Same here, saw the writing on the wall after 7 and tried Linux gaming a few times but it was rough back then so I always came back. I did however start at least dual booting with 7 onwards so apart from gaming I was a convert at that time.

This year finally got tired of all the crap, them trying to railroad AI junk in, ruining the control panel, absolutely BURYING settings, turning ones back on with updates, the entire operating system is a dark pattern when it used to be so much more streamlined. Switched to Bazzite and it feels like I’m almost back to Windows 7 except I don’t have to install drivers or anything, just install it, add any apps through the store and you’re off. What they’ve done to windows is ridiculous to me and I’ll never come back.

I used Lutris before but I do Bottles now, fitgirl worked on both fantastic for me

WPEngine has been trash for a few years now but this felt like a weird way to handle it, I don’t love that they gobbled up ACF and DeliciousBrains and slowly began enshittifying their products which do feel almost necessary to core

My brother needed the driver installed in debian on Qubes but has been flawless beyond that. When I was still running arch it just worked out of the box

I did this with Qubes a year ago and haven’t had any issues apart from figuring out the right flags to get the full performance, otherwise the GPU would cap around 30% under load with low CPU load.

Kind of at the mercy of what your motherboard and bios will allow, mine I had to cheese a little and disable the PCI device on boot so I get to decrypt my disk with no screen lol but it works!

Not op but I do a lot of architecture and infrastructure work on top of my normal dev work so keeping everything separated and per-client has become a pretty important advantage for me personally

Fwiw I had to tinker a bit to get good video playback, Fedora was always choppy for me for some reason but debian is typically smooth with hw accel disabled.

As for the gaming, depending on your setup (I have a desktop and T480 I keep in sync) you can absolutely run two video cards and do PCI passthrough on one to a gaming VM. I have mine set up with a dedicated NIC and USB card and just use a KVM to swap between Qubes and Windows (for now) and it’s worked really well. Had to play around a ton to get the full speed out of the GPU though and it only seemed to work in windows so hopefully get that going for a Linux hvm one day.

Absolutely agree there is no going back, I have all of my work stuff entirely hardware agnostic and a full on replica of my work desktop ready to go in a moment should the desktop die. Apart from that keeping client work isolated has been such a game changer.

Fwiw I used to daily an x210 and then an x230 in IT and pretty frequently typed with one hand while carrying with another without the weight bugging me but your mileage may vary.

You can definitely send them flying and not damage them my coworker launched theirs across the office and the bezel just snapped back together.

I have a T480 now since I do more dev work and needed a slightly bigger keyboard/screen and it’s phenomenal with Qubes and 48gb of memory on the quad core i5. Love the ease to repair I just swapped a motherboard on it in around 30 minutes and was back up and running

Just research ahead and don’t buy one with a known hardware defect such as the 5As which are notorious for frying motherboards and screens. Went through 5 of them with the extended warranty over my phones life and they all died while in my hand abruptly. Less than a year or life per device almost always failing around 8 months for me.

If grapheneOS wasn’t so damn good I would’ve left pixels after that, Pixel XL abruptly died, 2XL had both cameras and the fingerprint sensor die out of nowhere, then the 4 5As. On an 8a right now and love it so fingers crossed it lasts!

If they had a user repairable device that ran it I’d buy it in a heartbeat

This is pretty great advice to get into it. I previously ran 3 poweredge 2950s but have since switched to nothing self hosted and back to everything self hosted but on a much leaner setup with a NUC and 14tb WD my book drive with a dual Noctua 4020 fan shroud I 3d printed that it absolutely needed as I killed the original drive in two weeks.

My replica is just a 14tb in my desktop I run rsync to pull the data occasionally after checking SMART status on the primary. It’s not versioned or perfect but it works great to give me a chance to backup my jellyfin media. Everything I care about also gets backed up via restic.

Eventually plan to run a build with the Modcase MASS with multiple drives but for now this setup has been working fantastic.

Definitely keeping me far away from upgrading, newest vehicle is an early 2000s Corolla and still does 40mpg.

Honestly with how cheap and easy it is to fix at home, barring safety improvements I really don’t see a point in upgrading. Infotainment is just another component that will eventually go obsolete like the ones from ~2010 that are dog slow and a pain to go aftermarket on.

Adding to this, automatic plate flippers exist and are pretty popular for show cars to display something else when parked. Typically wired to ignition so it shows your plate only when the cars running.

Issue is if you street park dependent on the state, if the vehicle registration is hidden by the plate being flipped they can likely tow it. Would work great for at work/in your driveway though. Could maybe just have a bypass switch for if you need to park somewhere and display the plate.

Still a pain in the ass that it’s this bad though.

I just use nextcloud as a target for backups (Aegis, Signal, QkSMS). Apps such as KeePassDX I have load the file via nextcloud. My contacts and calendar go through it as well, photos are just set to auto upload along with a few other directories.

As for the home screen layouts, I just take screenshots once I have it how I like and try to remember to take them again if I change stuff.

It’s not a full backup but I’m back up and running fairly quickly (Pixel 5A died on me 3 times in under a one year lifespan per device).

Me after getting those dumbass Canary cameras that cost $200 a piece then they completely wrecked the free tier then started giving them away for free to get more subscribers.

Wyze cams with wz_mini_hacks firmware offline in a VLAN with Frigate and Home assistant from here on out!

Really depends on the make, you can get Mitchell and AllData prior to the subscription model (takes about a TB of space, from 1980s to 2013) to help with diagrams and disassembly and reassembly. Mitchell’s wiring diagrams really are a lifesaver.

Dealer level software/scanner combo you can get from obdii365, I got a Hyundai scanner from them and it worked well but you want to run the software in a VM or isolate it some other way and probably wouldn’t network it.

Vxdiag is pretty solid as well for the dealer software/scanner and you can usually get via Amazon but again I wouldn’t trust the software. I have their ford one and used it with IDS to set the VIN on an electronic power steering rack.

The software itself you can find via Google if it’s all you need but typically the scanner is very specific to the software for the dealership stuff

Be careful depending on the model, some of those run hot. I managed to kill one in under 2 weeks just by copying a large amount of data to it and had to print a fan shroud for it’s replacement to keep the temps at a reasonable level.

AirVPN, for over a decade and they’ve kept my ports the whole time

Great rebuttal lmao

I literally bought the wrong version of a game called Heretic on Amazon in the early 2000s because it “had a cool penguin on it” lmao