wreckedcarzz

wreckedcarzz, 24 days ago

Half of America: why am I suddenly erect?

wreckedcarzz, 24 days ago

Haha yes very good

(what does any of that mean, I’m not down with the kids these days)

wreckedcarzz, 24 days ago

All the other services, at once: “Nah nah, hold my beer, WE are the shittiest of them all”

wreckedcarzz, 24 days ago (edited 24 days ago)

last paragraph, “at the time”

(long, super recent story/rant)

I just switched to Kubuntu for my ThinkPad (not my first choice but hardware incompatabilities) over the last few days, and it still very much is a terminal-based system. It took me ~4 days to set everything up, and nearly every step aside from “change things in the settings UI” was “in a terminal, type…”

I dipped my toes into Linux… 19 years ago? As someone who likes windows up until 10, and heard all of the ‘it’s so amazing’ gospel from Linux users, two decades later I’m like: “it’s still not ready”

Shit, I wanted to install Debian 12(.5) with KDE on this TP. It has a snapdragon X55, that I need working, and previous attempts at getting it working (year+ ago) failed. I read docs, did more research, I was ready. Made a live USB, install it in the live environment, restart, and… it hangs during boot. Research, ‘use the option presented at the boot menu’. Okay. “no network” errors, that’s fine, it’s not a net installer. Done, restart. Hangs. Research. “use rufus, it solved my problem”. Rinse, repeat, hang. Isn’t Debian supposed to be super reliable? And Kubuntu booted fine, like what the hell?

Then cue the 4 days of setup. This machine is a very light use box, mostly to be a hotspot. Browser, email, password manager. Btrfs for snapshots (WHY IS THERE NO SNAPSHOT UI IN ANY DISTRO I TRIED?!). I’m far from a novice, been trying to switch for two decades. This will be easy.

deep breath

WHY IS GRUB NOT TAKING MY UPDATED SETTINGS (it’s a known bug in Ubuntu since 20.04?!)? WHY CAN’T I GET HOWDY TO INSTALL? WHY AM I GETTING APT ERRORS ON A FRESH INSTALL? WHY IS BITWARDEN FAILING TO SYNC? WHAT IS THE NEW-NEW-NEW METHOD OF SETTING UP NEXTDNS? WHY CAN’T I RESIZE A PARTITION (/) LIVE? WHY DOESN’T MY HOTSPOT WORK WHEN I USE WPA3 (still broken, actually, and WPA2 isn’t an acceptable solution imo)? WHY DON’T I GET ANY ERROR MESSAGES WHEN THIS HAPPENS (a recurring theme)? WHY DO I HAVE TO SIFT THROUGH 3 DIFFERENT LOGS? WHY IS SEVERAL HUGELY-POPULAR PROGRAMS NOT IN THE DEFAULT REPO (omfg - Librewolf, Telegram, Element, Signal, Discord, Bitwarden…)? WHY DO THESE ALL TAKE DIFFERENT STEPS TO INSTALL ON MY SYSTEM WHAT THE FUCK WE HAVE A SYSTEM FOR THIS SCREAMS

E: WHY DOES KDE CONNECT JUST DECIDE THAT IT’S NOT GOING TO CONNECT TODAY UNTIL I TROUBLESHOOT FOR 3 HOURS, CHANGE NOTHING, THEN WORK?

And then, the 5G modem. Why in the shit doesn’t the fcc unlock tool just fucking detect, and unlock, automatically. Why. WHY. This is simple, the installer is already detecting hardware. It’s right there. This could be easy. Instead I had to dig through pages of solutions that didn’t work, until I landed on a page for my laptop (but seemingly a different architecture?) for Debian 13 (unstable) talking about needing to edit the installer with commands (omfg what) or the screen will just show nothing on boot, that you need to change wifi and bt stuff or they don’t work, etc etc… But in this heap of “I should just revert”, there was one line, the line I needed, to run this stupid fucking fcc unlock tool - and how to find the hardware address. Enter both, nothing (a ‘success’ message would be nice…). No further instructions in the doc. Luckily, I am persistent and went into the networkmanager anyway, tell it to connect to mobile broadband. Fill in my apn. Save. It works.

There’s a ton of stuff I glossed over, but it should not take FOUR DAYS with the terminal essentially living on my screen, with my browser having a dozen tabs at any given time for troubleshooting, for someone who has done all this shit before (minus the modem) many times in the past. It’s done, I’m setup, but there isn’t a soul alive who would switch their generic Dell machine running windows, spend several hours a day for several days, just to get their base system running. And the second they see “open the terminal”, which is still very much a necessity, they’ll be running to the hills.

I have a friend asking me questions about Linux since I’ve been harping on this the last few days, and I’m like… it’s not the easy path everyone says it is. I don’t want to push them away, but fuck they use many of the same programs that aren’t one-click installs, and I haven’t even touched gaming, multiple sound cards, gpu drivers; they use their machine for gaming, and mine is on W10 for a reason. It would be a nightmare guiding them through the minefield I just emerged from. Not to mention games that aren’t handled by steam/proton and don’t have guides, old games like Midtown Madness/2, Midnight Club 2, Insane/2…

It’s still not ready, not anywhere near close.

wreckedcarzz, 24 days ago

computer

installs iOS

Que?

wreckedcarzz, 24 days ago

So what’s the deal with vim? I spooled up a vps recently and decided to forgo the gui options, like a real Linux server admin. I have been using nano and it seems to do all I need from a basic text editor in the terminal. I get that vim/emacs meme-bantering but actually why. It accepts texts and stores them in files. What is the actual point/difference?

wreckedcarzz, 24 days ago

…mostly

wreckedcarzz, 24 days ago

dog war flashback meme

wreckedcarzz, 25 days ago (edited 24 days ago)

I think there was some in-fighting between Homer and Bart and Bart had shook up a bunch of Homer’s beer, using a machine of some kind. Cue cut/transition, Homer grabs one from the fridge, (scene), and I think the house explodes?

I haven’t seen this episode in at least 20 years.

E: basically my memory is correct www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw0eiTLKNT8

wreckedcarzz, 24 days ago

It’s like a paint mixing machine or something. Can see it in the video above, that’s how it gets pressurized so much.

wreckedcarzz, 25 days ago

✈ 🏃

wreckedcarzz, 25 days ago

B-b-b-but think of the shareholders!

wreckedcarzz, 25 days ago

I had an msi board in my father’s build, and as I was eyeing hardware upgrades I decided to get some more life out of it by adding some memory and updating the bios, as it was quite old. After the bios update, it never booted again. The upgrade tool said it was the correct file, that it was installed successfully, and that I just needed to reboot. Their flashback system? Didn’t work. Researching, it was apparently a KNOWN PROBLEM that msi just shrugged off, and several boards from that era would die after an update. No apology, no resolution, not even an admission of guilt. Because of that fuck up, proprietary software that my father used for business finances, wouldn’t activate on a new machine - the company shutdown the activation servers, and it required hardware checks, and there was no work around. The new program? Unable to read the old file format. We lost access to 20 years of tax/receipt records.

MSI is blacklisted for me, my family, friends, and anyone who I perform IT services for. I don’t give 2 fucks if the hardware is 80% cheaper and 200% better. Fuck you, they fucked perfectly good hardware, my reputation, and if we ever get audited we’re fucked. Eat shit and die, MSI.

wreckedcarzz, 25 days ago

Brb ima order 64gb ecc ram and an epyc to play minecraft

(/s obviously)

wreckedcarzz, 26 days ago

…and you cut his brake lines, right? … Right?

wreckedcarzz, 26 days ago

main storage […] was

oh no

I backed everything up

OH YEAH 🥤

wreckedcarzz, 26 days ago

Well, except when a second drive dies 36 hours later and suddenly you are panicking…

wreckedcarzz, 26 days ago

“honeyyyy, I figured out our vacation plans!”

wreckedcarzz, 27 days ago

Same, plus porn. I haven’t run across active communities on lemmy that cater to what I’m looking for, but reddit still going strong in that regard.

Other than that, I haven’t visited in months.

wreckedcarzz, 26 days ago

I use the (hidden?) rss feed that every sub has, to get a chronological order of posts. Then when I find a user I like, I’ll add their (again, hidden?) user rss feed to a category of users I follow. It was a huge pain in the ass to start but now I have a pretty steady flow of users whose content I like. All this is wrapped together via FreshRSS, which I self-host. This has the unexpected side-effect of capturing images/links that may be taken down by picky/overbearing mods, but because I still have the source link (not just the reddit post link), I can usually still access it.

When they silently axe that feature, it’s the end for me.

wreckedcarzz, 27 days ago

Me, already with the speaker ripped out by the cord: Arbiter battle cry

wreckedcarzz, 27 days ago

No no, a pony’s penis

wreckedcarzz, 28 days ago

Self-healing capabilities, and the ability to do an ‘in-place upgrade’ (installing win over itself without data loss) were huge too. I had to wipe + reinstall XP dozens of times throughout the years, often for some small bullshit. I was a Vista beta tester, and got a copy for my machine as soon as it went gold. I went all-in and it was actually a fantastic OS. 7 was good too, but it didn’t do that much new, comparatively. It stood on the shoulders of giants.

All live Windows Longhorn (Vista).

wreckedcarzz, 28 days ago

Look ma, we have so much space now!

wreckedcarzz, 28 days ago

Link?! This is a goldmine