aka @rotopenguin@mastodon.social

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Is there a reason to install one(1) singular OS across multiple partitions? Is it just because that’s how our ancestors did things?

    Partitions are crude buckets that tell Operating Systems that “this lump is a filesystem that you know how to read” or “you don’t know how to read this, leave it alone”. Partitions tell UEFI that it should only use this special FAT32 chunk. A partition is not a good mechanism to set quotas, as you can see from how difficult it is to expand. A bunch of partitions that are all mounted together does little to isolate against failures.

    If you want to run an OS across two filesystems that provide different characteristics (one provides atomic snapshots, the other provides ??), that would have to live on different partitions. Would you be better served by putting it all on the more modern FS? Is the older filesystem only kept around because it straddles “what my OS knows” and “what my bootloader knows”? If it’s just for the bootloader’s sake, that’s why we have /boot.













  • Go to Desktop Mode, run Plasma Discover, get the Heroic flatpak, run Heroic, log into GoG there, install games.

    Heroic is pretty damn good at doing the rest. It’ll install the Linux or Windows version of your games, it’ll add them to Steam, it’ll run them. Heroic will even give Steam some coverart for your games. (Many are missing the logo, tho. DeckyLoader +SteamGridDB plugin fixes that.)






  • Might as well go for Win11, you’re going to have to deal with it next year anyways.

    Windows doesn’t do minimal, it does whatever the hell it wants. There are some OOBE tricks to get a local account working.

    I have used the privacy.sexy app to strip down some of the most obnoxious Win11 bits - be warned that you have to disable defender to have it work. Is it doing bad things? Is MS doing incredibly shady shit with their detections? Who’s to say? When I turn on Defender afterwards, everything seems “fine”.

    There’s no need to get rid of grub, or play games with different boot drives. Get to know how EFI works. Look at efibootmgr’s output - that’s pretty much all that the firmware knows. The firmware has multiple entries consisting of a drive (magic device number), a program path (EFI\grub\grub_x64.efi), and maybe a string to pass along. There is a priority list (0003,0001,0002) which MS occasionally likes to re-arrange.