A potato is me/cheap user experience upgrades
04-07-2020, 06:17 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-11-2020, 05:00 AM by classicdrogn.)
04-07-2020, 06:17 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-11-2020, 05:00 AM by classicdrogn.)
As expected but sooner than hoped, my HDD has indeed cacked it, so I'm going to be largely offline until the new parts I emergency-ordered with a loan from Bank of Fam arrive, hopefully sometime around the weekend. Do not be alarmed, the situation is otherwise normal as much as that applies to any of us at the moment.
On the plus side, as long as everything works (it's all new parts, even if I'll be building in a Gateway 310X case originally built like a nuclear bunker to contain the world-shattering power of a Pentium 4!) it should be a fairly good machine - Ryzen 5 3600 w/32Gb RAM on an ASRock B450M/ac motherboard with integrated wifi, an 8Gb Sapphire PULSE Radeon RX580 graphics card ("horribly outdated" at two or three years old, but anything better is around $400-500 and far out of my budget, plus I'm upgrading from a Smelleron laptop's Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics, so yeah. At least it supports Vulkan and OpenGL 4.5) plus 256Gb NVMe M.2 and SATA III SSDs so I can have the OS on one and the other for the swap/page file, and a 2Tb HDD for mass storage. (Or possibly partition the SSD into halves and put 'doze on one so I can set the M.2 up as primary boot drive with Linux and not have to futz about mashing ESC or DEL or whichever key to tell it to go to GRUB every time, since 'doze always wants to be the default.)
In the meantime, I'm booting from my Ubuntu 18.04 live USB and have noother storage, which means basically no swap since that drive is only 4Gb to begin with. That in turn means going to, say, YouTube will crash the browser when it runs out of RAM and has no swap file space. For now the HDD still appears as a read-only disk if mounted, but I'm not eager to test it until and unless I at least have a USB hub so I can put an external HDD in as well as the Live USB to try to rescue some of the data.
As for distros... I've been thinking of going with either MX-Linux or Manjaro this time, rather than Xubuntu. Maybe Pop!, but if I'm switching off Ubuntu I figure I might as well really switch from Ubuntu rather than just migrating to a different flavor. Anyone here played with those enough to have a meaningful opinion?
My primary use aside from incidental do-it-on-anything word processing and web browsing is Blender & GIMP and a desire to work with Godot Engine game development, and a little LMMS audio for sound effects and hopefully original music. All of those are common enough that they should also work seamlessly wherever. The only gaming I've done any time recently is failing to play Morrowind for more than a few minutes at a time while giving armor and weapon mods a cursory look, so that's not really a consideration, just the overall user experience WRT stability, ease of use, and shiny coolness. (There was a video on YouTube I watched earlier today that wa the king of shiny coolness... despite being from 2010. I think the title was something like "KDE + Compiz Fusion + Cairo dock" and it was basically just making the UI dance while playing "the egg travels" from some dinosaur movie soundtrack.
"ubuntu 3D Desktop Cube (KDE, Compiz Fusion, CairoDock" by Philip J. Bugsington appears to be the right one, though I can only judge by the cover image on Google since as I said there's no actually visiting YouTube at the moment. It's silly and completely superficial, but still so cool.
On the plus side, as long as everything works (it's all new parts, even if I'll be building in a Gateway 310X case originally built like a nuclear bunker to contain the world-shattering power of a Pentium 4!) it should be a fairly good machine - Ryzen 5 3600 w/32Gb RAM on an ASRock B450M/ac motherboard with integrated wifi, an 8Gb Sapphire PULSE Radeon RX580 graphics card ("horribly outdated" at two or three years old, but anything better is around $400-500 and far out of my budget, plus I'm upgrading from a Smelleron laptop's Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics, so yeah. At least it supports Vulkan and OpenGL 4.5) plus 256Gb NVMe M.2 and SATA III SSDs so I can have the OS on one and the other for the swap/page file, and a 2Tb HDD for mass storage. (Or possibly partition the SSD into halves and put 'doze on one so I can set the M.2 up as primary boot drive with Linux and not have to futz about mashing ESC or DEL or whichever key to tell it to go to GRUB every time, since 'doze always wants to be the default.)
In the meantime, I'm booting from my Ubuntu 18.04 live USB and have noother storage, which means basically no swap since that drive is only 4Gb to begin with. That in turn means going to, say, YouTube will crash the browser when it runs out of RAM and has no swap file space. For now the HDD still appears as a read-only disk if mounted, but I'm not eager to test it until and unless I at least have a USB hub so I can put an external HDD in as well as the Live USB to try to rescue some of the data.
As for distros... I've been thinking of going with either MX-Linux or Manjaro this time, rather than Xubuntu. Maybe Pop!, but if I'm switching off Ubuntu I figure I might as well really switch from Ubuntu rather than just migrating to a different flavor. Anyone here played with those enough to have a meaningful opinion?
My primary use aside from incidental do-it-on-anything word processing and web browsing is Blender & GIMP and a desire to work with Godot Engine game development, and a little LMMS audio for sound effects and hopefully original music. All of those are common enough that they should also work seamlessly wherever. The only gaming I've done any time recently is failing to play Morrowind for more than a few minutes at a time while giving armor and weapon mods a cursory look, so that's not really a consideration, just the overall user experience WRT stability, ease of use, and shiny coolness. (There was a video on YouTube I watched earlier today that wa the king of shiny coolness... despite being from 2010. I think the title was something like "KDE + Compiz Fusion + Cairo dock" and it was basically just making the UI dance while playing "the egg travels" from some dinosaur movie soundtrack.
"ubuntu 3D Desktop Cube (KDE, Compiz Fusion, CairoDock" by Philip J. Bugsington appears to be the right one, though I can only judge by the cover image on Google since as I said there's no actually visiting YouTube at the moment. It's silly and completely superficial, but still so cool.
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‎noli esse culus
‎noli esse culus