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’.

I’ve been having issues with my NVME drives on my main gaming PC. I don’t use it a lot, but I have two NVME drives in the machine:

1. WD Blue SN500 (PCIE gen 3)
2. Sabrent 1tb Rocket (PCIE gen 4)

The WD has been solid, it’s great, it’s just slower and doesn’t have a lot of space. The Sabrent is obviously bigger and faster, but I’ve been really using it more as a ‘games drive’ as it’s basically just a secondary drive on my machine. Windows 11 (or whichever OS I’m using at the time) on the 500, installs on the 1tb.

Over the past couple of years I’ve had these drives, it’s bugged me a little that I was using the slower drive for the OS, so I decided to move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, swap my OS onto the 1tb drive and hoped that I would be happy…

Hoped…

Within a couple of days of using the Sabrent Rocket I started getting sudden power-offs on the PC. It would just be ‘pop’ and the machine was suddenly without power. I can remember from when I first started using the Sabrent that something similar may have happened, hence using it as a backup drive, but I didn’t want to rule out power supply/ram, all the usual issues.

After more playing about (I have an X570 Aorus Pro, 5700G – I know but there was a valid reason for it – 32GB ram) I am sure that it is the drive, I’ve been using the WD drive in the other slot, as the Pro has 2 NVME gen 4 slots, and the slot seems fine, the drive seems fine in there and there’s no issues.

As such I’ve removed the SN500 and I’ve got a little USB-C caddy coming for it today, it can just be a mass storage USB device for moving files around.

Today I’ve ordered a Crucial P3 Plus 2tb drive which is going to hopefully become my main drive (it’s gen 4) and should be nice and quick, I just thought it would be fun to post a break down and a Crystal Diskmark screenshot of the speeds. I don’t have the new drive yet, but this is the Sabrent score – bare in mind it’s just gen 3. Will update again over the next couple of days when I can install the new drive!

Loving the Steam Deck – this is the base version, updated the SSD to a 256 from the base 64. Had it for a little while, this is the dock and the keyboard/mouse setup. The keyboard is a Logitech K295, silent touch, it’s really quiet and came with the wireless mouse. Had these for a few months also and haven’t had to change the batteries, which is a plus!

All the usual Steam Deck fun, mostly I play this for emulation, seems to be very much more geared towards a console experience, rather than play something that needs a mouse and keyboard. The mouse and keyboard I usually just use for desktop mode, I don’t have this hooked to a display, I tend to just sit in a comfortable chair laid back and playing old games and occasionally something new – mostly RPGs and the like. The USB-C dock is fine, just use it as shown with the receiver for the mouse and keyboard. It has HDMI out, some USBs and SD Card ports but Ive never used them with the Steam Deck.

All in all very much appreciating the time off work, although it looms all too quickly round the corner of the weekend – I truly hope that this coming year is better than the last… actually the last dozen years or so, hopes are not altogether high.

It’s been a bit of a nightmare to be totally honest with you. Bought this card and it’s been a headscratcher.

I have been fiddling around with computers for a good number of years, I’m aware of all the old tropes with 10gb, i.e.

• You’re not going to get 10000mb/s
• The speed of your drives dictates the speed of the transfer
• Your cables are important
• Jumbo frames blah blah blah

It seems so simple on the outside, link the ports on Windows, link the ports on Unifi and you’re good to go. Right? Yeah, no. Not right.

Installed the card fine, no worries there. Admittedly I have my Unifi gear two rooms away and there’s a lot of general household detritus around it, but I’m sure the cables are fine. The issue started when trying to aggregate the two ports on the Windows side. Bridging the connections at first would give an error, it would generate a linked adapter in my adapters list, but only one port would be assigned. I would allocate the other port, but this would just disable the bridge altogether. Removing the bridge, rebooting, both the ports would be disabled under Windows and no amount of ‘enabling’ the connection would work.

Removed/reinstalled the drivers (although the original drivers for the card came on a CD – I mean, a bloody CD in this day and age) and the provider didnt have the drivers on their website. I downloaded a generic intel driver and this may well be part of the issue but I believe it should be fine for the chipset on the card.

No matter which way I tried to enable link aggregation on Windows there was no joy. Resetting the IP with ‘netsh int ip reset’ and flushing the DNS seemed to work a couple of times, but then ceased being useful. I dont know why. Trying to get the Windows network troubleshooter to do anything was a waste of time and this just seems to be an app that is purposefully misleading and useless. I mean wtf.

So I opted to forget about the link aggregation and use just a single port on the card. All seemed to be fine, but the transfer speed between my PC and my self built Unraid server was topping at about 180MB/s. This is the speed of the drives in the server. I have a NVME cache, as well as NVME drives in my main PC. I’d stopped using the cache drive as for some reason Unraid seemed to be having issues with the ‘mover’ function, and my cache drive was always full. Anyways I chanced it and enabled the cache on all my shares, and this led to around a 600MB/s transfer to the server, and about a 900MB/s read transferring back from the server to my PC. All good.

I wish I could have gotten the aggregation working, but this will be a job for another day. Unfortunately just before writing this, my 10gb card in my PC disabled itself again, and took a couple of reboots to bring back – again, trying to ‘enable’ it just resulted in nothing happening. Ill test this through tomorrow and it may be that the card goes back to the Amazon seller. I mean, it works, but it’s going to be my main connection and I dont want it falling down every couple of hours. It’s just not worth it for £131.

That being said, I have had issues with the Unifi side and a Wifi6 card I picked up, it’s a Fenvi and it should have been fine, but the Wifi is just not connecting with the Unifi AP. Going back to my old Plusnet router it works fine, and the connection never drops, but on Unifi it just isnt playing ball. I bought the fenvi card as a bluetooth/wifi6 card, but I’ve nixxed the wifi connectivity and it’s just sat there as a BT card in my rig, the BT is working fine so will just keep it for future proofing. Tbh its my train of thought with this 10gb card, but the outlay is a bit high if it’s not 100% stable – again, I’m no super networking wiz, but time will just have to tell and see what happens.

C’est la vie.