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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I think the OS itself will be fine since the kernel and all that will be loaded to memory. But if you install games on that USB stick, they might be painful to run/load (depending on the game, some do disk reads while you’re playing, some do it all before the level).

    If you have a free partition to install it on, try using it to install a game or two while using the live boot. Or hell, you could even just install the OS there and then nuke the partition if you decide against it. It wasn’t a long process iirc (with Fedora), most of my time was spent learning about what the implications of each choice were. If you’re just experimenting, those choices don’t matter as much (just don’t format your existing partitions).

    Though they’ve also got USB external drives (HDD and SSD) that perform better than USB sticks. Some external SSDs probably still way outperform internal HDDs, even.




  • On the one hand, you can usually contract MS support and tell them you just upgraded your hardware and they can re-enable your key. That thing was meant to stop people from sharing keys and limit how many PCs they have running that key at once, not to force a new key for upgrades. Assuming they still even do that, as it’s been a while since I needed to.

    But on the other hand, it sounds like you already found an even better solution.


  • Oh yeah, the bit where SSDs move sectors around for wear evening is important. Because of that, it’s possible to completely fill up an SSD after deleting files and still have those files recoverable from the flash chips themselves. Without that secure erase, as I understand it, if a sector gets marked “bad”, whatever data is there might stay there forever (or at least as long as the cells hold a charge).

    So there’s no benefit to writing multiple passes over deleted data on SSDs as far as the flash is concerned, but multiple passes might make it more likely for the controler to actually direct those extra writes to a sector actually storing the data (though the odds might be low unless you’re overwriting all free space, though even that depends on how much space is free vs how many “spare” sectors there are, and even then it might be impossible to get it to write to a sector marked “bad”).





  • Don’t forget the first response that always gives the steps to solve a simpler version of that issue, almost like the responses are being copy/pasted from a guide by people who barely understand anything about it themselves.

    Plus these days the number of solutions that refer to some setting that no longer exists in the location it did at the time the solution was written.

    Meanwhile on Linux, I haven’t even had to search as much for solutions. Yesterday I installed a new desktop that I’ve never used before (KDE-Plasma) and was quickly able to figure out the changes I wanted to make because it’s designed to be discoverable and obvious. Whereas I’d say that Windows seems designed to make people either feel tempted to pay for a solution or give up and just do it the way MS wants.








  • Yeah, I’ve got a logitech mouse but didn’t want logitech’s software on my machine, so I just used the mouse by plugging it in. Which worked, but I had no way of knowing the battery level until the mouse itself started blinking low power.

    When I installed fedora, I was confused a bit because it had a system tray icon saying the battery was charging. I was thinking it thought it was a laptop until I realize it had just picked up the battery information from my mouse. A feature I had written off under windows just worked without me even considering it or needing to install software that was partly about using my hardware and partially about advertising more ways to get my money.


  • Considering all of the comments saying that a big part of this is people not wanting to buy new computers and choosing linux because it will run on their old machine, I’d like to add insult to injury and say I built a new PC before Oct and windows was never even a consideration.

    And despite it being my first Linux install I planned to play games on, everything went smoothly and I’d even say the “setting up the PC to my preference instead of the defaults” step was better because there wasn’t a “figure out how to disable the shit ms really wants you to run for them” substep, or a “figure out what new shit ms added that I’ll want to disable” discovery mode that, with win 10, lasted most of the time I was using it and included “figure out if a recent update reset settings to annoying defaults”.

    I bet this is why people are so vocal about switching to linux whenever there’s another complaint about ms. It went way better than expected, like I was about to do something that would cause ongoing pain and frustration to get away from something even worse, but there’s been nothing at all that has made me miss windows.