Well, aside from the development focus, this article resonates strongly with me: I love Linux, but I can’t quit Windows.
Linux friction is unpredictable. … The friction isn’t necessarily higher in total, but the unexpected issues are more likely to cost me an entire afternoon rather than a few seconds.
I won’t rehash Microsoft’s fuckery, despite spending most of my technological life on Windows (with a not-too-infrequent use of Macs). But this “AI” nonsense (it’s not AI, it’s a statistical sentence construction machine that frequently lies) has given Microsoft levers I can’t unpull. And, while I find some utility in limited use of LLMs, what I don’t want it my operating system recording every screen I see, every keystroke, and filing it in the most unhinged manner. I also don’t presume that, should I have wanted that, making my system a place where others who do not want such features act as a recording device simply because they interact with me is.. well, fuckery. Oddly, those features are, for the time being, able to be disabled if you know the right commands. What I could not work around was a change Microsoft made to SMB support. I tried every guide, setting, PowerShell command, and hidden toggle and nothing stuck. Which meant that I could write files to my Synology NAS, not copy them from the NAS to Windows.
So, while I do love my Macs (and prefer macOS for work), I still do like to play games. And gaming, despite Apple’s insistence, is still the domain of Windows for now. Which means trying to find a way to make the hardware I have function in a way that lets me a) work, b) access my local networked resources and, c) install and run most games available via Steam.
My first foray was popOS, mostly because I run Ubuntu on a local NUC for some containers and felt comfortable there. popOS was fine, But popOS changed at some point and the UI got to be… cartoony? Bubbly? It wasn’t for me. I wasn’t invested in it yet after a week or so, so I started fishing. More than a few people on a Discord I frequent were crowing about CachyOS and I thought “why not”.
I’ll skip the install process, there’s plenty of guides. I will catalog some of my mistakes, though, because I’m probably (am) doing some dumb, dumb things.
I use Brave for work and Vivaldi for personal internetting. I installed those first, set up the various sync services, set defaults. Then I started spelunking in Cachy’s settings and saw KDE Wallet. Having just gone through and turned off all the Web3 crap in Brave, “wallet” sounded pretty crypto-ish. Flipped it off and moved on. After a while, updates happened and the computer needed to restart.
And, when I fired up those browsers, it was Bad. Brave crashed on startup, never rendering a page. You could see the previous tabs, but within a second the whole thing just crashed. Vivaldi also could not find anything about the active profile, forcing a new one to be created, forgetting all the synced data.
After reading Mike Olson’s blog post about setting up Cachy, and seeing the section about KWallet, a lightbulb went off. Turning on KDE Wallet restored the browsers back to normal. So, lesson learned and, for the search engines/LLM thieves: if Brave is crashing on startup on CachyOS and you turned off KDE Wallet. turn that back on.
Cachy helpfully displays an onboarding window when you first install, giving you options to enable and install some helpful/necessary packages (want Bluetooth? Click this button.) I clicked a few that seemed right, but didn’t know what all of them meant. Assuming I’d run across these settings again (noooope), I dismissed the window for good. Then I started reading Mike Olson’s blog again (hmm, is that a theme I hear starting?) and realized I couldn’t get back to that window.
Well, it’s still there and you can run it again from the command line from /usr/bin/cachyos-hello. Thanks Reddit.
And, to save the read, this is where I gave up. Again.
The machine I’m using for Cachy (indeed, for most of my Linux experimentation) is an MSI-branded Intel-based system. 14th Gen Intel chip, major brand nVidia 4070, I think a Samsung SSD. Standard kind of PC you’d get for general gaming, no customization, no enhancements. Stock as stock gets.
I’ve had to revert to a snapshot half a dozen times already. I mean, thankfully they’re there, but every other update, no matter how minor (this last one was an update to Tabby for fuck’s sake) tanked the machine on startup. Just an endless spinning circle and no OS loading. So, revert again (twice, since the first point I picked also didn’t load), and now I’m writing this from a build that’s… three days old?
I don’t know why, though. I’m running the out-of-the-box system updater. And, I note, when some part just doesn’t work, the system tanks. Don’t know why, don’t know how to exclude pieces of the update
I haven’t jumped distros just yet, although I will be grabbing the latest Ubuntu tomorrow. I also, after each of these experiments, feel incredibly disheartened. Hearing people find that Linux “just works” now and I never get to experience that is frustrating. I try not to do weird shit when I use Linux distros; it’s too easy to break something I don’t understand in ways I can’t diagnose. But I also want my computer to work for me, and that inevitably leads to tweaking. I haven’t done that this time on purpose because I thought Cachy was meant to route around that need. And maybe it does and I’m the idiot that they can’t engineer around. It’s happened before.
I really, really want this to work. But I also want a computer that works without me having to become a sysadmin. And, for me at least, Linux isn’t it.
Finally the end of restrictions on liquids on flights? At least at Heathrow, yes.
Fun Mastodon accounts
I recently turned 50. In my more honest moments, I did not expect to make it to 50. I almost didn’t. But, here I am, likely in the best shape of my life since I was a teenager, down 60 pounds since the heart attack, numbers on medical tests are good (mostly), and I can buy clothes in sizes I’ve not been able to do before.
I also have 60% of my expected heart capacity (ejection rate or something) so I can run, but only for 4 minutes at a time. I have what’s likely permanent nerve damage from diabetes, and I have a pill case that I have learned how to pack efficiently in order to close the lid. What I’m saying is I have ailments, not just injuries. I have conditions and remedies and they all sound remarkably like the things I heard my “old” family members talk about when I was a kid.
[Sidebar. Dear pharmacies, when you fill a prescription, and that prescription is fulfilled by 30-90 pills the size of cooked rice grains, those pills don’t need to be delivered in a jar the size of a pop can. We have to store these things, sometimes a lot of them, in tiny medicine cabinets. Right size, y’all]
But, I am, by any measure and in my nieces’ estimations, Old. And while I am fit(ish) and have a normal BMI for the first time, I also remain vain and slightly… not obsessed but.. preoccupied with aspects of my appearance. I shaved my beard, for instance, because I wanted people to see the weight loss. It was also more white than salt-and-peppery, which I thought made me look even older. I even bought not one, but two electric razors (rotary and foil) trying to simplify that process, only to realize I kind of like the act of shaving with a razor. Of course, now I have two electric razors I can’t return and rarely use, but they’re the best I could get.
Which is another quirk of being Old I find oddly adopted: buying up. My partner and I often said the cliche “you get what you pay for” was true, but then bought a mid- to low-range version because, well, we didn’t make much for a long time. But through our 40s, we did ok job-wise and also cleared much of our recurring debt and found ourselves, while not debt-free, solvent in a way we hadn’t been our entire lives. And I found, as I was actually needing to buy new clothes, that I could go into stores and just… buy something. Michael Jordon U-M sweatshirt from the bookstore because I was cold and forgot a jacket? Sure. Pricey khakis as a ‘reward’ for hitting a weight-loss milestone? You betcha. Laptop I don’t need just because I wanted it? Embarrassingly, yes. It is a dangerous feeling and I find I have to be careful about why I’m buying something now because solvent != rich.
I am also beyond the halfway point in my career. Right now, that’s meant working for the last two decades at a university, a job I originally thought would be for 4 years. I like working for a university, not always enjoying the work itself, but that’s part of any job. But I’m also now An Old there, with 20 years at the institution and a fading list of accomplishments. I nod to other long-timers, we who are fewer each year as our colleagues take jobs with vendors or retire. I don’t think I can prosper out of the higher ed space and, frankly, I’m good at navigating the politics, culture, and pace. I don’t think I’d be good in industry with those skills as they are also now fine-tuned to a very specific wavelength of bullshit,
All of this is meandering thoughts circling a point, though. Much of my life has reached a past-halfway point. That likely happened chronologically a while ago, but the Law of Round Numbers means that it’s top of mind for me now. It’s an odd realization–and I intend that in the “becoming real” meaning of the phrase–to live in, being conscious a little too often of your mortality, of your growing irrelevance, and of how fragile the meat sack carrying my mind around actually is. I don’t have deep thoughts about this, this mildly-coherent post isn’t going to blow up into a New Yorker piece about this 50-year-old white guy’s existential revelations.
I’m just old now. I have things I want to do, but will run out of time to do them, so priorities start to shift. And it’s a new experience for me that I thought earned noting.
For some conferences, it is surprisingly affordable (in terms of what weddings cost).
The Sickos Newsletter did the work.
Only $125/hr for WMU. Seems like the University of Michigan is leaving money on the table by not having a mascot.
“Unparalleled Misalignments, pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other.” Fantastic
New Tron! (ug, Jared Leto though). The first single from Nine Inch Nails (Apple Music) is a bop, too.
Want something written like it’s from Star Wars? Aurebesh translator!
Tiny Undervalued Hardware – Adapters, Hubs, and more. What a great compilation
I’ll also link to Monoprice’s 1ft extension cables. These are fantastic for getting things into your power strip or UPS when everything is a brick. If you’re looking elsewhere for these, make sure to get NEMA 5-15P to NEMA 5-15R to comply with surge protection standards.
I “graduated” to buying a small server rack for home to control the sprawl in the basement. Knowing zero about setting one up, this article has been interesting reading: Building My First Homelab Server Rack – Michael Lynch
Drippings from the web for today
Not so much a Links post as random thoughts. Plus links
New music!
Digging around in my basement (neighborhood garage sale is coming), I stumbled onto a set of prints I’d purchased for my partner in 2016 (photos below). I could not for the life of me remember when and from where I’d bought them. I put out a call on Mastodon and within minutes got a response. They were created by Nooligan, someone I remember following on Twitter at the time. He’s still active and making nice stuff.
Last weekend we went to Frankenmuth, MI for a quick weekend away. I think we found the inspiration for The Good Place. Fun fact, Frankenmuth has the largest, officially-sanctioned Oktoberfest outside of Germany.
How to truss a chicken without string
TIL the name Madison as a given name was almost unheard of prior to the mid-1980s when Splash! came out. [Tumblr post]