I think I'm done distro hopping. For those of you who don't know, many users of Linux (an alternative operating system to Microsoft Windows) will often "hop" from one Linux distribution to another. This is known as "distro hopping," and it's often because different distributions have different software package managers, different commands, different file system preferences, and so on. It's not required to know these things when you move to Linux, but it does help. Anyway, I had been on Fedora KDE for a while, and I wanted to switch to Ubuntu because I wanted to use the Gnome desktop environment, and I really like Debian based systems. Some people say just install Gnome and remove KDE on Fedora, but that always leaves all kinds of junk files and it can cause the system to behave wonky if you missed something. So anyway, I move to Ubuntu, and it's just awful. Nothing against it, maybe I had a bad install, but nothing wanted to work, it was so unstable. The theming didn't want to work, either. I set everything to "dark" and half of my windows were still white, flatpak apps were white, even after updating with gtk3 and flatseal. So I think "fuck it, I'll roll back to Fedora KDE," and go to open my backup drive and guess what? I had erased it. Yep. My primary is a 2TB SSD, and my backup is also a 2TB SSD. All I can think is that I missed the different drive designation and hit "install." All of my documents, images, music, stuff going back *20 years* is all gone. You might say "don't you backup in multiple locations?" and the answer is that I did at one point, but the drive had gone bad and I'd never bought a new one, so I had this one backup. I did luck out though. It turns out that the previous Fedora install hadn't been wiped yet, so I was able to get into my home folder and remove my images and documents. My music had been wiped, but the other stuff was salvageable. I spent the next 4 hours, up until 4 in the morning, restoring everything, and here is where I'm staying put. It was such a junior league mistake to install on the backup drive, and if I hadn't been lucky, I'd have lost images of my mom, documents I had saved from decades ago. I'm going to save up and by a 2 TB external HDD just for backups and disconnect it when it's not in use just to have a secondary backup location. Remember, kids, always back up in multiple locations. This time around, I lost about 200 GB of music, but it could have been much worse. I don't know if it will stick or not, but it did seem to cure my distro hopping. I won't lie, I was on the verge of tears thinking I'd lost all of my mom's pictures, her written songs, my own documents, and so much other stuff. Be careful if you distro hop!
I'm thinking of going to Mint when Windows 10 finally dies. A techie friend recommended it. Any good?
Mint is a great Linux distro. The user interface is very Windows-like, so you will be familiar with it. It's easy to use, there's TONS of support for it online because it's based on Ubuntu Linux, which has been around since 2004, it gives you more freedom to customize than Windows, and the big one is that it doesn't show you ads or send your data to anyone as it's a community distribution, and that community is very friendly and open. I started out on Linux Mint back in the mid-2000s, and I loved it immediately. It looks good, it's stable, it's reliable, and if you install Steam, you will be able to play tons of games without any trouble whatsoever.
Yeah, not sure what I'm going to do when Windows 10 support ends. I've been able to tamp down most of the adware/spyware in Windows 10, but it's pretty much impossible with Windows 11 (which I use on my work laptop). Will definitely be investigating Linux.
Aside from a few minor software issues (getting software like Photoshop to work on Linux is a pain in the ass but there are solid replacements like GIMP and Krita), once you get used to it, you'll forget you even use Linux. Mint is a great choice if you prefer a Windows-like interface, Ubuntu is a great choice if you prefer a Mac-like interface, but both run the same software and everything, and the free software libraries in Linux are *enormous*. There is something for every need.
I'm currently in good shape with two computers; one for my recording space (Windows 10) and a newer one (Windows 11) for editing. My biggest software packages are Studio 1, Adobe Audition 1.5 (yeah, it's old, but it still runs on both) and RX 10. I use Libre Office, although Google Drive is awfully convenient for my relatively simple needs. How would Mint work with all that? I'm thinking of going the custom computer route on my next one. Would Mint be a better choice than Windows?
I don't know about Studio 1, but apparently, that version of Adobe Audition is the best to run on Linux using WINE (that's a program that tricks software into thinking that it's running on Windows). Libre Office works just fine on Linux, don't know about RX 10, but generally, if you can't get a Windows program to run on Linux, there's a Linux version that's just as good, though sometimes they're a little more complicated to figure out. One thing that you can do, before you ever invest in a new machine, is make a "Live version" of the Linux distro. Essentially, what you do is install the version of Linux you want to test out to a USB thumbdrive and make sure that the next time you start your PC, it boots from the thumbdrive and not the drive in your PC. You'll be able to test everything out (though any software you download will have to be installed on the thumbdrive, not the PC's hard drive) and see how well it all works, and if you like it. Depending upon your current system, you might actually even notice some performance boosts by running Linux off the thumbdrive. There's also a lot of message boards out there dedicated to Linux, so you can find one that has people who're familiar with what you're trying to do.
I like the idea of booting off an outboard disc. Studio 1 and RX are both relatively high powered, specialized software packages that I can't imagine would have a clone version. If I get motivated enough I will definitely try the idea of creating a separate boot disc and seeing what happens.
This is why you need winduhs. Your problem is you don't have onedrive pushing cloud storage on you all the fucking time until you give the fuck up and install it just so it can lock you the fuck out and sell your data for you. Not to mention you are not getting the full benefit of those 5G chips that were installed in you when Bill Gates hacked your brain during COVID. I have something called old man dad backup. It is actually reliable but the problem is dad never does any work while downloading music so his music library is bigger than a 1TB drive. The problem is he clicks on make a new file when he pushes everything together so he has around ten of fifteen versions of each version of the song, and he has never cleared out the shit versions that end in the middle or were released on limewire twenty years ago to mung up the world with versions of the song that have been purposefully fucked up. Old man dad backup has existed from days before computers which is why when you go through his toolbocx you find broken saw blades and flathead screwdrivers that have chipped. There is an updating tool called Mom, but she does not know what to throw away and gets rid of everything when you run her unless you are there to personally verify every fucking item. It took me four hours to go through charging cables with mom and I am pretty sure old man dad had saved a pong machine power cable from the seventies. There was a reason radio shack stayed in business so long and I am pretty sure many versions of old man dad would just keep buying RCA cables and storing them in stockpiles.
Yep. I usually do have multiple backups, but I managed to fuck up in between. It was one of those situations where I was like "eh, what's the likelihood of me screwing this up?" The answer, in the words of K2SO, would be "it's high. It's very high." That said, I managed to recover it, and now my data is sitting on no less than THREE separate drives.
I have over 800 anime DVDs ripped to digital. A whole bunch of them you cannot get anymore because companies that produced them have died without relinquishing the rights. A lot of them are also failing due to age. That is not to mention the american produced movies which at least are often available in digital format or as DVDs if I lose them. At least with the anime me and my con buddy have multiple back ups of the digital copies. His is on his server with a raid5 drive and a mirrored back up. Luckily funimation picked up a lot of titles and then joined with Sony and crunchy with a huge online library. I do not even know where I would find some of my favorites like El-Hazard or Magic Users club anymore. I could live with losing some of the Tenchis, but some of that shit is burried in rights hell and I will never see it again. I had to hunt for MUC disk three two times back around 2010. Music is fairly recoverable and youtube VEVO has most of it when I search so it is licensed for the artists, but that does not always carry all the B-sides I love. I am sure the anime is out there, but sometimes you lose things like the Orion dub of akira. I am actually one of the lovers of that version, and that never even hit DVD because Orion sank so long ago with the rights to so many old school things. Do you know how hard it is to find a decent copy of Angel's Egg? The kids do not know what any of that is, but that is the shit that blew my mind back in the day and it is gone. Actually, I could probably get it again, but I would have to find the recluses living in a cave to get it.
Thanks for reminding me, I almost forgot to look for El-Hazard so I can show it to my friend and get it ripped. Somehow I missed that one back in the day.
Oh, 100% on that. My movies are stored on two secondary drives, one of which is always disconnected until it's time to update it with new movies. I have spent years burning my DVD collection to my storage drives. I did manage to recover about 30% of my music, so it wasn't a catastrophe, and I can always ask some of my friends who have huge archives to see if they have the songs I'm missing from my collection. In an age of intellectual property rights squeezing people for every penny while giving them fewer "ownership" rights, we have to rely on the data hoarders to preserve art.
I have the archive of every story I've ever saved stored on at least five external drives. There might be a sixth one I'm forgetting. Over the years it's moved through three different tape formats, DVD and, since 2013/2014, hard drives. What's great is that not only do 15+ 60-minute tapes easily fit on a 2TB drive (with tons of space still available all these years later) but when I go to other stations to do workshops I no longer have to lug around a box of tapes and a huge professional tape machine to play them.
Yep. The blessing and the curse of digital storage is that it has grown to hold vast amounts of data, but that also makes it more dangerous to lose.
Tell me about it. I posted about it in my Blue Room thread, but two months ago on the last and most important shoot for a story, I temporarily lost the memory card I'd just used. I drove back to the location (an hour away) and found it lying on the ground right next to where I'd parked. Inside the silver adapter is an SD card, which gives you an idea of how small the object that went missing is. We use SD cards with adapters instead of the proprietary Sony memory cards because even though the latter are tougher (I've accidentally run them through a washing machine before and they still worked), they cost over $350 compared to a 64GB SD card which costs less than $20. Other people have lost tapes, but I never did. Most of the ones I used were literally the same size as a Betamax cassette so it was a lot harder to misplace one. Memory cards, OTOH, get lost all the time. Even when we used the proprietary ones, which used to cost more than $500 a decade ago. One coworker lost two of them and still kept his job.
Oh yeah, I know that pain. I mean, not in the line of a profession, which is riskier, but the fact that I lost a MicroSD card once that held 256GB of data. A card the size of a fingernail can hold more than 2 million books worth of data. It's insane.
