Aussie Techmoan with Ashens for good measure.

Legit have never had an issue with multi boot and windows like ever, tbf I don’t go into windows that frequently anymore but it’s never given me grief in at least a decade. I know my experience isn’t universal though, so sorry to anyone who does have boot issues after windows updates.

In the worst case, could use bcdedit and use the windows boot loader (tbh I have no idea if that works here, but could be worth a try)

Could use Polars, afaik it supports streaming from CSVs too, and frankly the syntax is so much nicer than pandas coming from spark land.

Do you need to persist? What are you doing with them? A really common pattern for analytics is landing those in something like Parquet, Delta, less frequently seen Avro or ORC and then working right off that. If they don’t change, it’s an option. 100 gigs of CSVs will take some time to write to a database depending on resources, tools, db flavour, tbf writing into a compressed format takes time too, but saves you managing databases (unless you want to, just presenting some alternates)

Could look at a document db, again, will take time to ingest and index, but definitely another tool, I’ve touched elastic and stood up mongo before, but Solr is around and built on top of lucene which I knew elastic was but apparently so is mongo.

Edit: searchable? I’d look into a document db, it’s quite literally what they’re meant for, all of those I mentioned are used for enterprise search.

Postgres runs well in a container in my experience and is nice to work with, def support that. I know sqlite works well, no complaints from me

I’m still stuck mostly on 1.7.10 and 1.12.2 modpacks, I don’t play as much these days though.

That’s me as well, I’ve used vim for simple edits over the years but more and more just used nano for most of my terminal based edits. Finally ran vimtutor (mainly because I wasn’t aware of it) and wow, I should have done that years ago.

Seriously though, it’s been some time be afaik any microsoft product file that ends in x, .docx, .xlsx, .pbix are all just archives and you can totally interact with them programmatically if you want. Really easy to corrupt them but hey, found it interesting years ago.

I just really like KDE, been between that and XFCE for years. Ubuntu’s version of gnome when they went to that side bar layout that looks like it’s meant for tablets turned me off of trying it again (though probably be great on a tablet). KDE’s super customisable too, totally done a faux osx look for my laptop and use more or less stock KDE on my shop computer. I didn’t mind older gnome though, isn’t that what cinnamon or mate are meant to feel like?

I’m always personally wary of storing blobs in a database if for no other reason it’s going to totally be more expensive to store on a server rather than in some sort of blob storage.

The task bar change annoyed the hell out of me, get why people were so upset with w8 now, I’ve been a top taskbar person since xp, small gripe but it jarred me, at least the hotkeys didn’t change, the hiding of context menus irks me too, if you are going to do things like that, let me toggle it off. Windows has been getting increasingly frustrating to power users, more annoying to me because winget is solid and windows terminal is actually really nice.

Same boat, work is windows, I’ve found it easier to work on a linux VM or totally in wsl with a chunk of tasks, had grief with docker too which to be fair, I’m pretty sure most of these issues are because of group policies, company i work for bought tech firms but the central IT is setup for business users so things like local admin I had to fight for weeks to get just to install the azure CLI.

100% a title that would struggle with full controller, for me it was cities skylines and rimworld. Also played a lot of warframe and spec ops:the line with mine, being able to have actions trigger at different points of the trigger pull was interesting, had a profile I grabbed for shooters that’d enable gyro aiming at the last bit of your trigger pull for fine adjustment and seriously, it works extremely well once you get used to it. The pads also supported osd rotary menus for hotkeys which was probably what the left pad got the most use out of, had the ability to set different behaviour too using mod buttons are by touching the rim of the pad. Also the haptic feedback on the pads was interesting, did a lot to make them feel more real, seriously had a really powerful piece of hardware with the og steam controller.

Totally was, it didn’t have rumble for battery life reasons, but didn’t miss it much at the time, barely used the rumble pack on the n64, think I got mine at EB games to try out the OOT secret hint feature (it’d buzz the pack if you were near a hidden secret), feedback has come a LONG way since then in terms of immersion.

I really liked the wavebird for the gamecube, unfortunately mine went into the aether on my last move, got bluetooth adapters to pair modern controllers with it but the wavebird was really cool at the time, was really amazing to not have to be tethered to the console and it being first party, though at the time the madcatz stuff was decent.

For recent controllers, I’ve been using a knockoff 360 controller for moonlight recently and after a lot of back and forth I really think MS nailed the controller setup back then (OG Xbox being decent but not a preference, I hated the duke, s controller was solid though), I like the xbone controllers as well, but IMO they’re just iterations on the 360 controller, easily my preference as an all rounder controller layout.

I have a steam controller, used it for a while but it’s been some time now, had some really great ideas, I’d totally go for an updated steamdeck style layout on that, probably a second for me.

I’ve had so much drift issues with ds4s that I personally don’t reach for a ds4 or dualsense for non playstation games, I like being able to swap batteries and the Xbox/Steam controllers all seem to have way better battery life in general, I keep a stock of rechargeables around so not generating piles of waste.

Yeah I recall the USAF deploying a ps3 cluster years ago

I don’t use mine much anymore but I still have it out, was a really cool idea and while it had a learning curve, definitely made controller gaming possible with a lot of titles, steam input in general these days is fantastic for that but even so I’d totally buy a steam deck layout steam controller v2.

Will echo the recommendations of debian or mint. I have mint on my 13 year old rog laptop, it’s my lab computer and runs klipper for one of my printers, pretty much always up, very rarely reboots. Debian is what I run on my 4 year old zenbook s, pretty much perfect for my uses, it’s what I cart around for light/mobile work and I swear it actually has better battery life than it did running windows.

I have an nvme enclosure with a 256 gig drive in it, I think I partitioned a quarter of it for ventoy, rest is for regular storage. It’s really nice to have if I do family support, have any iso I need and any utility I might need on top of that. Is it overkill for my needs? Yeah, but it’s nice to have and I didn’t go for anything fancy, just a cheap crucial drive.

I compressed some of the 4k rips I did, all my dvd and 1080p blurays, it’s the HDR only that’s stopped me from some of them as I found I lost it with the settings I was using and I put it on the “list of things I’ll come back to later” shelf.

I recall some banding on a few of the dvd rips, probably was a little too aggressive with the settings I used, but they’re still definitely watchable

I have LOTR directors cut on my server, haven’t bothered reencoding it because I’m not super experienced with keeping hdr 10 going to h265 or equivalent. Return of the king alone is around 130 gigs across two files, jellyfin says its bitrate is about 70 mbps.

Titanic is only about 74 gigs