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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I first got into Linux because I was a kid with an old hand-me-down laptop that was meant to run Windows 98 but I somehow stuffed Windows XP on there (it had a 4gb HDD and it was filled to the brim, I’m shocked in hindsight that it actually installed). Then I discovered Ubuntu (I think version 6.06?) and installed it, and it ran great! Once I got newer computers I ended up using Windows primarily but usually had a Linux PC kicking around. In college I started dual booting my main machine since Linux proved to be useful for my courses (Computer Science). Then I built a PC and just installed Windows 10 on it, but now that my 7th gen Intel CPU is “too old” to run Windows 11, I said screw it and installed Linux again. Plus I just really like having a bash shell natively, and a proper package manager is really nice.


  • I have a Surface Pro 4 (I think from 2015) and the battery life now is awful. I might be able to get an hour or two depending on the performance mode, I usually just plug it in while using it now. If I forget to plug it in between uses, it will definitely be dead the next time I go to use it.

    Plus it’s starting to feel pretty slow. I do still have Windows on it, perhaps installing Linux would help make it faster but it sounds like it takes some work to get everything working properly so I haven’t bothered.










  • One of the great things about Linux is that you can almost always just run whatever distro from the USB drive before installing (and just reboot without the USB drive to get back into Windows) So you can download a few ISOs and try each one for a bit before committing to anything.

    This is nice if there’s anything specific that you need to work, you can try it and make sure it’s usable for you before making any permanent changes.

    For example, I’m legally blind and use a screen magnifier. I tried a few distros to compare the built-in magnifiers before settling on one.

    I’d also recommend using Ventoy on your USB. That lets you just plop ISO files on the drive and choose which one at boot.







  • It doesn’t have to be that expensive if you keep it modest though. I have an old Dell Optiplex (I think from 2012?) that I run a fair amount of stuff on. Things like Jellyfin (with Sonarr/Radarr/etc), a finance tracking web app, Home Assistant, a wiki, and some other miscellaneous stuff. I don’t have a ton of storage though. Currently just the 512gb SSD that the OS is on. I have a couple 8TB HDDs that I want to get setup but they’re a little loud for being in my bedroom.

    The big thing I notice is that it can really struggle to encode media if it’s not in the right format. It doesn’t have much of a GPU though so that doesn’t help. And more modern hardware would be much better too, but this is fine for my needs at the moment.