I couldn't find one, so I figured I'd start one because I just upgraded my AMD Ryzen 5 2600 to an AMD Ryzen 5 5600. I was worried about whether or not I could do it, because it's been a long time since I installed a CPU, and it's one of those things you really don't want to fuck up. I also had to flash my BIOS 3 times before I could install it due to the firmware being too old to handle a Ryzen 5 5000 series processor. Fortunately, that went very well even though I was on pins and needles the whole time, because, again, not something you want to fuck up unless you want a pretty and heavy brick. But, all went well, and now I have a mid-tier gaming system that will last me for a good many years! IT'S ALIVE! UNLIMITED POWER!!! The beast herself: CURRENT SPECS: AMD Ryzen 5 5600 Processor 64 GB DDR4 3200Mhz RAM AMD Radeon RX580 8GB Video Card 1 TB NVMe M.2 SSD And 19TB of external storage.
Good question! I'm not sure yet. I'll find out if I ever buy it. I usually have to wait a few years because $70 is a little steep. The only game I'm definitely buying at release, at the moment, is Starfield. That being said, I am interested in Star Wars Outlaw, an open sandbox style Star Wars adventure that involves no Jedi, and seems to feel more like The Mandalorian than anything.
Well, after a wild ride I'm on Fedora KDE. On Friday I had installed Endeavour, because I wanted KDE and the latest packages, but also wanted a faster package manager. I felt an Arch distro was the answer. After a glowing post to my friends on Endeavour and how great it was running (and I still insist it's a terrific distro), everything exploded. I did an update, and suddenly I couldn't boot into the system. After I managed to find a way to boot into the system, I found almost all of my customizations removed. After re-customizing, I found that my personal files had also been deleted. I restored everything, and when I restarted, boom, couldn't log into the system. I figured that was a sign that I was either out of my depth, or that I shouldn't bother. So I thought "this is the perfect time to see how Pop OS is doing." Installed Pop OS, everything looked and worked great, for about half an hour, and then nothing wanted to work. Programs wouldn't load, I'd get constant crashes, and I know Pop is more stable than that. So I said, "well, I tried Arch, and I tried Pop, and I love Debian based distros, so let's install Debian 12!" and so I did. We will never speak of it again. All I'll say is 9 hours. 9 hours and things were still falling apart despite my best efforts to keep things running smoothly. It was definitely me, but I don't know what or where. So we'll move on. So as a last ditch effort, I said "fuck it, let's install Fedora KDE," and so I did. Everything seemed to install just fine. I created a user account for my family so they could use the system, and found that Dolphin wanted to close every time you opened it. I tried recreating the user account, and it kept doing it. So I dug around a little bit, and found that it was possible that Dolphin was denying ownership access to the user for some really weird reason. I mean, this was a fresh install, that shouldn't have been happening, but it was. So I changed permissions for the Dolphin file manager, and restarted. Everything has worked smoothly since, so here I am, and I'm exhausted. My poor, poor SSD. [ insert John Coffey "I'm Tired Boss" meme here ] All of that said, things seem to be running fine, and so here's where I'll stay while I go over the wreckage of what happened. What a weird series of events in the Linux world for me these past few days.
I'm looking at switching to Solus OS. Ha ha, I'm a fucking glutton for punishment. Seriously, though, I've been running it in a virtual machine, and I am honestly impressed with what they've done. Solus is built from scratch, and uses the eopkg package manager, which has been simple to use so far. They are a curated rolling release, and have cutting edge updates rather than Arch's bleeding edge, which means they're up to date, but stable. Solus uses its own software store, and all the apps are curated and guaranteed to work with the OS. All of the most popular applications are there, and if you can't find that, flatpak is easy enough to activate and use to install whatever else is needed outside the repos. Also, no telemetry at all. They don't even know how many people use the distro, and the community seems to be highly engaged and friendly. The distro was quiet for a while, due to some hardware issues as well as some upper developer level shakeups, but it's back in form and Solus 4.4 was just released this past week. They're already working on Solus V, too, and plan on rebasing it to Serpent OS for long term sustainability. I could see myself using it as a daily driver. It gives me the KDE Plasma desktop I want, an up to date kernel and applications, and it's very privacy focused.
I ended up staying on Fedora. I ran Solus in a virtual machine so I could get a good feel for it before switching. I have to say that Solus is indeed a lovely distro, but it's very niche in that only a handful of people maintain it. It runs eopkg, which is used on PiSi, another distro, and it's not just that eopkg isn't really designed to do much (it's not nearly as flexible as apt, dnf or pacman), but the repository is also quite small. That wasn't so much an issue at first because I figured I'd just compile what I needed. Well, Solus comes with exactly 0 compiler tools or libraries of any kind. They've clearly set it up to be a walled garden, probably so folks don't accidentally destroy their installations from ignorance. They also only update once a week, and I mean for everything, because it is all curated. Every app is looked over before being approved to be packaged in the repository. To put it another way, even though the kernel was 6.2, the version of Firefox in the repository was 114, which is one version behind, and the same version as Linux Mint. So I figured switching would be a mistake, and for now I'm on Fedora, despite their current desire to add telemetry to their software.
