You either get busy living or get busy dying.

That quote has stuck with me for a long time.

It’s funny. I used gnome for a long time, and after I fully switched to Debian, I didn’t have any problems with my nvidia card with gnome + wayland. But I switched to plasma recently, and it’s janky. I figured out my vsync issues, but it still runs a post when I wake it from sleep, which just defeats the purpose of sleep mode. I might as well shut it down every time I’m done using it like it’s 1997.

But I started using X + KDE, and most of my problems went away. Still takes forever to wake from sleep. But that’s it, really.

True story - I keep blank audio CDs around because my cars have CD players. The fact that I still burn CDs is another story, but Debian is still small enough to fit on a CD-ROM. So I keep a backup of Debian 12 on a CD-ROM so I don’t have to lose a flash drive to that task. Very convenient. And I’ve broken my system a few times tinkering. I’m not even sure how. But hey, I love to go fast and break things. I probably made an edit to a file long ago and forgot about it and now it borked stuff. It happens.

At this stage, I’ve got it down pretty good. If I break my OS, I can plop in my boot CD, use rescue mode to back my home folder up to a flash drive and wipe the system. I keep lots of other things on extra HDDs so all I ever wipe is my boot SSD. I have an Nvidia GPU so before I log in for the first time, I just get back into rescue mode and set up my root password, user account and password, reclaim my home folder, change ownership to the new account, set up fstab, and install drivers and programs before ever logging in as my user for the first time - all from the console.

As for data loss, I haven’t lost any. I have never needed to wipe my hard drives so as long as my home folder is intact, retrieving that is easy enough. I don’t keep just one copy of irreplaceable files, either. While my phone does back up my stuff to Google Drive, I keep additional copies of my favorite pictures and videos on DVDs. Three copies, on at least two different media, one of them off-site.

Breaking your OS is really not that big of a deal once you know how to retrieve stuff without it. You don’t even need CDs lol The boot CD is just for convenience. You can bork the system on a computer with just one storage device and as long as you have two flash drives, you can get it all back pretty easy.

But I’m only here after years of experience in bash. If I went back ten years with a busted laptop and told my 22 year old self to use lsblk, mount, and cp to copy the home directory to a removable device all in command line, younger me would probably cry lol

Everything I know about bash I learned by spending a decade copy-pasting random commands I found online into my terminal.

It’s really that easy. You’ll be sudo apt update-ing with the best of them in no time when you spend a decade copy pasting commands you found on the web to your terminal.

And as a multi-monitor user, I’m finding that part to be true. I’ve got my panels set up on each of my monitors exactly the way I want. Plus, controlling the wallpaper independently on each monitor as a built-in feature is dope.

The dock is Latte. I run Debian so this is Plasma 5. As I understand it, Latte doesn’t work in Plasma 6.

I’ve considered this in the past, and I might toy around with it in the future once I get the motivation to

Check your DMs

For the lolz, of course. Like, who is still using the XP start button in '25?

I’m 32 so I was a kid in the 2000s. XP represents a golden age of the Internet to me. A time when every YouTube channel looked different and any random MySpace profile you ended up on was probably playing MCR. Before you had to sell practically every scrap of info about yourself to use nearly any service, and Google wasn’t visibly evil. Ads were mostly “Your friend’s IQ was 44. Can you beat that??” because all the world’s authoritarians were too old to care about the web. You could pretty reliably know you were talking to a person in a chat room, and you didn’t have to do some kind of mental calculus to determine whether it was a bot trying to rob your grandma of all her money in Google Play cards. Pretty well no kid in the 2000s is safe these days. I’m sure most of us said the racial slur or the mental slur or had sexual relations with everyone’s mother after getting shot in Halo. I’m safe. We never had Xbox Live lol But I played a lot of split screen Halo in the living room. Good, innocent times.

Rose tinted glasses and all that, but idk, I feel like we’ll never achieve that again. Everyone was throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck. And the tech was kind of in a Goldilocks zone. Just powerful enough to be cool and exciting, but not so powerful that it gets scary.

Except for those damn PS2s being used for nuclear bomb guidance.

And that’s fine. I said I really liked gnome. The only extensions I had were weather in the top bar and dash to dock. I just wanted it to do a few extra things, and I wanted to play around with widgets. Gnome was also a bit too rigid for my taste. Plasma makes tweaking small things a joy.

For me, ootb Plasma felt too much like Windows. I use Windows all day at work so I want my home machines to look and feel completely unlike Windows.

It’s Debian so I’m on 5.

Thanks! I’m using Latte for the dock and Tera Circle Blue for the icons.

my wife’s old Macbook is still going strong for casual use

As is the 500 dollar Acer laptop I bought in 2016 lol But yeah, my wife had wanted a MacBook Pro for a very long time. We finally had the money for it in 2019 so we got that laptop for her. In order to play games on it, I had to give her one of my Windows keys and learn how to set up Boot Camp. It’s actually a perfectly serviceable gaming laptop.

She loves it. It’s still holding up very well. But was it worth $2,700? Not to me. But then again, my '97 Honda probably isn’t worth the $2,700 I paid for it to her, either. I don’t understand why she wants overly expensive computers. She doesn’t understand why I want overly crappy cars. But we did say for better or worse so here we are lol

I’ve literally never owned a Thinkpad lmao I’ve installed Linux on:

• HP Pavilion DV5-2077CL (Ubuntu 12.10)
• Toshiba Protege Z835-P330 (Ubuntu 16+)
• Acer Aspire V3-372T (Debian 12)

As for desktop machines, I have essentially the same computer I had in 2014. A 4790K on a Gigabyte Z97 board. The only hardware issues I ever ran into were a Netgear WiFi adapter (I got it to work, but I’m on Ethernet again because it’s better) and my RTX 4070 that replaced my R9 290.

Windows: You got a kernel panic from an update just once this week? I went through two BSODs today!

Mac: It’d happen more often if I actually had software! You get everything!

Arch: While getting updates can cause crashes sometimes, new stuff is fun.

Debian: You guys are getting updates?

I’ve been keeping Windows around on a VM because of Excel, but lately, I’ve been using Calc to build my spreadsheets more often than booting my whole VM to run one program.

Now, I’m thinking of deleting the VM on my PC. I’m going back to school to take some computer science classes and I might need Windows for that every once in a while. So I’ll probably pick up a better laptop in the future so I can host Windows on Debian because I refuse to dual boot.

Fedora issue. I restart my Debian machines maybe once every 4-6 weeks.

In my experience, it’s here.

I gave my brother my Sandy Bridge laptop that got me through college. New battery and charger and it’s all set. The 1366x768 resolution doesn’t render pages very nicely anymore, though.

My wife’s 2019 16" MPB is running pretty great. Probably got another 5 years of life left in it. She uses it to watch YouTube and play Sims 4.

My 2016 Acer Aspire V3-372T is hanging in there running Debian. 60 FPS YouTube videos are getting to be too much for it anymore. I may have to put the old girl to rest one of these days.

But hey, it does play Minetest pretty flawlessly.