T w e n t y S i d e d

Over the past week, I uninstalled World of Warcraft from my laptop, as I had proven everything I needed to regarding running WoW on Linux. I then spent the entire rest of the week trying to get Star Wars: The Old Republic running without ever achieving final success. SWTOR seems to be one of those things that either works immediately without problems or with very minor launch instruction additions…or it doesn’t work at all. I have increasingly run into things that “just work fine” on Linux until I try them, when I discover that the truth is “just works fine” comes with a ****load of caveats and assumptions. And Linux community-sourced support can literally tell you ANYTHING you would ever want to know about every possible problem you might ever have; at the expense of not ever being able to address the literal question you asked in a way that frames a useful experience going forward. I liken it to asking “how do I make a souffle?” and everyone answering “well, first I need you to go learn French or you won’t actually understand what’s going on or the instructions I would give you” or, unfortunately, the standard “why would you want to do THAT?”. Also, every discussion of a support issue WILL DEVOLVE into two separate arguments between two people trying to “help” about whether either is making the correct assumptions before attempting to provide and answer. Regardless, I erased my Windows installation and installed Linux on my main computer, this computer, last night.

Oh, and World of Warcraft released the newest expansion and broke some major game mechanics for two days.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Interesting Times”

Paige Francis He/him

It almost seems like a year has passed since last week; most of it in the past few days. This will be short one, and I mean it this time. The laptop is still running at 100% on Manjaro Linux. The biggest thing I learned this week is, when looking for a program, use the packages available in the AUR archive first. These seem to be more likely to have everything needed for an Arch Linux-based install set up already. It’s not an issue with everything, but I have found a couple of programs that wouldn’t work using the source package but did work using the AUR package.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “So…what a week…”

Paige Francis He/him

As promised last week, I will be talking about the Linux Switchover Project. And that’s literally the first time I have used that phrase, but I guess it’s accurate. The past week has been full of trials, tribulations, cursing, depression, and few successes. Most importantly, the laptop *is still running Linux*, and is doing more things *now* than it was a week ago. In fact, it has been running the same distribution and flavor since…Monday, I think. I probably could have been running the distribution and flavor I started with if had known then what I know now. I think that’s where I will start; with what I have learned that affects some underlying assumptions and rules.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Linux: So Tantalizingly Close to Prime Time…”

Paige Francis He/him