drphungky

I think I’m gonna fix my partitions so I can distro hop, then check out bazzite. Keep hearing good things. Even though I do dabble in programming and AI image generation and other desktop stuff, I do mostly just game.

I’m glad you’ve had a good go of it. I’ve been very unimpressed with Linux Mint. I expected it to be fiddly, I didn’t expect it to just…not work out of the box. Like freezing up on the initial screens as part of the welcome tour? Baked in features like linking up with Google drive just…not working? Losing sound in games when messaged on discord, the de facto standard for side by side gaming audio? And all of these issues reported multiple times in multiple forums, with like 8 different solutions proposed depending on who you asked, with a healthy amount of “well that’s not a problem, it must be your machine’s fault” when it’s happening to multiple people?

I fixed some of the issues after serious googling, and I’ll get it working fully eventually, but I could never in a million years recommend it to someone unless they shared my desire to go mostly open source with high privacy, or were very tech-savvy. I even thought it would be a scenario like, I play admin and get things set up, then can hand off a working computer to my wife or daughter. Not a chance for the wife, and we are going to really need to keep leaning into programming for the kiddo. Maybe she’ll be a tech whiz who likes fixing things, but if she needs something reliable for school some day it’ll be a Chromebook or (gross) a Mac.

It’s customizable as hell, it’s free and open-source, and it’s helping my computer skills, so I’ll keep going with it for sure. But if I didn’t love learning and problem solving and simultaneously have HUGE issues with privacy and Windows whole direction… I can’t imagine sticking with it.

This tracks.

DeWalt: high quality and good pedigree but overpriced = Slytherin

Milwaukee: basically the same as DeWalt, but less pretentious. Thinks they’re better and tougher though = Gryffindor

Makita: the smart choice for value, also best colors = Ravenclaw

Ryobi: I know it will break, but they’re just tools and I’m not serious about this anyway. I would rather spend more money on my family or other hobbies = Hufflepuff

Honorable mentions of other “houses” and schools in the thread.

Black and Decker/Craftsman/whatever. Used to be very impressive, but completely corrupted. Probably evil = Durmstrang (Russian school)

Festool: Beautiful, absolutely dripping with wealth signals. Still pretty amazing at what they do, but you might not want them on a job site = Beauxbatons (super wealthy French school)

Harbor freight: Simple, potentially the most powerful but also likely to break. Can probably accomplish what you need by using a wrench as a hammer, but you wouldn’t want to do anything delicate with it. Actually the biggest group of dad-wizards = Uagadou (the school in Uganda where magic was invented but they don’t use wands)