Hey, I'm Q!

[QueriesNTheories]

Hello all, I'm Q and just happened upon the forum and channel through discovering the "What if you can't reject convenience?" video. Was a great video that introduced me to the window of tolerance and I'm now sharing it with my friends

I'm an artisty nerdy maker of things type person, happily calling tumblr my home for the last few years now, but I have had a big interest in tech and video games since I was tiny. I really admire the homebrew and CFW communities and am on a small side-quest to hack and fix the systems I own, besides my Switch lmao (is that something I can say here? I'm aware of the no illegal stuff/piracy policy but I doubt hacking devices is illegal).

My current big quest when it comes to rejecting convenience is switching to Linux. I do not want to go to Windows 11 full stop new line, and MacOS is too small a box for my daily needs (was forced to use a Mac a few years ago at home, would rather not go back however convenient the features were). So soon enough I'm gonna go get an external drive for this laptop, pop Mint on it, and swap whatever daily tasks I do to there, with Windows still sitting on my SSD so I can still run some special programs and games. (I'd much rather avoid the headache of disk partitioning)

When I'm not cursing big tech for their AI stuff, I work on a little Notion site where I collect my favourite useful/cool web links and show em off to the world. I also write a lot of fiction in my spare time (there's a link to it on my strawpage if you're interested) and am a big big big fan of indie animation.

Uhhh that's all from me! Hope to see you guys a lot more, it's been a hot minute since I've used a forum lol
Cheers!

[rejectconvenience]

Modding what you own isn't against the rules here as far as I'm concerned Welcome to the forum!

[seasnails]

Welcome! I'm about to dive into your links. Seems like we have a few artsy folk around here and it's always fun to see peoples' creations.

Excited to hear about you jumping into Linux, it blew my mind when I first did and I've been Windows-free for a good ten or so years now. Mint's a great choice, and don't let anyone pressure you into switching to some other Linux distro if you're happy on Mint. I love the variety of options in Linux but it can also be a handful to deal with at times: all the different squirrels constantly begging to be chased in different directions, or people yelling at you about which squirrel they think you should be chasing.

[QueriesNTheories]

Welcome! I'm about to dive into your links. Seems like we have a few artsy folk around here and it's always fun to see peoples' creations.

Excited to hear about you jumping into Linux, it blew my mind when I first did and I've been Windows-free for a good ten or so years now. Mint's a great choice, and don't let anyone pressure you into switching to some other Linux distro if you're happy on Mint. I love the variety of options in Linux but it can also be a handful to deal with at times: all the different squirrels constantly begging to be chased in different directions, or people yelling at you about which squirrel they think you should be chasing.

Haha thanks for the welcome you two

Totally agree with you seasnails, I keep getting conflicting information from here there and everywhere... but Mint just Works for me, as a starting point. I've been told to go to Ubuntu or Arch, to distro hop and try things out (which is good advice but another day), heck I've been considering Bazzite for maximum game compatibility so I don't have to boot into Windows as much. But I need to just start somewhere, and start soon before support ends lol. I am not an expert (yet)!
What's your preferred distro out of curiosity?
PS hope you enjoy the stuff I've saved/worked on

[Crazyroostereye]

Welcome from me to!

Love seeing new People jumping into Linux.
As Seasnail puts it people love to argue about what Distro is better and who does stuff the right way. It's often just an Ideological Fight between Nerds . What ever Works for you is the Right Choice. If you ever want to distro hop I recommend doing it on a Second Device or have a Stable Device as Backup if possible. So you can still jump back in an Emergency.
I remember when I started to majorly Distro hopping and only had my Desktop as a PC, oh boy the amount of rushed reinstall I had to do, because X thing I need didn't work on Distro I wanted to try out and now had to use X thing. What a pain, but Informative.

As somebody who loves tinkering with Software and Hardware doodads I love modding and hacking stuff. I hate it how Company have made their Hardware more Closed of so you can't mod it or even Repair it as well. I am lucky I have access to the local CCC to use their Workshop when messing with a particular Nasty Hardware pieces.

[QueriesNTheories]

Welcome from me to!

Love seeing new People jumping into Linux.
As Seasnail puts it people love to argue about what Distro is better and who does stuff the right way. It's often just an Ideological Fight between Nerds . What ever Works for you is the Right Choice. If you ever want to distro hop I recommend doing it on a Second Device or have a Stable Device as Backup if possible. So you can still jump back in an Emergency.
I remember when I started to majorly Distro hopping and only had my Desktop as a PC, oh boy the amount of rushed reinstall I had to do, because X thing I need didn't work on Distro I wanted to try out and now had to use X thing. What a pain, but Informative.

As somebody who loves tinkering with Software and Hardware doodads I love modding and hacking stuff. I hate it how Company have made their Hardware more Closed of so you can't mod it or even Repair it as well. I am lucky I have access to the local CCC to use their Workshop when messing with a particular Nasty Hardware pieces.

Hey there Rooster! Good tips good tips, thanks so much!
Got the drive I mentioned earlier in the thread. It has 2TB and I'm planning to partition it 50/50, so I do have a way to backup my stuff if I do wanna try something new... but I think that will just consist of me running a live install off a USB for a day tbh
too scary to think about accidentally wiping my stuff clean, aaaa!

Totally agree with you, it's so annoying trying to meddle with new tech without voiding a warranty or whatever. I'm learning a lot from family members who are also into this kind of thing, so I'm not entirely in the dark, but yeah, right to repair all the way! Especially when companies don't offer any help after a device gets discontinued (except, somehow, Nintendo in certain places? Who can quote you a price for repair parts for the 3DS and ship them to you? It was weird to heard about, need to look into that).

CCC = Chaos Computer Club; looked into that, sounds like an awesome group with great people

[SergioEduP]

Making the move to Linux is a whole learning journey that I'm sure you wont regret even if for some reason you don't stick with it, you seem to have the right mindset going into it though so you'll probable be in it for good!! I my self have suck with Arch Linux for a couple of years now and I don't think I'll be distro hopping any time soon, the way Arch works and just expects us, the users, to set up our system how we want it to be and manage it ourselves is exactly the king of agency I was looking for after leaving Windows and the kind of changes that Microsoft constantly does to it, that being said it is a lot of work to keep it working well for most people (but as a pretty big nerd I really enjoy it ).

And like others said don't let anyone pressure you into jumping into any other distro becayse it is "better", they are all good, they just operate in different ways that might fit better or worse into your workflow and preferences, so explore at your own leisure and if something is not working for you in a particular distro's default configuration chances are you can tweak it or outright change it without hopping to a different one.

It is pretty smart of you to have a separate partition for data you want to keep in case you decide to hop (I wish i thought of that when i was first starting on Linux ) just be careful to not wipe the whole drive if you do decide to try some different distro, I would also recommend you invest some time in learning the basics of QEMU/KVM virtual machines to try quickly try out different distros in a risk free virtual machine if you are curious about some specific aspect of some distro like a different package management or maybe even a different desktop environment without messing up your own configurations.

I also want to agree, Right to repair all the way!