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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2023

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  • I disagree with dual booting at the early stages. I like dual booting (or even better a VM if that covers you) once you’ve figured out what works and what doesn’t (assuming something vital is in the “doesn’t” category); but, if you are trying to decide if it is right for you, I don’t think it does you any favors to be able drop back into old habits so easily. My recommendation is drop a bit of money on a second hard drive, pull the windows drive out and install just Linux. See if it works for you, if your “must-haves” are running painlessly or not. You still have the safety net if things go REALLY badly of just popping in the old windows drive and changing your boot options in the BIOS, but you will be less tempted to just boot Windows every time you use the computer - until you really have to.

    For a start, in practice you aren’t likely to actually reboot and load into a different OS very often. You can’t really give something new a fair shake while you are still spending most of your time somewhere else. Minor things, like how you like your system to look/work will just push you back to windows because it’s easy and you won’t ever look at the options to find out that it can do what you want (and likely more). Second, there is the pesky windows updates that likes to fuck with the boot loader.

    This is really only advice for an enthusiast that really wants to try Linux. I know some will disagree - everyone’s experiences are different, but it is definitely my preferred methodology and helped me make the leap.








  • Maytag and Frigidaire are separate (Frigidaire is part of Electrolux family, Maytag is part of Whirlpool, as is KitchenAid). We hardly carry Maytag kitchen appliances because most of them are just re-skinned Whirlpool products with some extra dollary-do’s tacked on for the name (and especially in dishwashers, the KA is just better if you want Wpl family stuff). They aren’t bad, but when you can get a KA for a tiny amount more and get more features, or get the whirlpool for significantly less with nearly the same features…

    Their laundry (which is where their name still carries a ton of weight with hillbillies that remember their commercials from the late 90s) is absolute hot garbage.



  • I wouldn’t go buy a new microwave just to spite the brand. For one, Frigidaire isn’t significantly less reliable than the other major appliance brands - they have noticeably worse “fit and finish” in their build quality (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Frigidaire Pro badge that was on straight, ever. Their french door freezer doors will not line up with even perfectly adjusted fridge section doors. etc.) but also typically a lower price point. Just about all appliance companies make some shit-boxes - from stats I’ve tracked at work, the common consumer brands in the US have roughly 10% failure rate for the first year, and about 30% failure rate over 5 years. Those rates stay pretty consistent between brands (as soon as someone looks like they are going to upset the balance, they release a fancy new design for an ice maker or something that just shits all over the bed and has to be 'service-bulletin’ed to consumer reports hell and the stats wander back into line).

    Basically, if the thing is working now, I’d keep it until either it doesn’t work or you just really want/need some feature it doesn’t have. Buying a new appliance is just going to be giving money to a different-but-still-shitty brand.




  • When my brother and I were both in university, we lived in cities about an hour apart. We grew up about another hour away, so to visit my brother my dad had to drive through the city I lived in, passed the campus for my university, to get to the city my brother lived in. You could literally see the buildings on campus from the interstate through the city.

    He would call me about once a month to tell me about the awesome weekend he just had visiting my brother and seeing one of their school football games. He would rave about how much fun it was and always say “you should come down too next time”. I would always tell him I probably would if he would tell me about it before the trip instead of after…

    I started to resent my brother being the “obvious favorite”. For years we barely spoke. We reconnected like a decade later when we happened to live in the same city. One night around a few beers, we started hashing out old shit, and I brought up him being dad’s favorite and all the trips dad made to visit him.

    That’s when I found out my dad made it all up. Our dad only visited my brother’s campus twice, the day he moved into the dorms and the day he graduated…





  • Garuda Linux hands down. Arch at its core but has just enough hand-holding for me to be comfortable and able to do most things via a GUI out-of-the-box.

    I might not have made the switch when I did if I hadn’t found this distro.

    Bazzite for an honorable mention, running it on my laptop and recently had some update troubles as it hadn’t been booted up in a while and ended up rebasing to the newest image (and discovered there was a specific image for Asus laptops with nvidia GPUs). The rebasing process really WOW’ed me…