obsidian says this takes 8 minutes to read

look at the page updates here

the using linux series jumplist:

I think we are like, 3 or so months away from the first post of this series, and really, I haven’t found anything that has caused me the urge to go back to Windows. I’ve seen some mutuals try Linux more, and work has made me want to try Linux more now, because using Windows for work is miserable. Using Windows 11 in 2026 is a terrible experience, and while my main PC has that trusty build of Windows 11 LTSC on there, it doesn’t fix the fact that Windows 11 feels so fucking sluggish most of the time, how animations sometimes feel so slow, or the fact that 11 currently is a dumpster fire of possibly vibe coded programming and user distrust. So uhh, here is another update on the Linux side of things. There hasn’t been anything majorly wrong that has happened so far, and even stuff that I expected to break and explode, like the disk encryption, has held up pretty decently.

an unremarkable Fedora 43 update

Fedora 43 gave me a poor experience when I first tried installing it back a couple months ago. I had an issue where I couldn’t put any passwords in because later the installer would crash, and the way I fixed it is basically by going back to Fedora 42. And I was having a good experience with 42, however Fedora releases are only really supported for a year, and 42 is about to be EOL in a month or so.

With all this, I decided to finally update the system to 43. It was a pretty annoying process, as the UI kept telling me to update everything and then reboot, so I did, I updated everything, rebooted, and was met with the same screen again. So I went with the command line solution, getting the system updated and then typing in sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=43 to get the system to update itself. Afterwards, I had to reboot the system and when I did so, I had this issue where the screen was black, and that usually means there is some sort of issue with NVIDIA drivers, this being an NVIDIA having laptop and all. A couple of restarts managed to fix it, and I don’t know exactly what happened really.

NVIDIA grief

Ever since I updated to Fedora 43, I had this issue where every couple days after booting up and logging in, I would hear the KDE boot sound, and then the system would freeze. It would just stay there, unresponsive, so the way I get around this is by force rebooting the laptop, booting it up again, and dropping down to the command line, pressing buttons like a dumbass until I hit the right keys, update the system, and then make Fedora update the kernel drivers for the dedicated GPU. It is pretty annoying, and makes the regular 40 second boot up of this laptop into a 3 to 5 minute ordeal, but at least it works now for the most part. I am still not sure what causes this, but I suspect maybe there is some wonky-ness with the NVIDIA drivers that I am just not seeing. I may try reinstalling the NVIDIA drivers someday, and I’ll see if this works actually, lmao.

clipboard weirdness

I noticed this weird behavior with Librewolf (and sometimes some Electron based programs, maybe Discord) where i try copying some text with CTRL+C and CTRL+V, and then realizing that I pasted the wrong stuff into the place I wanted to paste stuff in. I have to try it again, this time right clicking and pressing that “Copy” button, and it usually works. I am not sure, again, of why this happens, it is not like it happens all the time, but the times it does happen is very fucking annoying. Also those click to copy prompts in some websites (for example, to copy some code to run on the terminal) tend to not work on Librewolf on Linux, but they do work on Windows. Maybe it has to do with the fact I disabled the middle click paste in the KDE settings, hmmm.

Related, but I do want to stop using Electron bullshit one of these days. Electron itself is not that secure (allegedly), and Electron apps are just a web browser mushed into the shape of an app, like VSCode or whatever. Sadly there are a bunch of apps I rely on that use Electron, like Obsidian and Discord/Vencord, and Stoat i think also uses Electron too. For Obsidian, I heard that I could use QOwnNotes, since Obsidian is just using .md files, but QOwnNotes don’t work like Obsidian at all, it doesn’t show text as an active preview (aka live preview), instead showing a dual panel system. I don’t like this at all. Maybe there is an option to switch to a live preview, but I haven’t found it at all, lmao.

age verification concerns and systemd

Let me start off by saying that I fucking hate age verification. It is genuinely among the worst things that has happened to the internet, and it brings me great grief to see more and more countries implement this slowly, and I feel that my country eventually will follow suit, sooner or later. I think it is genuinely disheartening seeing most people IRL just not caring about the age verification bullshit, like they feel like it will not affect them.

And now the init system that most Linux distros use, systemd, is now adding initial support for age verification. Sure, today it is just a text field in the user records that has the users date of birth, but tomorrow it can have the users ID number, or some other document that is required to be loaded all the time for the computer to work. Like considering how proactively they added this fucking age thing, what happens when governments start forcing documentation verification (imagine a file field where you need to put in a scan of your ID) for you to use your computer? Will systemd also comply? Will they fold like wet spaghetti? I fucking hope not. But seeing their recent actions, makes me think otherwise.

Maybe this is justification to start checking out systemd free Linux distros. The only two distros that don’t have systemd that I know of are Devuan and Artix Linux, and I am also wondering if ditching a familiar distro like Fedora to something else like these two aforementioned would be a good idea. And if I were to switch to something without systemd, I worry I would end up hitting towards a wall, where I would end up like issues or something like missing features, like for example, I have a really strong preference for Wayland, and I am here left wondering if that would even work in a non systemd environment. I guess I will try that soon.

should we try gaming on the awful gaming laptop?

So the laptop I am running Linux on is a gaming laptop, but not a powerful one, at all. On Windows it was powerful enough to play Wolfenstein TNC on high settings, and Cities Skylines at very low settings, depending on how large your city was. Now, I been wanting to have some sort of device that I can play emulated games or like, more “lying in bed friendly” games like uhh, Beastieball, I think? Or like, PEAK played with a controller, or something like that. This laptop would be ideal, but sadly I am not sure how well this laptop plays on Linux. I remember I did try playing Minecraft on the thing, and that was not really playable, because the game always tried to use my integrated graphics and fully ignored my dedicated NVIDIA GPU. I also have played Slime Rancher 2 on the laptop, and that was a playable experience, but not a smooth one, since the FPS never got over 40 on medium settings (keep in mind, I consider 60 FPS as smooth). We should also keep in mind the massive backlog I have of mostly older-ish games, which would just run fine on a GTX 1650. I am honestly kinda lazy to do that right now, so uhh, I may do that in the future instead, actually.

vlc can’t play on smb shares, and dragon player sucks ass

Ever since I started using Linux, I noticed an issue with VLC, and that it is simply unable to play media off SMB shares. And for someone who likes keeping their media on an SMB share (like movies or music), this is very annoying, got to admit. And sure, Dragon Player works, but like it isn’t great, it runs slow, and it crashes if I dare try to add a subtitle file to the currently playing video. Alternatively, I could either add these videos to Jellyfin and play them from there (however I would need a GPU soon for video encoding), or simply move these into my laptop’s storage and play it from there.

page updates