I’m right there with you. Never stop flying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv1a-OrikdM

Not sure if directly relevant, but there’s been a rush of really good PC games lately after a long dry spell.

I do, too, and drove one for many years. I’ll be the one to splash cold water on the conversation, though.

Driving a stick arguably requires the use of both hands and legs, which is great and partly the reason why so many enjoy it - that sense of engagement. It’s far less boring.

But here’s the deal. Injure any one of those appendages and driving a manual becomes a whole lot less fun. In some cases, you can get by, but it’s less than ideal. Having your arm closest to the shift in a sling, for example, makes your vehicle undrivable.

It won’t matter to most people… right up until the moment it does.

Or even better, btop

Secret sauce: it’s much easier to get an employer on board with buying you a Thinkpad as part of a bulk order than it is to get them to spring for any of these more obscure models as a one-off.

I’ve tried three times to fully convert my gaming rig to Linux, sticking with the effort at least 3 solid months minimum each time. The first time was back in 2015. Only a small subset of my Steam Library worked, despite all of my best efforts hacking on bottles, and there was no way I could stick with it if I intended to play anything with friends. Community aside, Valve and Feral were leading the charge, but I could not stick with it.

My second attempt was around 2019. Almost half my library ran, some in need of care and feeding, others barely functional, but running nonetheless. This was primarily due to my curation efforts of trying to make sure the games I bought offered some slim hope of compatibility. Wine was still a very inexact science, so attempts to get things running outside of native ports or Valve games was a poor facsimile. WineDB representation of compatibility layers was a wide gradient of colors, with most AAA titles still squarely in silver territory or worse. Anything with anti-cheat was a fool’s errand.

My rig’s now been on Linux for 4 months solid, and the state of Linux gaming is nothing close to what it used to be. The state of EAC support thanks to Steam Deck represents a quantum leap all its own, and that wouldn’t have happened without Proton. The overwhelming majority of my Steam Library runs with no effort, each game running nearly as good or better than it did on Windows. This shift did not feel incremental.

I’ve used vim with a smattering of essential plugins for years to do this, and only this year moved to Neovim for the same.

It’s not Open Source, but I’ve also taken a hefty liking to Obsidian’s canvas mode. Likewise, I share a small selection of lists with my other half via Google Keep.

Only reason I’m holding on to my Windows partition at this point is for rare scenarios like needing to reprogram my VKB stick, which only has a Windows executable. Other than that, I’ve not fired it up in months. And I’m a pretty rabid gamer.

It’s taken a long damn time to get here.

Syslog (rsyslod) is usually the standard answer for the average sysadmin, but it depends a lot on your needs. A lot of newer loggers output as pure JSON, which offer benefits to readability and more approachable search logic/filters/queries (I’m so tired of regex).

When you start venturing down the road of finding the right way to store and forward the output of logging drivers from Docker containers, as one example, rsyslod starts to feel dated.

The easy answers if you want to throw money at the problem are solutions like Splunk, Datadog, or New Relic. If you don’t want to (and most people wouldn’t), then alternatives certainly exist, but some of them are just as heavy on system resources. Greylog has relative feature parity with Splunk Enterprise, but consumes just as much compute and storage if not more, and I found it to be a much larger pain in the butt to administer and keep running.

The likeliest answer to this problem is Grafana Loki, just based on what I’ve read of its capabilities, but I haven’t had a chance to circle back and test it out. Someone here who has might be able to weigh in and speak to its strengths/weaknesses.

This has been on my radar for a while, and I keep putting it off. How are you liking it?

Grafana’s Loki sounded incredibly useful and performant, with the added benefit of reducing storage requirements significantly under some situations.

And I wouldn’t advocate for installation of a daily driver OS on anything less than an m.2, these days. Fair enough. A consideration for the future, then.

It warmed my nerd heart that the first thing I spotted in the mpvpaper repo was an animated Steins Gate background.

If you have two separate physical drives to work with, dual-booting is a great “training wheels” approach to the problem. Then you can take your time with the learning process and hop back into Windows quickly whenever you need a break or the ability to do something quickly that the Linux hasn’t been set up for, yet.

That’s mostly preference, once you get things all set up and installed. You can’t avoid updating forever because you’ll eventually need to install something new from the repos, and it’s good to have some kind of update cadence for security’s sake, but daily is a bit much. Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That.

I save that effort for a Saturday once every couple of months, and it usually goes smoothly without incident. I could go longer if I wanted, 2 months feels right to me.

Steam Deck changed the landscape of dev support for anti-cheat significantly. It’s still not perfect, but most games relying on EAC work now with minimal issue. You might have to occasionally revalidate installed files or reinstall EAC for the game after a patch and that’s about it.

Other anti-cheat solutions are still a crap-shoot and likely won’t work. Thankfully, VAC and EAC are the most prevalent.

Minimal issues here. Set up Arch, install nVidia, add build hooks before next kernel update, carry on.

Arch, i3, GTX 3080 12GB, and no issues. I’m holding off migrating to Wayland for the sake of full compatibility with all screen-sharing solutions.

I’ve never really experienced any issues pairing Linux with nVidia, so I have trouble personally relating to all the hate they catch. There have been a few times where the kernel and the nVidia driver were mismatched, which caused issues trying to start up Xorg, but that’s easily solvable.

I suspect there’s some variance between distros that would alter your opinion slightly, but I can also still appreciate the before-systemd days where some Linux versions kept the important bits in a single rc file. Your preference is understandable.

One of the main reasons my wife hasn’t taken the Linux plunge is Photoshop support and a lack of feature-complete alternatives with sane UI design choices. We would gladly pay for a Linux version of Photoshop at this point.

It"s dawning on me now as I write this that Proton could be the secret sauce that slays this monster. Has anyone tried adding Photoshop as a non-Steam app to the Steam client, lately?

As others have stated, the cleanest option for a single monitor setup is to either share a specific window, or start making use of multiple virtual desktops, sometimes referred to as workspaces. Windows, Mac, and Linux are all capable of it, now - the only difference is how you set up, arrange, and navigate them.

Linux options offer the most versatility, Mac’s implementation is a decent balance between ease of use and scalability (with caveats), and the Windows native implementation is the newest entrant to this playing field… but it’s an adequate offering that gets the job done for this use case.