The older I get, the less I want to have to interact with things. I mean, people, work, friends, lovers, computers, and operating systems. Basically, all the things.

I’ve been trying to find an operating system to use ‘most of the time’ other than windows. I really want to use Linux, but damn man, it’s a pain.

I’d love to use an immutable OS. It just sounds so cool, and easy. BlendOS is immutable and gives you the choice of all the other base systems in one. Great. Alma gives you the option of all of the above, and a double-boot partition so that if an update doesnt work okay, then it reverts. Even better.

The problem is that these OS’s dont seem to be able to get the fundamentals right. I mean, I love Gnome, right? There’s other people out there who do too, I’m sure. But there’s always an issue: i.e. samba doesnt work right, graphics drivers dont work right, samba doesnt work right… and over and over and over. I appreciate that I’m probably a ‘power user’ as much as I hate the term, but I think after 40 years of *nix that they should have the basic shit down. Alas, it doesnt seem to be the case.

Linux just isnt ready for mainstream. Its awful, Debian, Manjaro, Ubuntu, they just arent ready for the mainstream at all. Dear lord people get the linux shit sorted out. All I want is parity with Windows – I want to be able to put in a USB stick, and deal with it, I want to be able to map a network share, and deal with it, I want to get able to ‘game’ (quotes even if through steam which is the best case scenario without getting experimental) and not have to deal with shit.

Sigh. Its all just shit.

As such Im now back to PopOS which at least seems to have SMB down from the first try, better than Ubuntu (which it’s based on) at least… and yeah, you’re going to wax lyrical about ways that it would work (if anyone actually viewed this site) but as a whole I have to say the ease of use for the common everyday folk is rubbish. This is not news, I understand that, but this is the illustration of my frustration.

Blep.

I’ve been Proxmox-ing and it’s pretty cool. One of those things that I’ve started a few times but never followed through with, I’ve a HP Elitedesk G3 Mini, actually I’ve two, and a larger G3 that I’ve been playing with. One has Batocera on it and is working great up till, like, Dreamcast, and the Proxmox server is working great hosting an Xpenology server – 2TB of storage on NVME, 8GB of RAM (will be upgraded to 32GB tomorrow when my Crucial RAM arrives!) and it’s working great tbh. I’ve set up a load of Windows VMs as you can see, Win11 still wont boot but I’ll find out why when I get more time.

A nice little tech excursion and very nerdy, ‘it just works’.