until you were able to watch porn

You mean you never watched 3gpp encoded 240p porn over WAP sites via a java browser on your dumb phone?

…what? Stop judging me.

Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss

It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.

Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.

One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.

And more fun, lots of laptops have really goofy routing. I’ve got one where the DP alt mode on the USB-C ports are on the dGPU, but the HDMI ports are on the iGPU. And the internal panel is on the iGPU unless you switch it to be on the dGPU because yay mux.

Why? I don’t know. Too much meth while laying the board out or something I guess.

Everything is temporary, except for that 25 year old system that’s keeping everything running and can’t be replaced because nobody knows how or why it works just that if you touch it everything falls over.

You keep cloning and configuring shit on a Win10 instance because you can’t find the key?

That’s silly and you should just stop doing that: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

There you go! One less problem to deal with.

completely disable Windows Update

Since this is a work thing, I’d maybe check with whomever is in charge of your shit that you’re not violating any compliance shit by turning updates off.

If you’re not, cool, then whatever, but compliance bullshit is awful and sucks and it’s better if you’re not the reason you fail an audit.

Edit: for the OP, not you.

See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially.

Right-ish, but I’d say there was actually a simpler problem than the one you laid out.

The immediate and obvious thing that killed OS/2 wasn’t the compatibility layer, it was driven by IBM not having any drivers for any hardware that was not sold by IBM, and Windows having (relatively) broad support for everything anyone was likely to actually have.

Worse, IBM pushed for support for features that IBM hardware support didn’t support to be killed, so you ended up with a Windows that supported your hardware, the features you wanted, and ran on cheaper hardware fighting it out with an OS/2 that did none of that.

IBM essentially decided to, well, be IBM and committed suicide in the market, and didn’t really address a lot of the stupid crap until Warp 3, at which point it didn’t matter and was years too late, and Windows 95 came swooping in shortly thereafter and that was the end of any real competition on the desktop OS scene for quite a while.

10% of windows laptops being sold are ARM?

That’s gotta be some weird corporate buyer thing, because otherwise I strongly don’t buy that line at all.

If you’re running HomeAssistant, you can integrate the printer into HA, and have camera streams and full controls.

If you’re not running HA, well, this is not especially useful.

Question: how is LinkedIn useful to you?

For me it’s just a non-stop swarm of recruiters from India who want me to kindly listen to their offer of a job that pays less than I’d make picking up garbage, utter sociopaths dredging up some psychotic hustle culture nonsense, and previous people I’ve worked with/for asking for favors, which of course means free.

Is it somehow more useful for an actual business?

I wouldn’t argue with the dude; he’s got a clear case of bad-faith-itis. What you did was bad, so you shouldn’t have done it, but no I won’t tell you how to fix it.

The absolute best you could have done is cross-posted to a Mastodon/Bluesky/whatever account as well, but you can’t just always go around yanking the rug out underneath communities especially if you’re in a position where it’s not just lazy shitposting and worthless commentary.

…that said, you have moved anything you can to being posted somewhere in tandem riiiiiiight?

Huh.

Usually when I run into that I just bounce the Portainer container and it sorts shit out.

Maybe that’s actually causing the tokens to rotate/expire and thus doing the same shit?

deleted by creator

One thing I ran into, though it was a while ago, was that disk caching being on would trash performance for writes on removable media for me.

The issue ended up being that the kernel would keep flushing the cache to disk, and while it was doing that none of your transfers are happening. So, it’d end up doubling or more the copy time because the write cache wasn’t actually helping removable drives.

It might be worth remounting without any caching, if it’s on, and seeing if that fixes the mess.

But, as I said, this has been a few years, so that may no longer be actively the case.

Stuttering and texture pop-in makes me immediately wonder if your SSD shit itself.

Maybe see if there’s anything in the system logs and/or SMART data that indicates that might be a problem?

Cloudflare tunnels are the thing you’re looking for, if you’re not opposed to cloudflare.

You run the daemon on your local system, it connects to cloudflare, and presto, you’ve bypassed this entire mess.

I think the thing a LOT of people forget is that the majority of steam users aren’t hardcore do-nothing-but-gaming-on-their-pc types.

If you do things that aren’t gaming, your linux experience is still going to be mixed and maybe not good enough to justify the switch: wine is good, and most things have alternatives, but not every windows app runs, and not every app alternative is good enough.

Windows is going to be sticky for a lot longer because of things other than games for a lot of people.

What, you mean you don’t play games and go “Well that looked great! Well worth my time!” like an awful lot of the AAA game industry appears to think gamers do?

Huh.

Seriously though, I’m curious how we ended up in the make-shit-prettier race and not a make-the-writing-good, or make-the-game-actually-fun, or even things like make-more-than-two-dungeons (looking at you, Starfield) race.

Especially given the cost to me, personally, to keep upgrading my GPU has reached an untenable level: I’m sure as crap not paying $2000 for a new GPU just so we get a few extra frames of hair jiggle or slightly better lighting or whatever.

Listen, is it really a 3d printer hobby if you don’t have 5 or 6 printers, none of which could actually print anything, and five boxes of parts laying around for you to fix your printers?

Oh also see above while planning another printer project, because none of those printers will do something you might want to do.

(/s, kidding, etc, but there’s That Guy somewhere, and you know who you are.)