Wait until you try bacon grease. Y’all are in for a real treat.

I use Debian. Does this mean I’m in the top 0.05% of Steam users?

Watch out. That’s how you create a Slackware user.

My wife got me 8 TB about 3 or 4 years ago. It’s awesome. My Blu Ray library is on it and I still have 5 TB free

Blue has always been a favorite of mine, but purple has really grown on me lately. Naturally, I love bluish purples.

Once you figure out that purple doesn’t actually exist it’s even neater. Purple and magenta are colors your brain makes up when it sees red and blue light at the same time.

I actually have a Wii. And I have RE4 for PS2. Unfortunately my PS2 is dead so I actually bought RE4 digitally this morning for PS3 and was surprised in the process that the PS3 storefront still exists. I appreciate that Sony still sees the tens of us who still play this way lol

My laptop doesn’t have dust filters, but the fan almost never runs anyway. Like the heatsink is way overbuilt for the CPU it’s attached to. It’s actually quite nice. I’ve never seen it hit 70 degrees. I’ve cleaned it maybe three times since 2016. It really only spins the fan up when I’m watching 60 fps YouTube videos or playing games. And even then, it kicks hard for a very short time and shuts off again.

And again, I bought this thing nine years ago. It’s just a little Acer. And it’s not even a nice one. I paid like 500 bucks for this thing.

Now, my wife’s MacBook that she games on…yeah, I need to figure out how to get the back off so it can get a proper dusting. Fuck you, Apple. Let me work on my stuff, dammit.

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.

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.

Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to come across aggressively. I get a little fired up at the thought of crossing a huge, fast road, and it doesn’t help that cars are way bigger and drivers seem way worse these days.

No question bikes are the best way to get around in a densely populated area. My wife and I stayed in a condo in a building that housed a Target (Newmark Tower) when we vacationed in Seattle a couple months ago. If I could afford it, I’d buy that condo and live that way. We rented a car while we were there, but we barely drove it. It was genuinely liberating not needing it. We rode the monorail. We took the bus from time to time. We climbed a stupidly steep hill to get dinner one night. It was awesome.

But man, I live about a mile and a half from the grocery store and I refuse to bike there for the simple fact that there are way too many fast, wide roads to have to cross to get there, and there are zero bike lanes along the way. Unless you’re on the college campus, everything here is built for the convenience of the car at the detriment of literally everyone else.

And if OP also lives in the burbs, I reckon their situation is pretty similar.

Again, sorry that I came across aggressively. I didn’t intend to get so riled up about it.

Big talk if you’ve never crossed a six lane stroad on foot. The American transit system is often downright hostile to anyone not in a car. It can be downright terrifying.

There are ways to cut down on car costs if you need one. What car you own matters. Get something extremely common that never breaks. A 1998 Camry or Corolla are probably two of the most solid cars money can buy and junkyards are full of them. Parts are cheap and available.

Learning to do your own basic maintenance will also save you lots of money.

• A dealer might charge sixty bucks to swap a cabin air filter. It takes one minute and a replacement for my Honda Civic is eight dollars on Amazon. Same story with the engine air filter.
• Check your oil and transmission dipsticks every once in a while for level and condition.
• Check your brake fluid level and clarity.
• Tire pressures are on the inside of the driver door jamb. Learn how to properly inflate your tires, including the spare.
• If your car came with a scissor jack, a tire iron, and a compact spare, you can rotate your own tires in 30 minutes without buying any tools.
• On an inline four cylinder engine, spark plugs are often on the top of the head, below a cover, and are insanely easy to replace.
• Check your lights and blinkers every once in a while and learn how to replace bulbs. This is important on older cars that use halogen and incandescent lamps. A tail light is a few bucks, takes 15 minutes to replace, and will probably save you from a ticket.

Learning how to replace some parts is also a big plus and parts stores will often lend you small tools for some jobs free of charge.

Many states also offer discounted rates on yearly registration for older cars. In Oklahoma, it costs me $26 a year to tag my '97 Honda.

Finally, get a dash cam and the cheapest insurance you can, and drive like you’re on probation and on thin ice with your parole officer.

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.