I’ve spent uncomfortably long trying to figure out what “figma balls” means, or what the obvious answer is when I eventually ask “what’s figma”.

Garuda is great. I tried Bazzite on my nvidia based laptop and had problems getting it to work well (to be fair to Bazzite, this was well over a year ago when Bazzite was very new on the scene - I have no idea if i’d have the same problems today). Replaced it with Garuda (which I had been running on my desktop) and it literally “just worked”. And, frankly, I’m a linux idiot. I basically just read the messages that pop up occasionally and do my best to do things like they say (for example, I try to remember to run updates before the system has to tell me “hey, it’s been a bit. Would be best if you would update me soon”).

Speaking of being an idiot… I don’t even know if I HAVE to download the “dragonized” version to get all the gaming bells and whistles just as easily, or if I can use their KDE plasma version that doesn’t have all the theming and still get the “gaming” tweaks? Since my system works, I don’t want to install a new version just to find out, but I feel like I could convince other people to try it more if they got the same functional experience without all the purple glowing stuff out of the box.

SSD died that had windows 10 on it. During the re-installation process I got fed up with onedrive and skype popping up every reboot despite being told not to start with windows multiple times. Attempt to disable, the next round of windows update brings them back. I didn’t even have the absolute basics up and running before I lost all patience for it. Downloaded several distros, setup like 10 different USB sticks to boot them all. Cycled through them for a bit poking around and testing out. Landed on Garuda Linux kinda by chance, but it has been great. It was so refreshing to have a computer feel like it’s mine again.

Gotcha, that makes sense. Thank you for explaining it!

“Government finalizes construction of baby crushing machine. Experts say it could be dangerous, but we can all sleep soundly knowing at least they didn’t build a full-grown human crushing machine. Yet.”

Your username is a downright lie and you sound like you haven’t actually used windows since 7. Keep drinking the microsoft propaganda, you are clearly the target audience after all.

I feel like every time Halium comes up it comes with qualifying statements (like “I don’t love Halium”). I don’t really know enough about it to know why that is. What are the problems with Halium that people don’t like? Is it what it does (or how it does it) that is the problem, or something else about the project?

That is very interesting indeed, thank you for bringing it up!

What I really want to at this point is a pager, a cellular Wi-Fi access point, and an 8" tablet that can run Linux and sip power so I can just pretend I don’t have a device.

This is basically what I was thinking. Where can I find a fully functioning 8" Linux Tablet? I feel like the rest of it is easy peasy.

Edit: In my head, I am imagining a steam deck but with the side controller bits snapped off. Someone pls make this. lol

Is it bad that I automatically don’t take them seriously just based on their links to socials? Didn’t even go for a Bluesky (let alone anything federated) and going for twitter and instagram like it’s still 2019.

They are also working to similarly kill custom ROMs. Just recently the GrapheneOS team mentioned that Google is no longer making their hardware drivers Open Source, and so compatibility with new phones means reverse engineering their own drivers - which is a big reason that custom ROMs support such narrow hardware options already and very often come with limitations and/or features that just don’t work. At best, they figure out how to make it work, but it takes time and updates can lag significantly behind.

We have a lot of options on the software side for avoiding google (or android), but very limited options on hardware. We need open source mobile hardware support ASAP.

As far as I can tell, it’s just de-googled android… It is going to have the same eventual problems as any LineageOS, e/OS/, or GrapheneOS phone will have.

Unfortunately we need to come to terms with the fact that 1) Android is not Linux after all of the bastardizations Google has done to it and the control they maintain. 2) We need hardware mfrs on board for fully Open Source drivers for mobile hardware.

Basically all of the Linux phone options I’ve looked at have been disappointing. You’ve got people making open source OS like Sailfish or PostmarketOS or UbuntuTouch, but they only work for pretty narrow (and old) hardware and they don’t get 100% functionality on basically any of the hardware. FuriLabs was the first one I’d seen claiming you could use all of the features of the hardware, but even then it is using a bunch of (basically) compatibility layers to trick android apps into running, so I don’t even know if that will work after Google gets done with their plans.

Yea… I’m really disappointed with the timing of FuriLabs new phone which is mostly a downgrade over the previous one. I’ve been window shopping phones for a couple of months and am at a loss for what to do. Even spent some time considering a dumb flip phone that can work as a wifi-hotspot and use a small linux tablet or something for the more involved stuff, but couldn’t find a good tablet option that wasn’t huge (would still want it to fit in my pocket) or come with the same problems.

The fact that they can buy a company by going into debt and immediately transfer the debt to the company is fucking insane. Maybe we need to figure out how we as individuals can do that and just fucking crash the lending industry entirely? Can I make my house buy itself for me and then “whoopsie, the house can’t pay the bills, guess it will file for bankruptcy and hand me a big ol’ stack of cash”.

I did jump in when Bazzite first began to gain traction early on, so I feel like it’s reasonable to expect some kinks to work out. And like I mentioned, it is very difficult to completely brick a Bazzite install as you can always boot into the last working configuration.

Nothing that I know of, lol. I use the laptop infrequently, usually at a DnD game every other weekend. I don’t know if that is part of the problem, like it really wants to run updates more often than once every few weeks? I would let it run updates via whatever it is that pops up in the system tray asking to run updates. Eventually, anytime it tried to update it would give me an error message, undo whatever had been done so far, and then close itself. I think they have a new software center now, Bazaar or something? This was before that was released so the problems might not repeat if I tried it again.

And honestly, rebasing to a new image was incredibly easy to do, it just takes a bit of time, but I didn’t like randomly “having to” do it.

I was already running Garuda on my desktop for about a year prior to the Bazzite problems on my laptop, so I just switched the laptop to Garuda as well.

Honestly, installing Linux these days is significantly easier than installing windows. For every distro I’ve tried anyway (haven’t tried any of the “hard” distros).

That’s only really true in the sense that you will “get a bootable OS”. I had Bazzite just stop being able to update itself 3 times in a year, two times I had to entirely rebase to a newer image to get it working again, last time I just left it, pulled the drive out, and installed a different distro. I still have it, it still boots to exactly what it was before, and it still won’t update - but in an external enclosure it makes for a good “emergency” boot option (better than a live USB stick anyway).