I’ll admit to liking the look of some gaming PCs, with a custom loop with clear tubing, colored coolant, coordinated lights; it hits the same way a well done build in Satisfactory does.

I’m not really interested in gaming peripherals like a big chunky mouse with a bunch of angled plates on it trying to look like Gigatron’s jock strap. Some RGB can be kind of cool, I kinda wish I could do more useful stuff with it, like I always throught it would be cool to have RGB lighting that varied from blue to red with component temperature or something. I’m not the biggest fan of just unicorn vomit for the sake of unicorn vomit.

In the 1940s or 50s. My family has owned it since the 60s.

xXx-=The_Mouse_Sl@yer_69=-xXx

Meowssolini

Actually I like that one.

You know that cute thing vets do when they come out to the waiting room and call the cat’s name?

They won’t do that if you name your cat “Shithead”.

From what I’ve seen, it means a bunch of bitching.

The “scam” seemed to be “Look, a woman. Give us money.” Like, it was so obviously a scam that I started wondering what was really going on.

As others have said, an alert if the tank is full would be legitimately useful, for a model that doesn’t have a drain line.

Yeah, at some point I would suggest replacing the unit as a whole rather than throwing parts at it constantly. For me, that point would come when the system can’t survive a season.

I wanted to be a pilot since I was a child. I got an introductory ride in a Cessna on my 14th birthday. Started taking flying lessons in earnest around 16, earned a private pilot’s license my freshman year of college. Decided I wanted to go into it as a job, started working on my instrument rating, and for my junior year of college I transferred to ERAU in Daytona Beach. Lasted just over a semester there. Ended up earning a light sport flight instructor certificate and I taught classes at a small school, eventually earning an LSRM certificate and working as the company mechanic as well. I’m a walking flight school, just add airplane.

Wasn’t earning enough money to pay all my own bills, and though I was logging 20-30 hours a week of flight time little of it was applicable to further ratings, and then the owners of the school started doing some sketchy shit and I decided to dip out. In the summer of 2012 I landed after a lesson with a student, and I haven’t flown an airplane since.

I kinda built myself a job as the project manager of a little job shop/prototyping firm, then that business didn’t survive COVID. I’m a woodworker now.

Apparently it’s an AMD firmware issue.

Okay, so the Linux ecosystem is more modular than Windows. Windows is synonymous with its Graphical User Interface (GUI) for reasons I’ll get into later.

With Linux, there are several GUIs available to choose from. These tend to fall into two main categories: Tiling Window Managers, and Desktop Environments.

Tiling Window Managers have minimal on-screen UI elements, usually they’re meant to be used with keyboard combos with little usage of the mouse. A major feature is everything that is running is visible on the screen, when you open a new window, another window divides in half to give it room, “tiling” the screen. Some examples of TWMs include i3 and Awesome.

Desktop Environments are going to be more familiar to newcomers from Windows or MacOS. They’re made more for mouse control, several have what you would recognize as a taskbar, start menu and system tray. Windows can be stacked on top of each other like papers on a desktop, exactly like MS Windows does. Some more closely resemble MacOS though none behave exactly the same way. Some examples of DEs include Gnome, KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon.

Cinnamon is a DE made by the Linux Mint development community, and the default/flagship DE for Linux Mint. It is designed to be familiar and easy to use for Windows users. KDE’s Plasma DE is similar in many ways to Mint although it’s based on different tech; KDE is based on qt, Cinnamon is a distant fork of Gnome and based on GTK. Some are designed to be more minimal so they take up less system resources, like xfce and LXDE, others are trying mostly to resemble MacOS, like ElementaryOS’ Pantheon DE. Then there’s Gnome, which I goddamn hate.

For a beginner, the choice of DE is going to present most of the differences you’ll notice when trying out distros. It can be instructive to try, say, Kubuntu and Fedora KDE. Both ship with the KDE Plasma desktop, but the underlying OSes are different. Then try out, say, Fedora Workstation (with the Gnome desktop) and Fedora KDE. That exercise will give you a good understanding of distro vs DE.

Edit to add: It’s kind of like launchers on Android. You can go in the Google Play store and install a different launcher on your phone, you can make a Samsung Galaxy look like a Google Pixel. Linux DEs work the same way, you can install KDE or Cinnamon the same way you’d install a normal app, you can have multiple and switch between them. It’s not a great idea but you can.

Okay, it’s not the power supply. Found this on the Fedora forums: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/weird-cursor-issues-on-fedora-kde/156413/8

Apparently the power failure just happened to coincide with a kernel update that causes a bug with AMD firmware; people are reporting the issue with higher end Radeon 7000 series cards using high refresh monitors attached via DP with kernel 6.15.

My uname -r output: 6.15.3-200.fc42.x86_64

So I can either learn how to revert to kernel 6.14 on Fedora, I’ve never messed with it before, or live with 100Hz like a bronze age slum rat until they push a fix.

The further mystery is why a momentary power loss took down a PC plugged into a UPS. It has one job, that it apparently didn’t do.

I’m still skeptical that it would cause problems that minor, prior experience tells me it would do something like work fine at low resolution and show no picture or boot loop or something at higher resolution, but for the sake of troubleshooting when there’s less convective activity on the radar I’ll try plugging it straight into the wall.

Right now, if I set KDE’s settings to 100 Hz, everything looks fine. If I set it to 144 Hz, sometimes I see a double mouse cursor. I get a second cursor about an inch to the right of what seems to be the actual cursor.

Explain how a problem with the UPS will cause that symptom.

Switched the socket on the GPU the DP cable is plugged into, I think I see the same problem. It’s only been a few seconds, I haven’t seen the “lower portion of the screen from about the mouse down goes one color” thing yet but I have been seeing a double mouse cursor. This goes away completely when setting the frame rate down to 100 (says 99.98 in the KDE settings menu).

Not sure what I’m looking for in package manager logs or dmesg.

Everything is attached to the UPS, both the computer and the main monitor are on the battery side. Why the computer was shut off on this UPS, I don’t know. I might be switching brands of UPS.

If I switch it down to 60 or 100 Hz, the problem goes away entirely, so I don’t think it’s a hardware damage issue at this point. Like, I did a software update, I wonder if it’s booted up with a slightly newer version of mesa or wayland or something that isn’t playing nice.

Yeah Black Hat called her “My dearest darling danish” after she called him “my cutie pie.” Closest thing she’s had to a name.

#Gaming

On the machine I used Nvidia on, I ran Linux Mint and used that distro’s driver manager. It was fairly straightforward. I found an appropriate time to build a new machine and I’m now a Ryzen/Radeon kind of guy.

In broad strokes, what Valve has done for Linux gaming is build a compatibility layer that translates the game’s calls for Windows systems into those that Linux can understand, especially translating DirectX API calls to Vulkan. So, for the most part, Windows games now “just run.” You do not need to wait for a game to be ported to Linux, and in fact many just simply aren’t anymore; Valve’s instructions are to target Windows and let Proton handle Linux gamers. The one place you’ll find issues are some games that use kernel level anti-cheat, a technology that can work on Linux, but many studios choose not to let it.

#Excel/macros

I don’t know if a conversion to a FOSS office suite (I would recommend LibreOffice or possibly OnlyOffice) will be 100% seamless, the most trouble I had with LibreOffice was collaborating with others. An MLA formatted essay made in LOWriter may translate fine, powerpoint presentations and spreadsheets might be a little wonky.

The cool thing about FOSS apps is you don’t have to have Linux to give them a try. You can install LibreOffice in Windows and try it out yourself.

#Outlook

I don’t know a damn thing about Outlook. There are several email clients available for Linux, which I don’t use, so, I can’t really help you here.

#Programming IDEs

I don’t think VisualStudio is available for Linux; their text editor VSCode and a “we built the parts they opened” called VSCodium are.

Linux is an extremely programmer friendly environment; you’ll find a lot of IDEs available. Your typical Linux distro ships with Python and Perl interpreters among others just built right in, along with GCC of course. I’ve messed around with the Godot game engine, along with Arduino, though these days if I’m going to do much programming I’m going to do it in Python, including for microcontrollers. These days I’ve somewhat standardized on ESP32s running MicroPython.