I should’ve clarified: “I actually loved that machine, referring to the HP*, …”

The HP was my first successful Arch machine, after various failures due mostly to impatience and incomplete knowledge; failing to install necessary drivers, not understanding how easy it is to just boot the live media, chroot back in and fix those sorts of things, and so on. It marked a point in my life where I just really went into crunch-mode, consuming as much as I could about as much as I could.

The Compaq was a hunk of junk, even when it was new. I can’t imagine servicing them was remotely pleasant, but I’ll give it credit for being the first machine I ever ran Linux on. Even if it did so poorly, “we all start somewhere.”

Just the battery for the thing probably weighed more than my next two laptops combined, and one was a 17" “Media” edition HP with the DVD ROM and the full keyboard with numpad. I actually loved that machine, and it ran Arch for a good while, before HP’s garbage thermal management (and, likely, aging solder) killed it.

I still have it because of sentimental stupidity and it being the only one I’ve ever stickerbombed the hell out of. I might need to craigslist a toaster oven just for hobby projects and see if I can bake it back to life. Would make a fine addition to “in case of LAN party” stack of old laptops I keep around for when friends are over and want to run some CS:S, Quake 3, Brood War or whatever.

My first was Slackware. I don’t remember much other than following instructions really well and coming away with a working, albeit slow, OS. There was a joke video making the rounds back then of someone opening their laptop in a library or something and the Windows startup chime playing so slooooooooow. That was unfortunately my embarrassing experience, in a community college class, with the KDE startup chime. I didn’t know anything about TWMs, the terminal, or anything else really and foolishly thought my secondhand, 90s Compaq Presario (?) laptop would run a full DE in the mid 00s.

Anyway I got Ubuntu running a while later, when the Beryl (Compiz) cube desktop videos were showing up everywhere, and it was much easier. Same time Live CDs got popular and you could test run the OS. Then did Debían for a while because I hated Unity and the end of Gnome 2. Riced out Arch with Xmonad after that, learning Emacs, Vim, TeX, Bash and so on along with the various coreutils. Arch(wiki) and some solid YouTubers got me finally learning to be a proper power user.

Now, servers aside, I’ve just got a Steam Deck and WSL. My next build, when/if prices get less stupid, will probably be Arch again unless I do the lazy thing and run with Bazzite or similar. I love Arch but I hate the occasional troubleshooting after I don’t update for a while, even if I have gotten better at it.

Sure thing. I got on a fuzz rock and stoner metal kick for a while and that album cover stuck with me. Then the usual compulsion took over and I ended up on a deep dive through old sci-fi, pulp comics, etc.

Cover of Utopia Zukunftsroman #299, 1961 by Karl Stephan. I’d never heard of it but it reminded me of the cover art for Truckfighters’ album “Gravity X” (which itself is from the cover of an issue of Space:1999). Turns out he didn’t do that cover but he did actually do some work for Space:1999.

It’s less relatable now, and the technology was fucking stupid to begin with, but: Imagine printing out a document and feeding the sheets into a fax machine instead of just sending the file directly to the machine.

Or using a cassette tape adapter to play music from your phone through a stereo system when that system has a built-in Aux port you could plug directly into (“Useless Use Of Cassette?”).

cat’ing into grep, and a handful of other programs people commonly pipe into from cat, is pointless when grep can be called directly against a file. cat is being run for no reason; a useless use of cat (uuoc). It means fuckall for most people today but I imagine it could’ve been an actual concern when hardware was much more limited and multiple users were connecting to a single system.

I’d love it if their equipment racks all simultaneously burst into flame the day it pops so they can’t pivot or hock their hoarded hardware to recoup the investment. Then again, if that finger on the monkey’s paw did curl, they’d probably all get bailed out by the taxpayers the following week anyway.

Win+R, wt, enter

Alt+Space, wt, enter (or .term and auto complete will fill in “Terminal”)

It’s pretty much identical in terms of keystrokes. I just always forget “wt” is the way to launch Windows Terminal from Run, and that it works with PowerToys Run as well. My main sell was that the latter is a decent quick launcher with some useful tools built in to keep you from ever bothering with the start menu. I’m sure if I played with the Keyboard Manager a bit more I could probably go for something like Super/Win+Shift+Enter and skip Run or PowerToys Run altogether. I just haven’t bothered for whatever reason.

On my one remaining Windows machine, I installed PowerToys and use the “Run” launcher. Alt+Space opens Run. If you lead with a . you’ll search programs. Alt+Space, .term, for example, should immediately show Terminal and you can slap enter to open it. You can also do stuff like = 1 + 1 or = 0b101 + 0xf for quick calculations, %% for unit conversion (%% 10MB to Mb), etc. It’s not KRunner, dmenu, etc but it definitely beats the hell out of the start menu.

PowerToys “Keyboard Manager” might let you reclaim some shortcuts as well. I used it to swap Caps Lock and Escape but I’m pretty sure it can be used to create custom shortcuts. There’s also some option to remap shortcuts on a program specific basis. So you can say Alt+T should send Ctrl+T but only when Firefox has focus, for example. Haven’t messed with it myself but I can see the value.

Still looking forward to ditching Windows entirely but, in the meantime, MS has some decent tools that aren’t included by default and don’t seem to be advertised because power users aren’t the target market and “they already know to look for it” I guess.

I paid $160 US for 2x32GB DDR4 3200 ECC almost exactly a year ago, when I built my TrueNAS server. I told myself I’d grab another pair down the road to fill out the last two slots in my board. Now I can’t find the same pack anywhere for less than $350. Upgrades are indefinitely postponed, to say the least.

Some of us are old enough to remember when “that command terminal thing” was computing. Now there’s something about text on a black screen that seems to make people’s eyes glaze over and their brains turn off today. You’d think they were being asked to decipher the Matrix. Too many generations removed I suppose.

The reality is I’m definitely not figuring out how my compositor works, almost never touching system files, infrequently scripting, and almost always using “a tool NOW for a SPECIFIC thing.” I’m not a tech luddite. Modern computing is shiny and awesome. You want graphical tools for graphical tasks. But there are so many excellent specific-purpose CLI tools, typically included by default across nearly every distro, that make so much more sense to use over a GUI. Maybe not always but most of the time.

Simple example, damned if I’m gonna open a file browser, navigate to my downloads directory, right click - Cut (or Ctrl X), navigate to another directory, paste, then right click - Rename. Not when I can just open a terminal (realistically, I always have it open) and mv ~/downloads/kewlwallpapers_abstract_dark_blah_blah.jpg ~/pics/wallpaper/abstract_003.jpg Especially when tab completion means I just have to type a partial path or filename and slap Tab to fill in the rest. It’s just so quick.

I hate it because I don’t know how to do anything

Some examples of what you’ve been unable to accomplish might add clarity.

but I’m not smart enough to learn terminal

Bull. Shit. You’re just not used to it and, even without picking up any knowledge of shell scripting, you’re only a man somecommand away from understanding what specific command line programs do. somecommand --flag --another-flag /home/me/thing typically isn’t much different from opening some GUI app on Windows, ticking two boxes, opening the file picker and selecting C:\users\me\thing then clicking a button.

All that said, now we really need examples because there’s probably no need for you to be messing with the terminal to begin with. At least not if you aren’t doing anything outside basic computing like web browsing, chat, productivity tasks and such. So what are you trying to do in the terminal that the OS failed to provide a GUI for?

Flatpaks… NOOOOO…

I haven’t used Zorin but flatpaks are enabled by default if I understand. Yes, you can install them via the command line but it looks like you could just open the built in software center and search for whatever it is you want. The only exception I can imagine is if you’re trying to install from a source other than whatever Zorin uses by default (Flathub, I would guess).

dependencies not found

With Flatpaks? Wat? With some other command? Context, please.

Anytime I have to use terminal I ALWAYS make a backup

You’re competent enough to image and restore your drive but not stay out of trouble in your OS? You presumably had to learn whatever software, and the underlying concepts, you’re using for that. Clonezilla, Rescuezilla, Macrium Reflect, etc all exist to make it easier but you’ve gotta know what an “image” is, what it means create it and subsequently write it onto a drive. How to identify the correct drive so you’re not wiping out something unintentionally.

So, are you not spending even a few minutes to check if the code snippets you’re pasting are applicable to your specific distribution? At least skimming the man page for the commands you try to run? Are you assuming “it’s all just Linux, right?” and that there isn’t nuance between distributions? Running shell commands you don’t understand is like running whatever backup solution you’re using without understanding it - just blindly clicking buttons and maybe you get a backup or maybe you format a drive and lose decades of family photos, your research paper draft, and whatever else. And if a fuckup costs me a literal day of my life in restoration time, I’m making it a point to use that time to figure out why so I hopefully don’t repeat the process in the future.

There’s little substance in your complaints and I’m left just so genuinely confused. In my head I’m imagining a walking talking XY Problem. Some specific examples of what you were trying to achieve or the snippets you were blindly pasting might shed some light but, left to guess, your actions sound akin to gamer kids running random batch scripts claiming to tweak power settings or whatever else in order to eke out a few extra FPS. Windows isn’t going to protect anyone who treats it the same way you have seemingly treated Linux.

I was overdue for a reminder about this site. In the same spirit “USB Killers” are indeed a thing. One I saw, a while back on Hackaday, was basically a bunch of small surface mount capacitors on a board stuffed in a generic thumb-drive type case.

I remember him being gifted a golden pager and I’m still holding out hope that he gets the call.

Now that is an ambition to strive for! Easily one of the most significant communal projects of our time which, despite still remaining almost unheard of to countless people who unknowingly rely upon it, would be such a remarkable honor to take part in.

Same boat except my Arduino and Pi devices are still gathering dust (but I do want to eventually get a general, foundational knowledge of electronics). My own ideas most often devolve into timesinks that leave me questioning how I even convinced myself to start down that road. I like doing dev stuff more if it happens when an update breaks something, like a service or a plugin to some app I host. “Hey, that’s a goddamn puzzle! I fucking love puzzles!” And there’s the underlying fact that, if I manage to solve it, I might be helping somebody else out. Some psychological compulsion to help others that I can identify but still not deny.

Anyway, I might never end up a “contributor” to anything else but one of my biggest highs was singlehandedly debugging, submitting, and having a fix merged to a Jellyfin plugin I use. From first reporting it and thinking out loud about it in the app’s Discord, to poking through the source on GitHub (in a language I’ve never touched), I worked it out in a few hours and even compiled a replacement .dll for my own use until the merge was accepted. To the reception of some compliments and pats on the back from regulars on the server that, at the risk of over sharing, did more for my emotional well being than my last lay. The problem ended up being a simple order-of-operations issue but the experience was the sort of the thing that makes a guy, who hasn’t worked so much as a help desk position, briefly think “Maybe I could hack it.”

Conversely, my biggest low was wasting 45 minutes on an Advent of Code problem because I forgot to switch from the sample data to my actual puzzle data in the second half. It was a first-week problem, probably child’s play for any pro, but I had a working solution fast enough to have landed on that day’s leaderboard. It would’ve been entirely self serving and good for nothing but bragging rights. Instead I wasted nearly an hour to reach the “duh” moment and subsequent self loathing. I wanted those bragging rights!

The TLDR is Programming turns bipolar disorder into a speed run session too easily for it to be more than an on-again off-again hobby or the occasional necessity for me. I can’t fathom how the actual pros, especially those in prestigious and lucrative positions, keep from crashing out or falling into imposter syndrome any time they let themselves get caught up in an off-by-one or some other nonsense.