It’s Time

Ah, yes. A new week and a new blog has yet to be written. Heck, I still have some cars to make for next weeks Race. But, before that, I have some thoughts and opinions!

But, the Race Wrap-Up!

Fine, fine. Tl;Dr, I took second and third in the race. We did King of the Hill style with eight cars and I got four in, three after the challenge was issued. Of the four of us racing, I had the most at stake here, with the most cars in the pack. Took an early lead in the finals, to only have a few back-to-back losses. If one of my cars had took back-to-back victories, I would have come home with the dub. Not terribly surprising, though. I’m doing fairly well with being the new guy to the crew.

Now, for some thoughts and opinions!

So, I really love Linux. Since I started using it a few years ago as my daily driver, it has really blown me away. Sometimes in anger, but, most times, I really enjoy it. I still have much to learn about its inner workings, but, that’s okay. Which brings me to my first point here:

Linux is complicated and that’s okay

For the layman, change is hard. That change for many of us computer users is from Windows or Mac to Linux. From Mac to Linux isn’t as hard in my opinion, since some users opt to get their apps from brew. But, in Windows, the paradigm for most of us is to get a .exe or a .msi file and install a piece of software that way. With Linux and its many flavors, it is all about installing in the terminal. With commands like apt,pacman, and dnf, among a few others, you interact with your setup in a more meaningful manner. Things don’t always work out of the box, though. For instance, I have an Nvidia RTX 2060 by MSI. When I first started up on this, I was playing Minecraft and a couple other games and noticed that my performance was a bit off. Upon further inspection, my GPU fans weren’t spinning! This took a decent amount of digging around and I found that this was a common issue and that somebody had written a small program to add to your startup. The config was pretty easy and required some more command line stuff, but, I am fairly comfortable in the terminal. Which brings me to my second point:

Linux is not for everybody and that is also okay

Digging around in the terminal and playing with config files and ricing desktops is 1000 percent not for everybody! While Linux is King in the server world, Windows will always be King of the Desktop. Does that make me feel great? No, because I have had a great time ensuring (and enduring) the niche that I have poured my efforts into. I run with endeavourOS on a daily basis. Have I had headaches? Plenty of them! Gaming isn’t always as clear-cut as some would make it out to be, finding the right software for you in the FOSS/FLOSS world can be a challenge, but, I have learned to accept it for what it is: a way to break from the paradigm that is Windows. This old beast runs better than it ever did under Windows. Doing this has inspired me to be more about the Free and Open Source world as a whole. Eventually, I will get around to self-hosting all or most of my infrastructure, whether that be on Linode (I really recommend them. #notsponsored) or my own bare metal.

My pick of the week!

It’s that time again! Speaking of self-hosting, Jellyfin is my pick of this week. Jellyfin is a Plex alternative that has come a long way since its humble beginnings. It is a fairly simple setup process and setting up folders for your shows is pretty simple as well. For those in the networking know how camp, you can set it up to be able to be viewed wherever as there is an app for your device out there. You can find them at Jellyfin.org

Until next blog

Be kind to one another