Its main purpose is to prevent malware from booting. In my experience its main purpose seems to be preventing me from booting things I want like ventoy flash drives, nvidia drivers, and Linux distros that don’t support it. Same goes for tpm module. Its main purpose seemed to be the switch keeping win 10 from upgrading. I turned them both off and haven’t felt the strong need to turn them back on yet.

That said, and my bad computing habits aside, you probably should turn them ON. I’m not sure they will do all that much realistically speaking, but if it isn’t getting in your way (and it shouldn’t), then ON isn’t a bad default state to be in.

It used to be a pain. Multiple versions that didn’t all work. Today it’s pretty painless. A lot of installers will actually do it for you now.

In arch (at least the last time I did it), it was just a matter of picking the right package and installing it with pacman

EndeavorOS’s installer will do it for you

I use Fedora these days. It didn’t do it automatically the last time I loaded from scratch (not an upgrade), but the rpm fusion team/repository made it simple. I just followed the crystal clear instructions on their website.

I think mint does it automatically with the installer…

Honestly I really don’t even think about nvidia drivers anymore.

Hard

94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.

But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.

My appendix came damn close to killing me. I vote “not valuable”. :)

It was a good childhood from an independence building, learning to explore standpoint. People my age around me are 1) very independent 2) confident 3) clever. It was also a hell of a lot of fun.

But dangerous. Like some guardrails could have been in place without really affecting anything. I also didn’t feel this way - I had good parents. But a lot of kids were pretty much just straight up abandoned on a daily basis. Lots of resentment towards their parents, it’s tough having a parent that literally didn’t give a shit about you. I unfortunately think a lot of kids fell into that category.

RI in the states.

Funny how things so far away can be so similar.

Man, what was it with pipe bombs? It was totally a thing to do. Everybody has a story about them. For anyone younger reading - no parent thought that was safe. But so many kids tried to make them…

A kid on my street blew his hand off doing that. For real, I don’t know the details. Me and a couple of other kids strolled up to his crew (they were older and generally got into more trouble than I did). They were out in the woods and he was cutting a galvanized pipe with a hacksaw. When I figured out what he was doing, I took off. I literally got picked on for that - for about a week. I could not have been a bigger pussy. Then he was in the hospital with no hand. Then I was ok to hang out with again - someone with brains - nobody screwed around with pipe bombs any more after that.

We didn’t have a lot of water near us - just some ponds. We did stupid shit, but 1) not considered safe and 2) generally not that bad in the big scheme of things. Kids drowned a lot in pools and ponds. The items above around water were changing. My mom wasn’t a fan, but my dad was all “you’re just moming him to death”. So I suppose those are half truths - mom didn’t think they were safe - but I was still allowed.

51 Born in 74. Dead smack in the middle of GenX. Parents had me when they were real young. To be fair, they are good parents. We were pretty poor, they got divorced and should have never married in the first place, and they do all the boomer things that drives everyone crazy. But, they cared about me and my sister, gave us more than they could afford and we deserved, and I think I had more love from them than most kids got.

But boy-when it came to making decisions about safety. Man, what was considered normal and ok just blows my mind. ;)

Gen x with boomer parents who barely parented, so…. Everything?

How’s this for a list? I swear every one of these is honest to god true and I did them all.

• jarts
• Being kicked out of the house for the entire day with zero supervision
• ice fishing / pond hockey. We decided if the ice was safe or not. Like 10 year old kids…
• being allowed to ride our bikes on literally any road except for highways
• riding bikes on the roads with no helmets
• being allowed to go literally anywhere we could get to on our bikes
• being given firecrackers
• carrying and using real guns on the farm at about 10+ years old unsupervised (22s and 410s - the 12 gauge unsupervised wasn’t until I was older - like 16ish)
• riding with no seat belts
• riding in the back of a pickup truck
• riding in the way back of a station wagon
• riding on the edge of a tailgate with our legs dangling over (we used to drag our sneakers on the road and make white lines by burning off the rubber soles)
• riding on the side edges of the bed of a pickup
• holding ladders and whatnot onto the roof & tailgate of a pickup (like not tied down - the kids held it down)
• working / playing all day in the summer sun with no suntan lotion
• making jumps and going off them with bicycles
• jumping over our friends with said bicycles and jumps
• riding three wheelers (they stopped making them because they were so dangerous)
• mean green machines
• candy cigarettes
• buying real cigarettes for our fathers from a vending machine
• drinking from the hose
• we we had “real” ninja stars and we hucked those things at everything
• we had real knives at very young ages - like maybe 5?
• I had a real slingshot early. Like 5ish. That thing could kill. Dangerous af.
• I always had a bow and could use it as soon as I could draw it. My friend was lucky enough to have a compound bow. Totally cool to walk around with bows and shoot shit.
• I learned to use a chainsaw around 10yr old
• drove tractors unsupervised at about 8 yr old
• drove tractors on the road
• learned to drive a real car (Datsun pickup truck - stick shift) at about 10. Unsupervised on the farm. Not allowed on the road. We used to drive it fast and do donuts and shit. Parents and grandparents didn’t care - we were just having some fun. “Be careful and don’t crash into trees” was all I ever got warned about.
• siphoned gas with a hose
• sprayed herbicides pesticides and fungicides as a teenager with no mask
• being allowed to camp outside in the woods for the night with friends
• being allowed to make campfires at said campouts (we cooked hotdogs and ate them)
• going to concerts with older brothers (anyone’s older brother) at young ages (basically once you started getting into music - 10ish?)
• carrying a house key with you since day 1 of kindergarten
• being a latchkey kid - I came home alone and took care of myself and my younger sister by about 3rd grade. Before that we got dropped off at grandmas house after school. If we had a problem we just called grandma on the phone.
• allowed to cook anything anytime since about 5
• it was a responsibility to light the wood stove and keep the fire going in the winter.
• mowed lawns unsupervised since a young age. 8ish maybe?
• used weed whackers about the same time
• had a dirt bike at 13ish. Allowed to go anywhere unsupervised
• totally cool to swim unsupervised or even alone once I learned how to swim
• totally cool to eat things that had fallen on the ground - the 5 second rule definitely applied
• it was ok to drink at home a little bit with friends as a teenager. Like a sleepover or out in the woods. Better than drinking and driving. Getting shitfaced wasn’t cool, but drinking some of dad’s beer / liquor was - as long as we didn’t drive. Party at a friends house? Gonna be booze? Ok if parents are around and nobody drives.
• when tromping around the neighborhood-I didn’t have to tell my parents where I was. They didn’t care. There were no cell phones either. If our parents wanted us they’d yell. If that didn’t work, they’d call neighbors and once they found out where we were last seen - that neighbor would yell.
• people had chicken pox parties (I never went to one but they happened - I think I got it from my sister)
• monkey bars - big ass ones at least 15 feet high. Hard packed dirt underneath. Totally could bust your head open or break your back if you fell off one. Wicked dangerous. Was actually scary to climb to the top but you bet your ass we all did it, otherwise you were a pussy and got picked on forever.
• huge Fn seesaws - like would go up in the air maybe 6 or seven feet
• those spin-y things in the playground-dunno what they were called. You know all the kids piled on, others grabbed the bars and spun the shit out of it. We all got dizzy and tried not to whack our heads falling off.

I dunno, that’s all just off the top of my head.

Corned beef and cabbage. Corned beef, one onion, 2 cups of water, can of guiness. Pressure cook on high for 90 minutes. Slow release.

Remove beef, cover with a mix of brown sugar and honey. Broil/grill/torch to carmelize/burn the sugar a bit.

While you’re doing that, you throw the cabbage, potatoes, and carrots into the broth and pressure cook on high for 5 minutes-quick release.

Veggies will be done same time as beef is seared.

Enjoy.

I will try it! Never heard of it. I also hate the markdown nonsense.

It’s super easy on the steam deck. You don’t need to know Linux. You boot into desktop mode, open Firefox, install emudeck by clicking on a link. Then you configure in there a bit and download roms - all pretty straightforward and easy. A noob can do it in a couple of hours.

Now that said - the steam deck is hit or miss emulating switch games. Most games work awesome. But not every game. It’s not clear to me if the hardware is a little too slow for emulation overhead, or if it’s more an issue between the emulator and the game. My take is it’s a bit of both.

Someone else will have to comment on modding the switch as I haven’t done that, but I bet once modded, it plays every game 100% fine.

Assuming my prior paragraph is true: if the ONLY thing you want to do is switch games - then I’d skip the steam deck. If you want to do OTHER things as well (snes, nes, all other older consoles, actual pc games that play on steam deck) then ya, steam deck all the way. Make sense?

When I run arch, I end up building pretty much exactly what fedora does. Once I realized this, I just install fedora now ;)

Easier to maintain, pretty dang current, “just works” like mint/ubuntu does. But I don’t do anything crazy though so it works for me.

Their insistence on sueing the world of emulation ensures I’ll never buy another Nintendo console ever again. (And I’ve bought all of them so far). Their actions cause the opposite effect of what they want - they are creating pirates.

Love mine and daily drive it. Not janky, zero issues. Everything works on Linux. Not sure what you’re referring to.

Can you get more bang for your buck? Yes, to start. But let’s compare after a couple of upgrades on mine vs whole laptop replacements with other brands.

And the sunk costs aren’t even a thing tbh. You can just go pirate your books with zero moral dilemmas since you actually paid for it and they took it away.

I really like the gnome workflow plus a couple of extensions. Notably I ran across a tiling extension called “grid” that scratched my tiling window needs on my desktop, and gnome is amazing on my laptop trackpad. I zing through desktops quick! Anything it can’t do out of the box, you can find an extension for.

I like the feel of something different than windows.

A pool cue. It was a nice one I had grown to love. My wife replaced it. But I still keep that old one around so when guests are over they have a nice cue to play with and don’t have to feel like they are handicapped with a crooked house cue ;)

This is good advice imo. Some further comments:

• Its easier to make a vm out of a bare metal or “real” install. It’s much harder to go the other way.
• you seem to have some fear about installing or reinstalling OSs. It’s much easier than redeploying vms. I’d banish those thoughts and jump in. Again the above advice is solid because you can mess up or change your mind, and you can always revert. Cloning a drive and redeploying that image to the original drive is simple.
• dual booting gets a lot of flak. Most of that comes from windows not playing nice with boot partitions when windows is installed on the same drive. Another source of issues is secure boot. If you have two internal drives, installing an os on each one works great. I like turning secure boot off and simply pressing F8 upon boot up if I want to switch. (But you totally can get it working with secure boot and adding other OSs to grub.

Those are not normal problems. Linux generally does work out of the box unless you’ve got weird or new hardware.

Mint usually does the trick ez peasy and that’s why it’s recommended so much. BUT, sometimes it craps on your hardware. I’d actually suggest trying a different distro before you make up your mind. Some are newer than mint and might work where mint doesn’t.

Might I suggest fedora workstation or popos? Fedora and the rpm fusion team make installing nvidia a breeze and it’s running pretty recent kernels and code. I’ve never run popos but it seems to be gaming focused and people generally like it.

If your having the same issues, then you probably do have some hardware incompatibilities. And if that’s the case, you have my condolences-you’d be better off just sticking with something that works - aka windows.

But please do believe me/us when I say you shouldn’t have to work that hard - mint is either too old, or you’ve got wonky hardware that is going to be a pain no matter what.

I think Myersguy nails it. One addition: Manjaro comes packaged with a gui software installer/updater, endeavoros does not. Endeavoros pushes you to use pacman and yay.

I’ve used both. I was happy with manjaro for a long time, until I wasn’t. Manjaro fools you into thinking updating is like mint - click a button, poof done. And that’s just not what you do on an arch system. Eventually one of those updates tanks things and you don’t know how to fix it. Endeavor does a better job at teaching you - for example showing you the arch wiki news prior to update, automatically installing pacdiff and meld, giving you tools to handle the cache and old files, etc. All of this is accomplished on the welcome screen with buttons that fire off terminal commands - so it’s not sexy, but helps.