most of this crap is DIY, good luck with that

• Win10
• Win11
• Fedora
• Fedora Server
• Hirens

That and running games in a VM has been known to get you the banhammer for multiplayer.

I actually tried linux (Fedora) this past weekend; I had fewer issues installing and using it as a day to day computer, than I did with Windows. Tried out Gnome and KDE both, preferred gnome but UI scaling (for my shit vision) was simpler out-of-the-box on KDE (about 125-150% was comfortable for me.) I found KDE a bit overwhelmingly customizable to start out with, and maybe a bit bloated.

The caveat to this was Gaming, in my case I did not have a good time with gaming (probably because I am trying to run at 4k and play a game dependant on Ubisoft DRM, as well as an older MMO that doesnt handle high DPI screens and ui scaling). Very frame-y at 4K, a decent amount of tinkering is/was required. YMMV, check ProtonDB as it is heavily dependent on what games you play, and heavily dependent on Steam. If you want to multi-box (without software, just alt-tab through windows) an MMO, I found functionally no information on how to open multiple instances of the same game to do so (which is why I mentioned the dependency on steam, which only seems to let you have one game launched at any given time)

Moving back to windows for gaming felt like a major downgrade as far as general computer work goes. Inside of an hour I had a fully functional, up to date, linux machine. Windows 11 took 1-2 hours to install and update itself, then another hour to install drivers, then longer to de-bloat and start disabling all the stupid shit from Microsoft. I’m sure I’ll be doing that continuously for the next few weeks.

Is it bad that my first thought for “ASCII porn” is a pelvic thrusting stick figure with a boykisser meme head?