I plan my days backwards. If my appointment is at 13:00 tomorrow I check the travel timetables and determine the absolute latest I have to leave. From there, how long does it take to get ready? What time do I have to be awake in order to get ready? What time do I have to be asleep by in order to get a full night of rest? The anxiety and restlessness makes sure I stay on top of it.

…and a lot of weed to make sure I actually do fall asleep on time as one or two puffs too many puts me in the right spot to fall asleep quickly.

Bitlocker.

I’ll decrypt it one day…

Piggybacking onto this, MenuLibre also works and the “hide from menus” setting does exactly that if a GUI is preferable. I used it to hide a bunch of VSTs a while back.

Forking is indeed the way forward when Mozilla loses its way a little more. For myself, I switched to Librewolf about 6 months ago, along with replacing Thunderbird with Betterbird after using it since the Phoenix days.

I cannot remember what prompted the move to Librewolf, it may have been the AI stuff they were pushing at the time, or possibly the update that forced the tabs into my titlebar without having to go into about:config to fix it. Or the fact that Firefox was constantly pushing me to sign up for an account. There were quite a few gripes that added up over time lol

Betterbird restored some removed things I liked pre-supernova as well as a native systray icon under Linux and that was enough motivation to make the switch.

It is time for a new browser to enter the market. Either Ladybird or something built with Servo seems likely.

I’ve got some bad news for you. Mozilla bought an ad company.

Have you looked at Duplicati? I use it and find it dead simple and reliable (I did a full recovery from a total data loss last year).

In the meantime, its possible to use qjackctl to create a connection from input to the VST before it goes to the easyeffects sink. Its a bit kludgy but it should work well enough.

Ooh damn. Mandrake was my first distro, I remember being sooo excited when the CDs came in the mail. It was I think 4 discs?

The experience was absolutely not good lol. At the time I only had one computer (some eMachines something or other) and a 56k line that only went to 14400 or 2600 baud depending on the weather. My NIC wasn’t supported and after some banging my head on the desk I ended up going back to windows 98se after a few days because it was the family computer I messed up and caught sooo much flak for wiping.

Returned some years later when it was called Mandriva and had a better experience with a custom built AMD machine. The eMachines machine by then was still around as a network file server running a flavour of BSD that served media to my OG xbox played through XBMC (now Kodi).

Great post OP and thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Someone will likely share it for preservation purposes soon enough.

I’m one of those creatures that flattens out fizzy drinks before drinking xD

Air-up water bottles. When I bought mine it claimed to be a better water bottle all-around.

Its primary gimmick of tricking the brain into tasting the scent works well, I did drink a lot more water without needing actual flavouring. The fact that I could (unofficially) 3D print my own reusable flavouring pods to be a little more eco-friendly was a nice surprise and the reason I decided to try it.

The “better bottle” part is utter horse crap. It leaks when tipped over, even when tightly closed. Their marketing team went as far as adding “sip, don’t tip” to the instructions instead of making the cap properly seal.

Drinking from it was a chore as there was no water pressure and the constant bubbling (lets be real, its more like wet fart) noises made it impossible to use in silent settings.

I ended up going back to reusing a disposable bottle until it leaks even though the thought and feeling of something flavourless being in my mouth is revolting (its a sensory thing).

Broken in iOs 16.7.2 using whatever built in viewer comes with Safari.

Bitlocker.

They can’t even use a lot of these IPs anymore.

That’s the thing though. Gamers have a special kind of amnesia that gets triggered every time BIG_IP_OF_THEIR_LIKING releases a new sequel or edition. The communities on Lemmy and reddit are unfortunately not indicative of how the wider audience actually perceives games. We’re a fringe group, and the publishers/studios bank hard on that. The uneducated and apathetic masses are their target audience. If the gaming world listened to the likes of Lemmy and reddit users, micro/macrotransactions, early-access hell, and half-finished releases wouldn’t have become common practice. But here we are.

Fallout is now associated with 76 unless you’re thinking of Obsidian.

You may be right. Fallout 76 has however seen a record number of players since the show aired. That’s commonplace with most gaming franchises when a film or TV series comes out. See also: The Last of Us, and SWTOR when The Mandalorian came out.

(I personally think of Neverwinter Nights 2 when thinking of Obsidian. t’was peak gaming)

Blizzard is a shell of its old self, cutting interest in Warcraft, Starcraft, and Overwatch.

I agree with you here. In reality, Blizzard still consistently has queue issues when releasing a new WoW expansion or game, even after all this time. They know it happens, and won’t scale up for launch day on WoW retail AND Classic. Their target audience eats that shit up and I’m saying this as a former player that quit during Battle for Azeroth. No comment on Starcraft as I quit when the OG Starcraft scene died down on aus-1 back in the day. Overwatch 1 was seeing incredible numbers when I played from launch until Moria was released. OW2 being a pay-to-win shit show ate into their numbers until they gave up the pay-to-win bullshit. I see more and more of my friends and streamers playing it again now that Bobby Kotick is gone. I’m quite disappointed in some of them, but it is what it is.

There’s rumors even Call of Duty is struggling to retain relevance in new releases.

Good thing they’re just rumours until the earnings report comes. Sony has poorly-redacted court documents stating that CoD is their bread and butter on the playstation. There’s no way that’s changing in the forseeable future (at least not in the billions of dollars range), even with the absolute shit-show that was MW3. When MW4 comes out, the diehard fans will forget it even happened, as they have with every single release since its inception.

Money. They are buying up IP instead of making it on their own merit.

Yeah same here regarding immutable distros. I’ve only dabbled in the reading and it seems to fit your use case. ^^

Keeping my eye on the thread for future reference. Best of luck!

To answer the direct question, BTRFS works fine for gaming. Garuda uses BTRFS by default and I’ve been daily driving it for a few years now. My gaming machine hasn’t had an unrecoverable failure that wasn’t my fault (not checking consple output for errors when updating and then rebooting). Games on an ext4 file system work fine - that’s what I do for games I don’t play often. The main NVME is for games that are played regularly and everything else goes to the storage SSDs.

Correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like you want an immutable distro more than BTRFS for what you want to do.

I admit that I am a bit biased. During the 8-10 years I tanked my startup by going all-in on Microsoft Store apps because I absolutely loved my Windows Phones and was convinced that they were the future, especially when Continuum was announced (and it actually worked!).

The disenchantment started when Microsoft forced developers to rewrite their apps for Windows 10 after already having forced the mobile devs to do it from 7 to 8. The hatred ramped up when they killed support for the Lumia 950XL 6 months after launch. I freaking loved that phone.

It pissed me off so much that I went to Apple lmao talk about cutting off my nose to spite my face.

You forgot Vista before 7. The list didn’t “break down” because Vista was the steaming pile of shit in between.

8 sucked, 8.1 was good at least in my opinion. 10 was when I fucked off to Linux land permanently after using it on and off for 15 years and have never been happier.

I’m a fan of hellpotting them.