Yeah, I found quite a few games that I had to go in and specify it re-download and use Proton because the Linux native build was borked.

Yeah, I tried audacious. But I use a lot of plugins to run weird formats, so it doesn’t cover my usage. Neither does VLC. I’m using Wine to listen to music for now… but not nearly as much as I used to on Windows.

I’ve got a bug in Wine that the entire desktop UI locks up on first launch. Not to mention opening a second song opens a second Wine. Not optimal.

I’ve searched through logs and journalctl to see if there is a reason for the lockup, but best I can find is that my Intel A580 GPU isn’t playing nice. I’m using Mint (not Manjaro) and nothing in my logs indicates that Intel is the issue, though.

Switched Jan of 2025. Already used 99% open source stuff on Windows, so the conversion was nearly painless.

I tried Debian at first, which didn’t support my bleeding edge new hardware. So I tried LMDE… which also (unsurprisingly) didn’t support new stuff either. It wasn’t until I landed on regular Linux Mint that things hit a good stride.

I still mourn the loss of Winamp though… :(

I’m a happy middleground. I’ve had two upgrades blow up on me, out of the tens I’ve done.

One was a usrmerge catch-22. It wouldn’t let me install the package during upgrade, but also wouldn’t let me complete the upgrade without the merger finishing. Ended up reverting the install and running the merge prior to upgrade.

The second failure was just… I have no idea what I did wrong. Some commands stopped working. Then I lost SSH. Then it wouldn’t even boot. I had to do a full reinstall and rebuild. Not happy times.

Overall, it was just enough failure that I routinely run two backups prior to upgrades now. hahaha

The heart skip when an rm command runs longer than expected.

I learned the VP9 sort after I saw how randomly abysmal the encoding is for AV1.

Just look at these numbers:

and a direct comparison, same frame from AV1:

and then VP9:

use --compat-options prefer-vp9-sort

yt-dlp -f bv*[ext=mp4]+ba[ext=m4a]/b[ext=mp4] -S height:1080 --compat-options prefer-vp9-sort --all-subs --no-warnings -v https://www.youtube.com/watchx

I had used Lubuntu to rescue an underpowered laptop back in community college. At university, I was on the campus tech support team… and ended up “the Linux guy” for the few foreigners who had installations (I knew how to run apt and that’s about it). Out of uni, I ended up in a career supporting RHEL. Of course Raspberry Pis skyrocketed in popularity as well, so I got to sink my teeth into a Debian-derivative and blow up a few installs without having to worry about change management.

When time came to build a system in 2025, I figured I’d try it as an experiment. I stumbled at first and learned Debian does not play well with new hardware, but after switching to Linux Mint it’s been nearly painless. Most of the software I had been using in Windows was already open source (because I couldn’t afford to buy software), so almost everything migrated 1:1. Excluding Winamp… :(

You should have seen the panic back in 2017 when my team found a cluster of Server 2003 running at a hospital.

The client thought it was fine.

I just hit the same issue a few days ago. So Debian 12 (Bookworm) still has i386 support, but that support may end as soon as next year as they haven’t confirmed i386 as an architecture for LTS.

If you do go with Debian, you can easily choose a lightweight desktop during installation.

I didn’t look too far into it yet. I know that Bookworm is good until 2026, though there is a big TBD on whether i386 is part of the 2028 LTS. I guess I have a minimum of another year to figure it out. Not that I do much with 2008 hardware to begin with.

I JUST got done posting about LXQt rescuing old hardware earlier today, found out about this news, booted up my laptop to perform a Debian Trixie upgrade in preparation… only to find out that my Pentium M is too old to rescue. Debian dropped i386.

so instead of defaults I think you want noauto,nofail

Then it shouldn’t automatically mount, but at the same time won’t throw you into emergency mode if it fails to detect the drive.

I tried XFCE for some older hardware and had the same experience.

I poked around at stuff like fluxbox and found it too minimal. So I ended up using LXDE instead and got better results, but that was before it transitioned to LXQt. I have no idea if it’s still as lightweight as it used to be. Someone else might have to chime in.

Interesting. The Zero W is still in active production, with production promises all the way to 2030. I would not want to be in the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s shoes right now.

which is funny because firmware is a legacy term for what evolved into what is honestly software.

You don’t need to socket any new chips nowadays.

I had dabbled with Linux over the years, starting with Lubuntu reviving an old Dell 120L during college. When I moved to university they gave us all Macbooks to work with in the IT department. OS X never clicked with me, so I set up a VM with Linux to perform my day to day work. I instantly became the Linux guy because of that… so any tickets that came in for Linux troubleshooting got routed to me.

It just sort of made sense to try a Linux build after that, since I couldn’t afford a Windows license after I lost access to MSDN.

Oh! I know this one! ReactOS!