LostWanderer

I had talked about my wonderful experiences with openSUSE Tumbleweed...Which to be fair, it's amazing on my desktop. The one thing is that you must enroll keys in MOK (Machine Owner Key) every time you do a major update that alters the Linux kernel or NVIDIA Drivers. As this is a security feature designed to protect users against unsigned customized kernels or drivers. I had experienced a great borking event (due to body being disagreeable to the daily process of being alive). Having gone through that ordeal on my desktop, which ultimately required me to reinstall openSUSE Tumbleweed...

I was not thrilled about the idea of doing that on my Laptop. So after a lot of thinking about my options from mild like Solus, wild FreeBSD, and interesting concept Shani OS. I decided that Solus was the best bet because it had a package manager that I hadn't worked with before. Solus supports flatpaks out of the box, sane defaults, and a fairly robust recovery system that gets to back into a working OS if an update failed.

Installing the thing was really easy, took less than 9 minutes to install and boot into. You can also use Secure Boot with this distro, all you need to do is register the MOK on your device following easy to act upon instructions. I do advise to not use the drive encryption, as it was bugged AF, it wouldn't recognize my encryption password no matter how hard I tried. It took reinstalling Solus before being able to boot into it proper, still it wasn't that hard to get a working system in under 9 minutes.

I do recommend using the package manager eopkg to install updates upon logging into your user account. As Discover (KDE's graphical package manager) is slow. While eopkg is blazingly fast and surfaces useful information that you can act upon if you experience a problem. Surprisingly, zypper is slower than eopkg, yet both are powerful package managers.

After the initial system updates which are on a weekly schedule btw (a godsend from the daily deluge of openSUSE Tumbleweed). It didn't take me a long time to install and configure my software. I love the speed and efficiency of Solus. Can't wait to use it more often; particularly when I go to the coffee shop for writing or continuing to learn the basics of programming and Python.

I didn't really like that Aurora and Bazzite were moving their main discussions from Discourse to places like Reddit, Discord, and Github (the three sites deep into their villain arcs). At least Bazzite kept Discourse open for other users to help users, while Aurora set it to read only. That gave me the ick and I decided it was time to change my distro, yet again.

I get that Github is used for developer stuff and it makes sense...I just didn't want to sign away my soul and likely have my posts scrapped by LLM bots. General discussions being moved there was a strange choice, the desire for proper forums reignited within me...I chose openSUSE Tumbleweed. Now, previously I had a lot of issues and failed getting that distro installed because it was in a rough state last year when they pushed major updates to both Leap and Tumbleweed.

It wouldn't even boot into the installer proper, failed to connect to openSUSE's repos necessary to install the operating system when using net install. However, I used a different USB Image Writing software and made super sure that everything was above the board before trying to install openSUSE Tumbleweed this morning. As I don't like giving up, I decided to give openSUSE Tumbleweed that fourth chance.

Surprisingly, it was a fast and easy as any other distro. Sane defaults, it picked the right drive right out the gate, quickly allowed me to make all the user choices that were necessary for me to proceed. Letting it rip took probably around 15 minutes for openSUSE Tumbleweed to install. Having chosen KDE (the best to me, btw) I was quickly brought into the glorious interface that I love. Plasma 6.6 is simply immaculate and I love it so much. Its smooth right out of the box, just some small issues annoyed me. Those were fixed with system updates.

Choosing the correct NVIDIA driver and installing it was also easy. YAsT, is still a graphical interface that controls all aspects of openSUSE, it took no longer than several minutes to navigate it after reading instructions. It did take me longer to get my system up and running as this was my first time installing openSUSE in a long time. Honestly, the amount of reboots was mildly unhinged, however necessary because updates need to be applied this way (however, openSUSE was very patient and waited for me to initiate the reboot).

I didn't have an automated script that would reproduce my build (a handy feature that I've not used in years). I think once openSUSE is installed on my laptop...The next part of my learning journey will begin. I will get into coding and gradually build up my skillset into something that can be used to pour back into the Linux community.

Despite having to wade through the absolute bullshit of the end zone in order to complete the main story. I felt Techland did a solid job with bringing back Kyle Crane and some reoccurring characters in the franchise up till this point, Castor Woods had a great mixture of terrain to explore and parkour in. It made me think about how I could stay outside the reach of those Infected people trying to get a bite to eat out of Crane.

The inclusion of working gasoline/diesel truck felt a bit out of place, given how gasoline/diesel would've long since lost its viability since The Fall of Mankind. I don't feel there would be enough infrastructure left to be consistently producing such fuels.

It's a game though, so this is really just a nitpick on my part; trucks helped make the map traversal easier, it is possible to get around Castor Woods without burning too much of that precious daylight.

I think Techland did an amazing job of making the night scarier again; as in Dying Light 2, I felt less fear when sneaking around at night. The world is really dark and the Infected pay attention to light sources now, making it risky to use your flashlight too much. Thankfully, Techland did add some cheeky light sources that made the Night at least a bit more navigable.

Dying Light: The Beast was fun enough that I will be playing in a post-game save, and messing around with Infected and exploring the whole map to find any secrets that I missed.

Honestly, after struggling to get that CachyOS installer to work, I binned that idea. Followed a recommendation from another user on OMGUbuntu of all places; he suggested Aurora as a nice Atomic Linux distro to use. Since I'm already using Bazzite as a daily driver on my desktop, I decided to try.

OMG The smoothness Aurora makes it satisfying to use. The distro just works with a little extra configuration needed to make it right for me. I stopped trying to get Mullvad VPN to work via package layering and will be trying to use Mullvad through Tailscale in the coming days (once I've read the documentation to my satisfaction).

In the time between that, I set up a NextDNS and make use of that through Tailscale (it's filtering a lot of nonsense from the web). I can even use Tailscale to transfer files between my laptop and desktop, this will bypass the weird Filen issue that I temporarily experienced while launching+running it via it's VM container.

There was really only one change that I needed to implement. That was using Fedora as the Distrobox on Aurora...As for whatever reason, creating an Ubuntu Distrobox refused to work, update, or be useful. Left me scratching my head, but, I can use the two applications that aren't on Flathub at the moment.

Otherwise, Aurora just works and I love it for being a great Atomic distro that makes using Linux both easier and prettier (KDE is the best DE in my opinion).

I'll keep this one short, unlike the last one because I could likely go on for FAR too long. Thanks for reading!

Given that this is the start of my days off (I get 4 because part-time employee) I decided to try to install CachyOS, as it's suppose to be an easier form of Arch-based distro to install. Now, I had thought this was going to go swimmingly and not like the disaster that EndeavourOS was for me months back, where the installer decided not to care about my partitioning choices.

I wanted to sate my curiosity after using Bazzite for more than 2 months now...I got the itch to change it up. So I created a Live USB with CachyOS on it, and got to work on it after shopping for some lunch in the late morning. Backed up all my data like a good computer person does, and summoned all the bravery that I could muster.

I first disabled secure boot and chose to boot the Live USB with CachyOS before booting into CachyOS's installer (which looks rather pretty). I selected all the correct options and let it rip. Just a small little error happened and I thought nothing of it as it continued to quickly succeeds overwriting Bazzite and adding all its software goodness into my SSD.

Except that isn't what happened, in fact CachyOS failed to install the kernel correctly. Broke Bazzite's bootloader, and generally wasted hours of my time (which isn't actually a big deal, since I'm off for days).

I had to futz around with reinstalling Bazzite and took about 2 hours and 5 minutes to get my system back to the point it had been before attempting to install CachyOS. Bazzite installs super fast and accurately, so no issue there...There are fiddly bits with working with an atomic distro. I had to set up a distrobox VM (Distroshelf makes it very easy), create an Ubuntu VM, and install programs there to pass through to Bazzite. I wanted to avoid layering packages, only Mullvad VPN is installed via that method (as that was the simpliest way to do it). The rest of the time was simply finding, installing, and configuring Flatpaks to how they were before my little experiment.

Apparently, the universe has spoken and said, "Arch, not even twice, you silly fucker!"

I learned a lot today, always stick to Fedora, Bazzite (Atomic Fedora), and Ubuntu. Those are the only ones that ever seem to install successfully on my PCs. ROFL Sorry for the nerd post, I just had to let it all out.

Not having to be at work makes for a great day, ground some coffee beans for a cup of coffee without being in a hurry like normal. Even successfully cooked oats with vanilla almond milk and canned pear (tastes great and makes my apartment smell nice). Too bad, I chose a jug of almond milk that's going to expire tomorrow. ROFL The rush at the store was so stressful, I was very goose on the loose yesterday as a result. Grocery shopping the day before Thanksgiving is never fun (the life of one who lives paycheck by paycheck).

At least I'm free to enjoy this day anyway I please; probably video games and casual creative writing is the goal!

I love that Let's Go Karaoke is blending thriller elements with comedy and slice of life; the story so far is portrayed in a sensible way so far, I enjoy the nuanced facial expressions and subtler body language. They've nailed Kyoji Narita role in the narrative, I enjoy the blend of conflict/bromance that Satomi Oka is experiencing when interacting with Kyoji.

It makes me wonder if they can maintain the correct tone for this anime throughout the airing (feels like an 11-12 episode anime). I'm also getting curious enough to read the manga afterward to see what the key differences are!