@Anonymous wrote:I also am fond of Linux although I run Windows (I'm a gamer and no matter how far Steam's Proton has come, it's still got a long way to go, and Linux is hit or miss on old console emulation too which is one of my favorite uses of my desktop at the moment) and MacOS as well. When I was living with my dad he let me build a machine to install various distros of Linux on in addition to my main machine. This was back in like 97/98 (I was around 13-14) when Linux was still very much command line and configuring Xfree86 was the stuff of nightmares if you weren't intimately familiar with the hardware in your computer. SuSE was my favorite distro back then, Mint Cinnamon is my favorite now although Pop! is growing on me and is what I run on this crappy Dell laptop I made the mistake of buying a few years back.
I go on Distrowatch every now and then and grab a new ISO to try out in VMware (not a VirtualBox fan and Xen seemed like too much hassle for something I just like to tinker with). My desktop has Windows 10, KDE Neon, and MacOS Big Sur running in a triple boot config. I actually need to purge that KDE Neon install and go back to Mint or Pop! so I think I will go ahead and do that before I go to bed tonight.
ETA: Pop! OS won the great debate. Nvidia support out of the box and I prefer Gnome to MATE or Cinnamon.
I have no problems with Steam at all. I love playing immersive games, and they look so nice on a 17.3" laptop screen!
Right now, I mean right this minute, I'm using a loaner laptop that's running Pop! Maybe you can tell me how to do two simple things! When I say simple, I mean I can do them in Kubuntu with my eyes closed. How on earth do I change the clock (at the top) to show HH:MM:SS? And how do I make Dolphin have single-click functionality?
Back to games: I've played games on *nix forever. I used to use wine to play my all-time favorite game, Roller Coaster Tycoon (and its expansion sets). I did an experiment once, when I had just received a brand-new desktop--that I had to pay the 'windows tax' on. 
I booted it up as is, and installed RCT and played it. It was choppy, laggy, slow, flickery, just basically bad. Then I did what I always do: WIPE that virus known as windows off my drive and install Kubuntu! Installed RCT and played it. Smooth as silk.... Fast, smooth, no jerkiness, no lag time, no flickering. It played better under wine on Linux than on its native windows--ON THE SAME MACHINE!
As for Linux and its old CLI days...did you ever try to get wireless working with a Broadcom BCM43xx card? I did. On several computers, spanning a few years. Those cards were infamous for not working with Linux, and although it was frustrating at the time to have to spend time fiddling with ndiswrapper and all this other stuff, I look back on it fondly now.
Here's my current Kubuntu splash screen:
We've come a long way from the command-line-only days!
@Anonymous wrote:I'm a tech junkie. It takes a lot of self control to not blow money on all the things I want. Like I have a 12 Pro Max right now and really want a Pixel but only so I can play with Android 12. I buy game consoles even though I really don't play them a lot because of my anxiety. Every year I have to talk myself out of buying a new TV - it's a fight I have with myself at least twice a year (when they are released and again around Black Friday). I built my first computer when I was 12 and I usually end up being tech support for friends and family. Love tinkering with OSes. I used to go on Distrowatch and download a new linux distribution at least once a week and I spent the better part of 3 months with the OS X Tiger Intel developer image that leaked figuring out how to get it to boot and install natively instead of having to use it in VMware or dd the VMware image to a hard drive partition. I also dabbled in ROM development for Windows Mobile 5 and early versions of Android.
Before my panic attacks got really bad I used to be big into music. Rock, alternative, metal, electronica (trance, hard dance, breaks, techno, liquid DnB, psytrance, goa, IDM, psychill - pretty much the only things I didn't like were happy hardcore and anything else that was over 170 BPM)... I was a bit of a DJ (trance, hard trance, hardstyle, breaks, and right before I sold my tables I made my first DnB mix) and I used to always love driving my car up to the mountains to enjoy the drive while blasting music. I also used to go to a lot of raves and parties.
Photography has always been an interest of mine but with my tech junkie mentality it would be a huge money sink so I have stayed away from really diving into it. The most expensive cameras I have bought are the Canon PowerShot G series (I have a G16 currently and my first one was the G9) because they were a good middle ground between point and shoot and DSLRs. Now I'm happy to just take shots with my phone.
I enjoy anime as well. I don't watch it as much as I used to because my eyes bother me when I'm reading subtitles and I can't stand dubs but I'm getting new glasses next month and I'm hoping that will bring back some anime binges. I just realized that Sailor Moon Eternal is available on Netflix so I'm going to watch that tomorrow.
@Anonymous Perhaps I can link this to you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqvRHffrNeY 
Also anexity is horrible as a suffer myself.
For the past few months been doing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_and_FM_DX#Sporadic_E_propagation_(E-skip)
@SoCalGardener wrote:I have no problems with Steam at all. I love playing immersive games, and they look so nice on a 17.3" laptop screen!
Right now, I mean right this minute, I'm using a loaner laptop that's running Pop! Maybe you can tell me how to do two simple things! When I say simple, I mean I can do them in Kubuntu with my eyes closed. How on earth do I change the clock (at the top) to show HH:MM:SS? And how do I make Dolphin have single-click functionality?
Back to games: I've played games on *nix forever. I used to use wine to play my all-time favorite game, Roller Coaster Tycoon (and its expansion sets). I did an experiment once, when I had just received a brand-new desktop--that I had to pay the 'windows tax' on.
As for Linux and its old CLI days...did you ever try to get wireless working with a Broadcom BCM43xx card? I did. On several computers, spanning a few years. Those cards were infamous for not working with Linux, and although it was frustrating at the time to have to spend time fiddling with ndiswrapper and all this other stuff, I look back on it fondly now.
Here's my current Kubuntu splash screen:
We've come a long way from the command-line-only days!
So I actually started messing with Proton in Pop! and it was just crashing even on games that it said were supported - the only game I managed to get to run on it was Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and even then the resolution options were not ideal, 1080p was totally not an option on my 3440x1440 display, although to my surprise the benchmark clocked a 51FPS average which I didn't think my 780 Ti could pull off at that resolution.
I decided to install Ubuntu after I tried like 10 other games and they all instantly crashed to see if things worked better over there and I was met with typical Linux bugs that turned me off from the start. The bootloader installer in Ubiquity explicitly ignored my instructions to use the EFI partition on my other SSD rather than installing itself into the EFI on my NVMe drive that has Windows on it, placing it into the NVMe boot drive instead, and then when I installed Steam, it never opened once beyond the first time to update. I hit Google to see if I could find the reason and nobody had reported the same error codes as me and I didn't feel like messing with it so I just canned it and went back to Windows. I am sure with some tinkering I would have figured out the problem with Proton but why would I want to do that when I can reboot to Windows in less than 30 seconds and have everything just work? I don't have the patience that I used to for computer problems. I guess I'm getting old. 😂
As much as everyone likes to hate on Windows, myself included, it really does just work most of the time while Linux requires a lot of fiddling around. Windows 10 has been rock solid stable for me most of the time and I still have nightmares about kernel updates borking my Linux installs before.
Funny that you mention Broadcom. My old Alienware laptop uses a BCM4352 card and fussing with those Broadcom STA drivers was one of the things that sent me to Mint in the first place since Mint included those as well as the Nvidia drivers while Ubuntu did not. I did mess with ndiswrapper before and actually found that easier than building the kernel module sometimes. I loved that machine but the card was a real hassle.
I have never messed with clock or dolphin settings so I have no idea there, sorry.
Its interesting that we have had totally opposite gaming experiences. I never found Linux gaming to be smooth unless it was Unreal Tournament 2004 which did indeed have a native Linux version that ran better than the Windows one did. Usually its messing with wine and getting really irritate trying to get it to perform as well as it does on Windows. One caveat here though is that my systems are usually upper midrange gaming rigs with x60/x600 class or higher Nvidia GPUs (my 780 Ti was my first flagship card, I have a Radeon 5830 in my old Q6600 machine (which replaced the 8800 GTS I originally built it with), and my computer before that had a 7900 GT which failed and EVGA replaced with 7950 GT) and overclocked Intel/AMD processors with parts I picked for ideal Windows performance so maybe I just never really noticed but I used to hate having to deal with wine anyway so my ideal setup almost always involved a dual boot scenario with Windows for gaming and Linux for everything else. When Windows 10 came out, I found myself using Linux less and less and that's when I started just using it in a VM.
That splash screen has some nice colors to it. I'll download Kubuntu next and give that a try. I used to love Kubuntu but somewhere along the way I fell in love with Gnome and left KDE behind. I think I'm going to grab 20.04 LTS because 21.04 Ubuntu was what was giving me so many problems and 20.10 support ends this month.
ETA: Got it installed, got Steam installed, Steam was complaining about missing GLX and crashing immediately so I added the Nvidia PPA per their instructions and updated everything which then got Steam to bring me to the login but dumped errors about being unable to initialize Vulkan so I installed vulkan-tools which also installed additional Nvidia packages and rebooted and now it won't boot at all. Hangs with no errors after I select the boot entry. Meh. I don't feel like messing with it anymore.
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:I'm a tech junkie. It takes a lot of self control to not blow money on all the things I want. Like I have a 12 Pro Max right now and really want a Pixel but only so I can play with Android 12. I buy game consoles even though I really don't play them a lot because of my anxiety. Every year I have to talk myself out of buying a new TV - it's a fight I have with myself at least twice a year (when they are released and again around Black Friday). I built my first computer when I was 12 and I usually end up being tech support for friends and family. Love tinkering with OSes. I used to go on Distrowatch and download a new linux distribution at least once a week and I spent the better part of 3 months with the OS X Tiger Intel developer image that leaked figuring out how to get it to boot and install natively instead of having to use it in VMware or dd the VMware image to a hard drive partition. I also dabbled in ROM development for Windows Mobile 5 and early versions of Android.
Before my panic attacks got really bad I used to be big into music. Rock, alternative, metal, electronica (trance, hard dance, breaks, techno, liquid DnB, psytrance, goa, IDM, psychill - pretty much the only things I didn't like were happy hardcore and anything else that was over 170 BPM)... I was a bit of a DJ (trance, hard trance, hardstyle, breaks, and right before I sold my tables I made my first DnB mix) and I used to always love driving my car up to the mountains to enjoy the drive while blasting music. I also used to go to a lot of raves and parties.
Photography has always been an interest of mine but with my tech junkie mentality it would be a huge money sink so I have stayed away from really diving into it. The most expensive cameras I have bought are the Canon PowerShot G series (I have a G16 currently and my first one was the G9) because they were a good middle ground between point and shoot and DSLRs. Now I'm happy to just take shots with my phone.
I enjoy anime as well. I don't watch it as much as I used to because my eyes bother me when I'm reading subtitles and I can't stand dubs but I'm getting new glasses next month and I'm hoping that will bring back some anime binges. I just realized that Sailor Moon Eternal is available on Netflix so I'm going to watch that tomorrow.
@Anonymous Perhaps I can link this to you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqvRHffrNeY
Also anexity is horrible as a suffer myself.
For the past few months been doing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_and_FM_DX#Sporadic_E_propagation_(E-skip)
I used to love The Thrillseekers. It saddens me that I can't really handle trance anymore, it sets my anxiety off hardcore.
Sorry to hear that you have anxiety issues too. They really are quite terrible. I am working hard to get off the medication for mine and learn the coping skills I need to get out in the world again but its a challenge. I went with my roommate to the Dollar Tree and the grocery store yesterday and I was okay at Dollar Tree but I almost had a panic attack when I was walking from one side of the grocery store to the other because I started thinking I was going to get stuck since I was in the back of the store. I hate agoraphobia but I pushed through it and got out and home without incident.
I wasn't even aware that it was ever possible to pick up distant channels like that. Pretty cool!
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:I'm a tech junkie. It takes a lot of self control to not blow money on all the things I want. Like I have a 12 Pro Max right now and really want a Pixel but only so I can play with Android 12. I buy game consoles even though I really don't play them a lot because of my anxiety. Every year I have to talk myself out of buying a new TV - it's a fight I have with myself at least twice a year (when they are released and again around Black Friday). I built my first computer when I was 12 and I usually end up being tech support for friends and family. Love tinkering with OSes. I used to go on Distrowatch and download a new linux distribution at least once a week and I spent the better part of 3 months with the OS X Tiger Intel developer image that leaked figuring out how to get it to boot and install natively instead of having to use it in VMware or dd the VMware image to a hard drive partition. I also dabbled in ROM development for Windows Mobile 5 and early versions of Android.
Before my panic attacks got really bad I used to be big into music. Rock, alternative, metal, electronica (trance, hard dance, breaks, techno, liquid DnB, psytrance, goa, IDM, psychill - pretty much the only things I didn't like were happy hardcore and anything else that was over 170 BPM)... I was a bit of a DJ (trance, hard trance, hardstyle, breaks, and right before I sold my tables I made my first DnB mix) and I used to always love driving my car up to the mountains to enjoy the drive while blasting music. I also used to go to a lot of raves and parties.
Photography has always been an interest of mine but with my tech junkie mentality it would be a huge money sink so I have stayed away from really diving into it. The most expensive cameras I have bought are the Canon PowerShot G series (I have a G16 currently and my first one was the G9) because they were a good middle ground between point and shoot and DSLRs. Now I'm happy to just take shots with my phone.
I enjoy anime as well. I don't watch it as much as I used to because my eyes bother me when I'm reading subtitles and I can't stand dubs but I'm getting new glasses next month and I'm hoping that will bring back some anime binges. I just realized that Sailor Moon Eternal is available on Netflix so I'm going to watch that tomorrow.
@Anonymous Perhaps I can link this to you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqvRHffrNeY
Also anexity is horrible as a suffer myself.
For the past few months been doing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_and_FM_DX#Sporadic_E_propagation_(E-skip)
I used to love The Thrillseekers. It saddens me that I can't really handle trance anymore, it sets my anxiety off hardcore.
Sorry to hear that you have anxiety issues too. They really are quite terrible. I am working hard to get off the medication for mine and learn the coping skills I need to get out in the world again but its a challenge. I went with my roommate to the Dollar Tree and the grocery store yesterday and I was okay at Dollar Tree but I almost had a panic attack when I was walking from one side of the grocery store to the other because I started thinking I was going to get stuck since I was in the back of the store. I hate agoraphobia but I pushed through it and got out and home without incident.
I wasn't even aware that it was ever possible to pick up distant channels like that. Pretty cool!
Hopefully you can find a solution to it to get back your normal self @Anonymous .
I also do some shortwave listening as well radio wise. Looks like somebody above mentioned they were a ham.
Most of my radio stuff is done with a SDR (Software Defined Radio) might interest you. For the FM Broadcast DX(Long Distance) stuff i am using a SDRplay RSPdx and a 4 element Yagi antenna. HF(Shortwave) i use something called a active magnetic loop antenna. Some stuff for you to look up. @coldfusion probably knows what this all is being a ham
Also various tech things like you mentioned so similar stuff here.
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:I'm a tech junkie. It takes a lot of self control to not blow money on all the things I want. Like I have a 12 Pro Max right now and really want a Pixel but only so I can play with Android 12. I buy game consoles even though I really don't play them a lot because of my anxiety. Every year I have to talk myself out of buying a new TV - it's a fight I have with myself at least twice a year (when they are released and again around Black Friday). I built my first computer when I was 12 and I usually end up being tech support for friends and family. Love tinkering with OSes. I used to go on Distrowatch and download a new linux distribution at least once a week and I spent the better part of 3 months with the OS X Tiger Intel developer image that leaked figuring out how to get it to boot and install natively instead of having to use it in VMware or dd the VMware image to a hard drive partition. I also dabbled in ROM development for Windows Mobile 5 and early versions of Android.
Before my panic attacks got really bad I used to be big into music. Rock, alternative, metal, electronica (trance, hard dance, breaks, techno, liquid DnB, psytrance, goa, IDM, psychill - pretty much the only things I didn't like were happy hardcore and anything else that was over 170 BPM)... I was a bit of a DJ (trance, hard trance, hardstyle, breaks, and right before I sold my tables I made my first DnB mix) and I used to always love driving my car up to the mountains to enjoy the drive while blasting music. I also used to go to a lot of raves and parties.
Photography has always been an interest of mine but with my tech junkie mentality it would be a huge money sink so I have stayed away from really diving into it. The most expensive cameras I have bought are the Canon PowerShot G series (I have a G16 currently and my first one was the G9) because they were a good middle ground between point and shoot and DSLRs. Now I'm happy to just take shots with my phone.
I enjoy anime as well. I don't watch it as much as I used to because my eyes bother me when I'm reading subtitles and I can't stand dubs but I'm getting new glasses next month and I'm hoping that will bring back some anime binges. I just realized that Sailor Moon Eternal is available on Netflix so I'm going to watch that tomorrow.
@Anonymous Perhaps I can link this to you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqvRHffrNeY
Also anexity is horrible as a suffer myself.
For the past few months been doing this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_and_FM_DX#Sporadic_E_propagation_(E-skip)
I used to love The Thrillseekers. It saddens me that I can't really handle trance anymore, it sets my anxiety off hardcore.
Sorry to hear that you have anxiety issues too. They really are quite terrible. I am working hard to get off the medication for mine and learn the coping skills I need to get out in the world again but its a challenge. I went with my roommate to the Dollar Tree and the grocery store yesterday and I was okay at Dollar Tree but I almost had a panic attack when I was walking from one side of the grocery store to the other because I started thinking I was going to get stuck since I was in the back of the store. I hate agoraphobia but I pushed through it and got out and home without incident.
I wasn't even aware that it was ever possible to pick up distant channels like that. Pretty cool!
Hopefully you can find a solution to it to get back your normal self @Anonymous
I also do some shortwave listening as well radio wise. Looks like somebody above mentioned they were a ham.
Most of my radio stuff is done with a SDR (Software Defined Radio) might interest you. For the FM Broadcast DX(Long Distance) stuff i am using a SDRplay RSPdx and a 4 element Yagi antenna. HF(Shortwave) i use something called a active magnetic loop antenna. Some stuff for you to look up. @coldfusion probably knows what this all is being a ham
Also various tech things like you mentioned so similar stuff here.
I am going to not research that stuff because I don't need another tech hobby to sink money into. 😂 It's bad enough that I'm ready to spend $1400 on a video card that's only like 20% faster than the $700 one because GPUs are never in stock. It does sound interesting though.
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I also do some shortwave listening as well radio wise. Looks like somebody above mentioned they were a ham.
Most of my radio stuff is done with a SDR (Software Defined Radio) might interest you. For the FM Broadcast DX(Long Distance) stuff i am using a SDRplay RSPdx and a 4 element Yagi antenna. HF(Shortwave) i use something called a active magnetic loop antenna. Some stuff for you to look up. @coldfusion probably knows what this all is being a ham
Also various tech things like you mentioned so similar stuff here.
I am going to not research that stuff because I don't need another tech hobby to sink money into. 😂 It's bad enough that I'm ready to spend $1400 on a video card that's only like 20% faster than the $700 one because GPUs are never in stock. It does sound interesting though.
SWL can get to be a fairly expensive hobby but all you really need to get started is a PC with an available USB port and one of the RTL2832U-based RTL-SDR dongles (Amazon, eBay) with free software like HDSDR or SDR#. The dongles themselves sell for < $50.
The UI is very similar to what you see with the Flex serie sof amateur radios and some amateur operators use RTL-SDR dongles to help with search-and-pounce type operating. Helps to keep from having to randomly turn the tuning knob to see if a particular band is open or find a frequency where someone is transmitting.
@coldfusion wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I also do some shortwave listening as well radio wise. Looks like somebody above mentioned they were a ham.
Most of my radio stuff is done with a SDR (Software Defined Radio) might interest you. For the FM Broadcast DX(Long Distance) stuff i am using a SDRplay RSPdx and a 4 element Yagi antenna. HF(Shortwave) i use something called a active magnetic loop antenna. Some stuff for you to look up. @coldfusion probably knows what this all is being a ham
Also various tech things like you mentioned so similar stuff here.
I am going to not research that stuff because I don't need another tech hobby to sink money into. 😂 It's bad enough that I'm ready to spend $1400 on a video card that's only like 20% faster than the $700 one because GPUs are never in stock. It does sound interesting though.
SWL can get to be a fairly expensive hobby but all you really need to get started is a PC with an available USB port and one of the RTL2832U-based RTL-SDR dongles (Amazon, eBay) with free software like HDSDR or SDR#. The dongles themselves sell for < $50.
The UI is very similar to what you see with the Flex serie sof amateur radios and some amateur operators use RTL-SDR dongles to help with search-and-pounce type operating. Helps to keep from having to randomly turn the tuning knob to see if a particular band is open or find a frequency where someone is transmitting.
Sounds like a interesting hobby to get into, what do i need to get set up and is it easy to hook up?
Starting Score: 663
I'm a tech junkie by profession, so it's the last thing I want to do at home for fun. haha.
My true hobby is fiber arts. I am an expert hand embroiderer. I've done several antique restoration projects, embroidered and beaded many wedding dresses and cultural costumes. In a world of machine made, mass produced, fiber art products, I feel like I'm helping to keep a dying artform alive. I'd LOVE to do this kind of work professionally, but I just can't give up my big salary as a 30+ year IT professional. haha.
And, I love to travel... in the two years before Covid times, I went to Africa twice (Egypt and Tanzania), the middle east once to visit the UAE and Oman (I drove from Abu Dhabi to Muscat Oman, it was fun), and once to the UK and once to Greece. And, I have a trip booked and paid for back to Egypt for early 2022. Love me some travel rewards! LOL I think I'm also planning a trip to drive from Barcelona Spain to Marakesh Morocco next summer too, because why not?
@razzy116 wrote:
@coldfusion wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
I also do some shortwave listening as well radio wise. Looks like somebody above mentioned they were a ham.
Most of my radio stuff is done with a SDR (Software Defined Radio) might interest you. For the FM Broadcast DX(Long Distance) stuff i am using a SDRplay RSPdx and a 4 element Yagi antenna. HF(Shortwave) i use something called a active magnetic loop antenna. Some stuff for you to look up. @coldfusion probably knows what this all is being a ham
Also various tech things like you mentioned so similar stuff here.
I am going to not research that stuff because I don't need another tech hobby to sink money into. 😂 It's bad enough that I'm ready to spend $1400 on a video card that's only like 20% faster than the $700 one because GPUs are never in stock. It does sound interesting though.
SWL can get to be a fairly expensive hobby but all you really need to get started is a PC with an available USB port and one of the RTL2832U-based RTL-SDR dongles (Amazon, eBay) with free software like HDSDR or SDR#. The dongles themselves sell for < $50.
The UI is very similar to what you see with the Flex serie sof amateur radios and some amateur operators use RTL-SDR dongles to help with search-and-pounce type operating. Helps to keep from having to randomly turn the tuning knob to see if a particular band is open or find a frequency where someone is transmitting.
Sounds like a interesting hobby to get into, what do i need to get set up and is it easy to hook up?
2 great places to start:
Do a search on eBay for RTL2832u and sort based on low-to-high price. The weakest link is probably the antenna but it should be good enough to at least pick up strong local stations and there are various jumper/adapter cables available to allow different antenna types to be connected directly to the dongle.