A few months ago, I wrote about me making a modpack for Need for Speed: Most Wanted. The 2005 game, not the crappy 2012 one. I dubbed it "Definitive Edition". I even made a teaser video for it, showcasing a few of the mods I applied to the game in the following YouTube video.

But since then I've gone silent about it. Why? What happened?

Simply put, after extensively testing it by going through the career mode of it 2 times - once on my Windows PC and once on my Steam Deck - and encountering issues I don't know how to account for or fix, I've decided to effectively shelve it. Below, I'll detail some of the issues I've encountered with the development of the mod pack.

After the initial installation of the NFSMW Unlimiter mod, a few things happened. Namely, brakes on cars started spinning if custom rims were applied. While a minor annoyance at first glance, I then realized that it's not something I could actually fix. I thought that installing the Leftover Brakes Fix would be what I would need to do, but that did not resolve anything. Just made the spinning brakes look prettier.

And despite during installation telling NFSMW Unlimiter that I do not have any additional customization mods installed, it still attempted to add & enable Front/Rear Headlight customization, tried adding Neons and a bunch of other stuff...which basically meant I had to start over from scratch.

Specifically the BMW M3 E46. The base model. There are two mods that restore this car - one restores the model to make it actually functional & not a black BMW-shaped box. The other actually restores its performance & adds it to the Career Mode as a purchasable vehicle.

First of all, the customization on this car was lacking. No body kits. No working hood & roof scoop customization. The only things that did work were spoilers & wheels. Second - adding a vinyl to the car crashed the whole game. And if the game decided to spawn an M3 E46 in a race with a vinyl - yeah, that would lead to a random crash too.

I tried scouring NFSMods to see if there's anyone who made a different re-implementation of the base M3 E46, but I couldn't find anything. Plenty (and I'd figure too many) mods exist that expand what you can do with the M3 GTR, but the pool for the base M3 E46 is practically non-existent.

Although aside from the M3 E46 being a nightmare to re-implement, rather surprisingly - the other cut vehicles were not so difficult. Re-implementing the Nissan 350Z & Nissan Skyline GT-R R34 into the game - two known cut Nissan cars from the game - was rather easy and it was pretty painless. Adding the Black Edition exclusive cars into the Career Mode as purchasable vehicles to use throughout the campaign? Also pretty easy & not an issue. However...

Re-implementing all these cut vehicles let to the side effect of the M3 GTR variants - Street, Prologue & Endgame - all being available for purchase at the start of the Career.

It's less of an issue than you would expect, granted, considering that the M3 GTR Street variant was set to be priced at 90,000 cash (whereas you start out with only 42,000 in the mod pack), and both the Prologue & Endgame M3 GTRs were set to be priced at 500,000 cash each, I'd ideally like to not have them be unlocked upon creating the save file. But I could not figure out how to change their unlock conditions after screwing around with NFS-VltEd.

My idea would've been that the M3 GTR Street variant would be unlocked after you beat Blacklist #8 Jewels, and the M3 GTR Endgame variant would be unlocked after you complete the game, much like how you get that car in your garage after clearing the final pursuit. The M3 GTR Prologue variant doesn't need to be there, as it's just the weaker duplicate of the Endgame M3 GTR. But, again - I couldn't figure out how to fix it.

This is the most significant reason why I am no longer working on this mod pack. Mashing together so many mods has resulted in frequent graphical glitches, such as cars randomly becoming transparent, the game crashing upon trying to change any setting, and most recently - the game straight up freezing when trying to initiate a pursuit through the Bounty/Milestone screen. The only way to engage with the cops in the mod is to trigger them in free roam & finding them yourself. Which is just...no, I don't find that acceptable.

The graphical glitches are all likely part of the Xbox 360 Stuff pack that's been ported. My assumption is that when it's trying to deal with the add-ons that I've added to the game, it's likely pushing the engine to its limit, resulting in it trying to unload assets to save on memory. But I genuinely don't know.

In the end, what I wanted to do with this mod is make a version of NFS Most Wanted 2005 that included:

• The PS2 Demo Content
• The cars cut during the game's development - namely the M3 E46, 350Z and Skyline
• Expanded & finished heat levels from 1 to 10
• Graphics & cutscenes from the Xbox 360 version of the game
• An uncensored soundtrack

All the while, trying to keep the original game's identity & period-accuracy fully in tact. The mod pack basically aimed to just make the vanilla NFS Most Wanted experience, an already good one, even better. And the reason I wanted to do it with this approach is because I'm just not satisfied with how many other mods with similar names end up doing non-sensical things, like adding Veyrons and other hypercars into the game that did not exist back in 2005.

But it just didn't end up working out. While mashing mods together to make your ideal version of the game sounds good on paper, it ultimately doesn't end up working out the way you would expect. And that's okay.

I want to end this post off with the full list of mods that I used for this project. And even though it didn't pan out, maybe you could try your hand at it yourself and see how far you can get. Maybe you'll succeed, or maybe you'll try something entirely different. Either way, I hope this was an interesting read at the very least.

Tools used:

• Binary
• NFS-VltEd

Mod list:

• Widescreen Fix
• Extra Options
  
• 1967 Chevrolet Camaro RS-SS 396
• 1999 Nissan Skyline GT-R V-Spec (R34)
• 2003 Nissan 350Z-Fairlady Z (Z33)
• 2004 Mercedes-Benz SL65 AMG (R230)
• Bartender
• Falken Decal Restoration
• HD Car Logos
• HD Police Decals
• HQ Window Decals
• Police Helicopter Name Fix
• Leftover Brakes Fix
• NFSMW: Upscaled HUD
• NFSMW Race Fixes
• NFSMW Unlimiter v4.0.1.1337
• NFSMW Front-End Shadows
• Maximum Cop Probability
• Recompiled Vinyls
• Return Of Roger v2.3
• Revamped Pursuit System
• Uncut & Uncensored Soundtrack
• Unlockable Bonus Cars
• Addon Tuning
• Upscaled HUD
• Upscaled Minimap Textures
• Xbox 360 Cutscene Files
• Xbox 360 Stuff Pack [v4.1]

Some of these mods require Binary, some VltEd, some both, some neither.

That's all. Thank you very much for reading.

A few years back I wrote a post about how I had to leave Linux for the time being due to Nvidia's driver support being utterly awful. You can read all about that here.

However, since then, I've actually been back on Linux since around...August of 2024? Somewhere around that. At my (now former) job, one of my friends who I was working with at that job with mentioned how he would be interested in trading his RX 5700 XT for my RTX 3060 that I had at that time. I ended up taking that trade, actually.

Ever since then, I went back to Linux and have been on it ever since. This year, in a few months time, will mark 2 full years of me being on Linux. It's gotten to the point where I only ever use Windows these days for a few very specific things, such as modding old games where the tools don't really work on Linux. I have an entire secondary PC next to me with a Windows 11 install on it and it gets booted up like, at most, once a week.

Honestly, ever since I made the graphics card switch from Nvidia to AMD, it's been...fantastic! I'm genuinely just shocked at how good AMD graphics cards work on Linux.

Granted, I did have to switch from that RX 5700 XT to an RX 7600 about 1 year into the trade. That reason being because the RX 5700 XT ended up kicking the bucket. But it wasn't because my former co-worker lied to me though, no. The graphics card was genuinely in good health when we did the trade. The reason the GPU died was namely due to how tiny my case is and I think I ended up suffocating it.

Hey, if anyone from Lithuania is reading this and they want a broken RX 5700 XT to tinker around with and try to revive it, let me know, could arrange something I guess.

The RX 7600 I ended up getting fits into my case much nicer, has a lot more breathing room and it has been a treat ever since I got it.

But the Linux experience has been honestly great. I've gotten to the point now where my Fedora install now does absolutely everything, and I mean everything, that I need it to do. Everything to the last minor detail now just works as if I were on Windows.

I've experimented with a few desktop environments, namely GNOME, XFCE and Cinnamon, but I honestly still find KDE to be the best one for my personal needs simply because it requires re-learning things a lot less than other desktop environments.

I've also dabbled around with other distros, namely Arch, Linux Mint and Ubuntu, but I still personally find Fedora to be the one I'm most comfortable with. So I've stuck with Fedora.

I've run some more fun things on Fedora, you can check a video down below where I ran TUFU (2Unreal5Underground) on my Fedora install. Still using that same install, by the way! Only difference is that I'm currently on Fedora 43 now.

When Fedora 43 was released, myself and a lot (and I mean a lot) of other people started experiencing issues upgrading from Fedora 42 to 43. The reason? Wine, for some reason. Here's my Reddit post about it when it was relevant. I had to delete Wine & reinstall it after the upgrade to 43. I did have to fix a few Wine prefixes, mainly osu-winello, but that ended up being far easier than I anticipated.

(note: even though I said "for some reason", the actual reason being that 32-bit WIne has been deprecated and is no longer supported, so that was the reason the upgrades were being blocked)

One thing I never ended up getting working on Fedora was, sadly, my Hauppauge HD PVR 2 capture card. I ended up giving up on it and put it away. Thank you crafciak31 for the HD PVR 2 that you gifted me ages ago at this point, I still really appreciate it as a sick as hell donation, but now the thing is currently in a box, piled on top of other misc. tech that I have but don't use.

DaVinci Resolve...never got it to be stable on Fedora, sadly. I could not figure out how to make it stable and not crash every time I tried to do a timeline change. I ended up giving up on that as well. I heard there are video editors that work fine on Linux though, so I'll have to look into those when I feel bothered to. Not right now though, it's not a priority at all for me at the current moment.

I actually got a Steam Deck in October 2025! And I've been enjoying my time using it so far. I don't have much to say about it, other than I think it's a really cool piece of tech.

My Steam Deck ended up replacing my Lenovo Thinkpad E490, which I recently donated to a friend of mine. I'll miss that laptop but I'm also much happier knowing that it's off to a new home where it'll continue to be used.

Honestly...still no. Despite how many advancements Linux has made, I still don't think Linux is at a point where an average user could just jump into it and have everything work. It's still very much a platform for nerds who like tinkering around to get stuff work.

Granted, I don't think Linux is that hard, it really isn't. It's just time-consuming. Anything and everything you would want to do is one simple internet search away from figuring out, but the problem is that it just takes a lot of time, especially if you're new.

Sure, setting up a new web browser and surfing the net is easy enough. Most Linux distros come with Firefox packaged in, most Chromium-based browsers work fine on Linux too, including the crime to humanity known as Google Chrome. Getting Steam to run and getting your Steam Library to work out of the box is also super simple and super easy. I get that. Even non-Steam games that utilize Wine are also not that much of a hassle to get going, especially if you use something like Lutris.

But the main thing is that the moment you decide to step away from doing anything that isn't already working out of the box, figuring that stuff out genuinely takes more time than it's worth for some people. Linux still has ways to go in making things just work. That's where I think Windows still has an advantage over Linux. It's in software support. All you need to do on Windows is download an installer, install it and off you go.

On Linux, I wish it were that easy with some stuff. I really do.

With Linux, it's still a case of where I have to ask my friends "well, what exactly do you want to do on your PC?" when it comes to recommending it to them. For people like artists, music producers and such, as I do have a few friends who do that kind of creative work, I still cannot recommend Linux to them. One for a lack of experience doing that sort of stuff so I don't know whether they could get their software to reliably work on Linux, the other...is hardware. Nvidia is still, to this day, the biggest roadblock for me recommending Linux to others, purely based off my own experience. And a majority of my friends have Nvidia GPUs. I earnestly still cannot recommend Linux to anyone with an Nvidia GPU.

If all you need out of your PC is a web browser, Discord and Steam for all your games, then yeah, Linux is a good fit for you. But if you want to do anything beyond that basic set of stuff, then no. I don't think I can earnestly recommend Linux to you.

Well, I don't plan on leaving Linux anytime soon. It's been treating me very, very well and I have no complaints. I've been slowly but surely de-Windows'ing my life, ever since I made that decision in June 2024 to leave Windows behind due to Microsoft's shift to making Windows an "agentic OS" with all of the unnecessary AI crap no one asked for and no one is using, on top of being an insane privacy risk. I couldn't stand Windows becoming even more like spyware than it used to be.

As for my next post...I promised something relating to Windows XP and I still intend to make a blog post about a particular piece of hardware I received. And that's still in my plans! On top of writing about a mod pack for Need for Speed Most Wanted (2005) that I'm working on.

Safe to say, I have things I want to talk about. But until I find the motivation to do so, this little blog post is what you're getting for now.

Thanks for reading!
- huu

I really don't know how to formulate my thoughts. In October 2024, I wanted to originally leave Weebly and migrate elsewhere. I was ready for it. I had even started to remake pages on the new web host as well. But then...life happened. I need a space where I can really just...talk. Then I remembered - that's right, I have a website that is literally my own personal space.

To say that I had a...turbulent ending to 2024 would be a huge understatement. I don't think there's anything that could've really prepared me for what was going to happen at the end of that year. I had just come back from my first ever solo trip abroad, going to cavoe's osu! event (COE) that year. But the timing was less than fortunate. The event had landed in the week that my mom's birthday was on, which, yeah, she wasn't entirely happy about. But I had already planned everything out - booked the flights, booked the hotel, got my convention ticket. And furthermore, I really didn't want to travel together with my mom to an osu! event.

It's one thing to leave your family member at home but it's another to leave them alone in a country where she doesn't speak the native language or know English that well. I didn't want to deal with that additional headache on top of things. So when it was actually her birthday on July 30th, I called her. Least I could do is say happy birthday, even if I am over 1000 kilometers away. But she was completely drunk. Crying and screaming at me so loud that other people in the area next to me could hear her, even if I didn't have her on loudspeaker. I just remember hanging up on her and not picking the phone up again. My other friends I was traveling with were shocked too, they knew that my mom had a tendency of this but this was the first time they got to witness it first-hand in real life.

After I came back home, my mom started to drink. A lot. And I really mean...a lot. So much so that she tried to hide it by placating me with snacks and drinks when I came back home from work. Some people asked me why I never moved out, I was wondering that too but then remembered that moving out wouldn't be so easy given current wages. I had been window-shopping for an apartment to rent for some time by then but couldn't find anything. So I kinda toughed it out, guess it helped me save some money not having to rent my own place too.

In November, my mom went on her own solo-trip, this time to the UK to visit my brother and his family. And I was left alone for 3 weeks. All I can remember from that time is how...quiet everything was without my mom around. Every day I would come home after work and it'd be...quiet. Usually I'd find her in her room watching some TV shows on her PC but when she was away for 3 weeks, it was...odd how quiet it had gotten. It was during this time that I had actually started to sit down and start making some marginal progress on my website move that I had planned.

Then when she returned from her trip, things were off. The previous year in 2023 when she went to the UK on her own, I remember how absolutely star-struck she was about my brother's kids, especially his newborn one at the time. But this year? She came back...bitter. Apparently having gotten into a fight during the trip with my brother and his wife. I didn't pry too much but I did ask my brother what was up. Why not ask my mom at the time? I did. She didn't want to talk about it. My brother mentioned that my mom kept asking to be let go solo to go to places like London and Manchester, meanwhile my brother was flat broke and also didn't want my mom wandering around the UK while she spoke literally zero English. I understood my brother's POV but my mom saw this as being confined intentionally.

It was a week after this trip that I came home from work and I saw that my mom was fully drunk. Like, fully shit-faced drunk. And she started harassing me. Asking me to clean up her pissed up mattress. Asking me to help her with her computer issues. Asking me to go to the store to get her more booze. Keep in mind it was late in the evening, early December and incredibly cold outside. I was insanely tired after work and didn't want to do anything, my mom started calling me a lazy slob. I...couldn't take it anymore. Lashed out at her. First, a shout-match ensued between the both of us. But then my mom started physically hitting me. With her first, with random objects she found, she genuinely tried to hurt me.

It was at that moment that I had decided enough was enough. I packed as many things as I could carry, grabbed my e-Scooter and went out. It was -6°C outside, and here I was with 4 bags and an e-Scooter, looking for a place to stay. I asked around as many friends as I could if anyone would be willing to let me crash for the weekend. Thankfully one friend said yes.

During that weekend, I heard nothing from my mom. Zilch. Sunday evening I called her from my work phone, since I didn't want her knowing it's me calling. She picked up, that was enough. I went home that evening, found her fully passed out drunk. I just took a shower and went to sleep myself. Early the next morning I started texting around, looking for someplace to move to. Eventually one of my former work colleagues from my previous job told me they had a vacant room in the apartment they were living at, asked if I can bring my cat, asked what the rent price is and by Tuesday, I had started actually moving my stuff to the new apartment. That was when my mom started to actually begin beg, cry & ask me not to leave her. But I've been through that song & dance many times over the last few years, I couldn't take it anymore. So I told her that this is the consequence of her own actions. By Saturday, I had finished moving and started living separately from my mom for the first time...ever.

We barely kept in touch. I flat out told her that if she wants to have any kind of positive relations with me, she needs to start taking her alcoholism problem seriously. I told her that if I catch her drunk one more time, I'd be cutting contact and then gave her suggestions on what to do next, being psychological and psychiatric help. She promised she would, I left it at that.

Fast forward to Christmas 2024. I decided I want to go visit mom for the holidays. That day I remember calling her and getting no reply, which was very odd. I made my way to what was now my former home and I tried unlocking the door. I can't. My mom had locked herself into the apartment with no way of getting in. I start calling her and after like 5 attempts, she picked up. I asked her to let me in, she said okay. 10 minutes later, she unlocked the door and I was able to enter the apartment.

First things I noticed - the place is a complete and total mess. Unwashed dishes. Garbage bags everywhere. And the undeniable smell of straight up urine. And my mom? She looked...disheveled. Messy hair. Wet/greasy clothes. Not even wearing underwear? Yeah, what the fuck. Told her to put some pants on, sat down next to her and I wanted to just talk to her. I abandoned my original plan of inviting her out to the city to explore the Christmas market together because something was clearly up. But my mom, she was not listening. All I could get out of her was a groggy "WHAT?!" before she would proceed to pretend that I don't exist in the room at all, watching Russian TV shows at volumes that would make anyone's ears hurt.

At that point, I have had enough. I straight up told her "This is it. This is what you're choosing, huh? Well, consider yourself gone from my life." and I went to pack whatever loose things I still had left behind. Things like slippers, some old consoles I thought I'd maybe want to play down the line. While I was packing though, my mom actually stood up and angrily opened my room's door and screamed at me to not cut her out of my life. I just repeated to her that I told her this would happen and these are just the consequences of her actions, and she went back to her room.

After I grabbed some extra stuff, I just left the apartment, finished packing what I couldn't fit outside of it because I just could not stand the smell anymore. While I was outside, I actually heard her lock herself into the apartment again. In hindsight, I should've gone back. But at that point I was completely done and didn't want to speak to my mom anymore, ever again.

5 days later, on December 30th, 2024, my brother started calling me in the middle of work. I went to a private call box and picked up, asked him what's up. I thought he was just calling me to wish me well for the upcoming new year but...it was something else.

He had mentioned that he hasn't been able to get in contact with mom since Christmas. He already knew what happened, since I did confide in him moments after it happened on Christmas day, so he knew I was no longer on speaking terms with her. But he pleaded with me to actually go and check on her, just to see if she's okay. He said I don't even have to talk to her, just make sure that she's okay and that's all he needs. I agreed, told my boss the situation and he was instantly understanding of the situation and told me to just take the rest of the day off to sort this mess out.

First I had to go to the new apartment I was renting, since the keys to my old place were in the drawer. Grabbed the keys and then went back immediately to mom's place. Yep, locked herself in again, exactly the same as Christmas. I start knocking on the door - no answer. I knocked for what felt like ages, but no one came to the door. Then I began pretty much spam-calling her. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over...no reply. I was at a loss. I had been standing there for over an hour, banging on the door and calling her to...nothing. I started panicking. I called my brother, told him the situation and he advised I call emergency services. This does not look good at all.

Hands shaking, I dial 112 and explain the situation. Not even 5 minutes later, two firetrucks, an ambulance and a police car show up. The firetruck had an extendable ladder, and thankfully my mom left the balcony completely open, so the firemen just had to get in through the balcony and they were able to get the keys out and unlock the apartment.

I wasn't allowed inside initially. There were safety things they had to check, as well as check up on mom. But that's the thing. After 10 minutes, they let me in with the news...mom's dead. Mom had...died. She was found dead on the floor of the apartment.

Everything just...shattered for me. Words genuinely cannot express how...soul-crushing that was. My mom was...dead. And I felt responsible for her death. I don't know if she died on the 25th, 26th or any other date, or if when we found her was the day that she died. But it also didn't matter. My mom was dead.

2025 was a hellish year for me. The year started off with mom's funeral. Which was entirely funded by my friends & my mom's friends donating to the funeral. But to think I'd start the year with...burying my mom...was...well, I can't put it into words.

The following months were mentally some of the hardest I've had to endure. I was incredibly desperate for any kind of companionship from...anyone. I have no family left in the country that I live in. I have no father, no grandparents, no cousins, nothing. I have nothing, I have no one. I genuinely felt alone and isolated. Like the universe taking my mom away from me being a gigantic middle finger. Me getting what I deserved. That's what I believed too.

I've never felt more alone in my life during this time period. It eventually culminated into me having yet another attempt on my life. For those not in the know, my birthday is February 24th. What did I decide to do on February 23rd, 2025 - one day before my 26th birthday? I decided that I would be committing suicide because I had also lost my online best friend at the time. One of the people I went on the trip to COE 2024 with. Someone I had known since 2016. I couldn't bare it anymore. We had gotten into a fight over Counter-Strike 2 and they ended up removing me everywhere - Discord, Steam, osu! - anywhere and everywhere we talked.

That was genuinely the straw that broke the camel's back for me. That was it. I had lost everything. I don't HAVE anything else to lose anymore. I don't have any family, and now it seems like I don't have any friends left either. The ones that were left just felt...fake. They didn't feel like actual friends whatsoever. So I decided - fuck it. My life isn't worth anything, might as well just end it.

Thankfully, I am an idiot and publicly posted about this to my private Instagram filled with IRL people who know exactly where I live. But in my head, none of them gave a single shit what would happen to me, so the least I could tell them is that I'm going to be gone for good and not be in anyone's hair anymore. That ended up saving my life as several of my IRL friends immediately called the police. Before I had the chance to do anything to myself, not 20 minutes later - police were knocking at my door, alongside one of my IRL friends who saw the Instagram posts.

The police started interrogating me on what the hell was I trying to do to myself. I told them, without bullshitting them, that I was just insanely depressed and suicidal after feeling like I've been left completely alone. I lost my family. My friends felt fake, all of that. After the interrogation, they called medics over and I told the same thing to them. At that point, they told me to pack some stuff, grab my passport and put me into an ambulance. I was driven to the psych ward. I was hospitalized.

But you know what? That hospital stay genuinely wasn't bad...at all. There, I met people who were very similar to me. Down on their luck. People who understood me right off the gate. I didn't have to tell them anything in any kind of roundabout way or anything to avoid unwanted "advice" like "oh life gets better everyone has these moments" type of things. No, these people got me instantly. And they spoke my language, if you get what that means. And that hospital stay genuinely helped me mentally get back on my feet because I realized that people who do understand me exist out there. I kept in touch with some of them after being released from the hospital but, as these things go, we all basically went our separate ways after I or they were discharged. I haven't really heard much from them.

It was at this point that I felt like things started looking up. I wasn't doing great. My hospital stay really highlighted and emphasized how fake everyone around me felt. Going from a place where people embraced and encouraged me to be...me back to a place where I had to fake being nice was...exhausting. But for the first time in my life, I felt as though I finally had people wanting to help me. I was signed up for monthly psychiatrist checks and slowly but surely started going to therapy again. I hadn't done that since 2022. My psychiatrist eventually signed me up for a 6-week group therapy program at the clinic I go to. I was very hesitant about accepting it at first (it was offered to me back in March when I was initially discharged from the hospital) but ended up accepting it.

In June 2025, I officially started going to the group therapy program. I was...terrified. I didn't know what to expect. What kind of people I would meet. Or even if I'd be allowed to leave. I was a genuine fish out of water because what the hell am I even doing here? I remember fumbling around the first few weeks, not knowing what to do or what to expect.

But as the therapy program went on, I started feeling braver in the sense that I started to want to talk to the other people going there, finding out their reasons for being where they were then. That is a choice I do not regret, as it led me to establishing some friendships with people. People that I still talk to even now and hang out with from time to time too. One of my fondest memories I made there was essentially making my own little "group" - me and 3 other people who had similar interests and really just opening up about our struggles to each other. It really opened my eyes to the fact that I really might not be alone in this journey after all. Yeah, we're came from different walks of life and experienced different things throughout time but at the end of the day, we all are seeking the same end result - to get better, to become mentally stronger.

I guess the one thing that sucked when therapy was over is that from the 4 of us, only 2 remained. The other 2 went their separate ways and I haven't heard much back from them. All I can say is that I hope they're doing okay. I would reach out but at the same time, I've tried reaching out to one of them for about 2 months straight and heard nothing back. I guess I assume they want their space and want their peace, so I stopped prying. Eventually ended up removing them.

The one thing that still partly stings to me is the fact that one of those people I met promised me they'd be there for me when I went to visit my mom's grave on her birthday and was stood up by them on the day we were meant to go together. I still have a video of how rainy and unprepared I was. Would've been nice to have a helping hand but oh well. No hard feelings, I suppose.

I still sparsely keep contact with some of the other people from there too. Not as frequent as the last remaining friend from our little group, but often enough to remind me that - yeah, we're friends and we're interested in hearing how each of us is doing after not seeing each other for god knows how long.

August 2025 rolls around and something...unexpected happens, to say the least. That being the fact that, for the first time since 2019, I had gotten myself a girlfriend. And this time - no strings attached. None of that weird "cheating" thing that happened back then, no. Someone actually confessed to me and I just accepted it. Feels like something I wanted for a long time to happen too. Albeit I wasn't entirely sure on the relationship from the get-go but I felt like it was worth a shot at least, just to see how compatible we would be.

The relationship didn't end up lasting that long. We were meant to go to the zoo but on the day of the trip I woke up sick and with a fever. The trip ended up cancelled. We did go to a Halloween event together and spent the New Year together.

In December 2025, I returned back to the therapy program again for my second round. That's something my doctor had strongly urged me to do back in Summer, it's just that I myself refused it due to really wanting to wrap up some loose ends from work before committing to something like that for another 6 weeks. But December was...well, a month of pain. I had started waking up with apathy every single day. Didn't even want to go to therapy. I just wanted to sleep away the entire month. I didn't care.

This second time round, the therapy program also wasn't that effective, which my doctor noticed too. I think it loses its "surprise" factor the more you go to it. Going through it a second time, I began understanding why some of the people going there say that the therapy program is ineffective. When I was there the very first time, it felt refreshing - a way to slow down, disconnect yourself from the hustle & bustle and really just focus on the most important thing - yourself. Because it feels like you're just re-doing the same things that you've already done previously. And I found myself feeling incredibly apathetic. It started feeling like routine instead of something I need.

I still ended up meeting great new people there. Some of which genuinely sacrificed a lot of themselves for me. And the story repeats - most of the people I met there I no longer talk to. We went our separate ways, with life taking us in different directions. But I still talk to at least one person from there, so it's nice something still came out of it.

Celebrating the New Year with one of the people from the therapy program & their partner, as well as me being with my at-the-time partner too was a good way to start the new year too.

Unfortunately though, 2026 so far has not had the best start. While it started on a high note with the New Years' celebration, things quickly tapered off and things went off the rails again.

First - I got sick within the first 2 weeks of 2026. Wasn't anything super serious, caught a flu. But that also meant that I had to leave the therapy program early, not quite completing the full 6 weeks as intended. At least I got sick on the very final week of it?

Second - my job. My job was in jeopardy because I had heard that my workplace isn't exactly happy over the fact I "skipped" 2.5 months of work due to needing to be in therapy, even if everything was marked appropriately by my doctor and they've been informed beforehand. But apparently there were considerations of me being fired from my job, which immediately sent me into a panic. Thankfully, as of now, I haven't been fired and haven't heard anything regarding this in a while.

Third - relationship issues. It started with me absolutely losing my mind and feeling like shit over the fact that my partner is incredibly into politics. And me? I'm apolitical. I genuinely do not keep up or follow anything political, let alone read world news. And the reason is very simple - it's horrible. It makes me hate people & hate the world, which then bleeds over into me hating...myself. It's a perpetual loop of misery. So I kind of lashed out at her for talking about politics all the time or showing me political content. I hated it. Eventually talked things out with her and just asked her to no longer talk about politics together. She agreed.

However, a few weeks after that and 1 day before Valentine's Day, I got a pretty gut-wrenching message from my now-ex. She wanted to break up, realized that we don't really work out as a couple.

Now here's the thing - I didn't mind breaking up. Being honest, I saw the writing on the wall with our relationship for a while by then. I wanted to break up too, I was just waiting for a good time to actually talk about breaking up with her. My whole idea was that we spend Valentine's Day together, celebrate my birthday together (as we pretty much started dating very shortly after her birthday back in August), and then some time after that - I'd break up. That way, I'd see it as symbolic - make some final good memories together and then go our separate ways.

But at the same time, I agree with my close friends that it's better to break up early and not drag it on arbitrarily if things aren't working out. At the end of the day, we both acknowledge that we don't work as partners and we really shouldn't be dating. Yet, my heart still tells me that the timing stings - right before Valentine's Day and right before my birthday...great.

All in all, I do wish my now ex partner the very best on her future endeavors. She's a really talented artist & writer and hope that she sees what the rest of us do in her. For the record after breaking up she did offer to remain as friends but I refused. I think it would be too socially awkward and emotionally difficult for both of us to handle going back to being "just friends" after dating for 6 months.

My birthday ended up being very...lowkey this year. At least I didn't end up in a mental hospital this time. Wasn't anything spectacular, two of my close friends showed up with snacks & cake for me, some online friends got me some additional Steam games, those being Deep Rock Galactic and Sonic Superstars, and other trinkets. And, of course, I got my fair share of happy birthday messages from all sorts of people, including those who I haven't talked to in a while. <3

Right now, I'm feeling very internally conflicted. I've had a few days where I think I had manic episodes, not really knowing how to handle myself at the moment. It's part of the reason I decided to write all of this down, a skill I learned in therapy is that giving yourself a space like this to express yourself is one of the best ways you can help yourself during difficult times.

I'm just hoping things eventually start to get better. Things aren't necessarily bad for me right now but I can just feel like there's something missing. I just don't know what. So my goal is to explore as many avenues as I can to hopefully figure that out.

Maybe start going to the gym? Start journaling again? Try out a different diet? Pick up a sketchbook and start drawing again? Hell, maybe even change careers? Who really knows what the future has in store for me.

If you read all of this to the end - thank you. It means more to me than mere words can describe.

Hopefully my next post on the blog won't be as depressing as this. I don't intend to anyway. I wanna talk about something more fun...something related to Windows XP, maybe. We'll see.

Thank you. I mean it.

- huu

This post won't really be as structured as my other posts that I've written over the time that this website has been up. Frankly, I just kinda want to vent for a while.

I've been on the internet, in some shape or form, since late 2010, early 2011. I was 11-12 years old when I first started using the internet and started exploring things like YouTube & various forums. Particularly, in my early days, I remember spending a lot of time on places like MM2X and various Sonic the Hedgehog forums, among other things that I really don't want to mention.

The internet was always a rather hostile place for the most part but it was always the type of thing that always felt...manageable? I guess? But in the last few years, particularly I wanna say after all the COVID-19 stuff started happening & everyone was forced into lockdown, I've genuinely just seen the entire internet...shift. Morph into something different. Something that makes it very draining to be on these days.

What used to be an escape from my bleak reality in my teenage years has turned into the thing I dread the most these days using. There's just so many things happening all at once that it just becomes...too much at a certain point to really handle.

These days, it genuinely feels like every other week that certain users on the internet try to go after someone to make a "big new hit piece on", cancel someone, expose them for this & that and it's all just...exhausting. Being on the internet, especially in 2024, just feels very exhausting. Even I wasn't free from the turmoil. In early 2020 - I got doxxed. In the middle of this year, I was relentlessly harassed by a particular user who had the doxx information on Mastodon. It got so bad that the moderators of the Mastodon server that I'm on had to personally issue me an apology that this stuff was even happening to me.

And now, seeing my YouTube feed just be constantly filled with things like "exposing influencer A you've never heard of for being this & that", "exposing influencer B who you've watched for years for doing this & that", things like that floating around literally everywhere to the point that it's inescapable just genuinely wants me to do nothing else but to hide away. Leave everything. I don't want to talk to people online anymore. I don't want to do anything online anymore.

There's a reason why, in late 2022, I started slowly drifting away from social media. Starting with my intentional ban from Twitter. Yes, to those who don't know yet, I intentionally banned myself from Twitter. And I made it so that I can never be unbanned from there & I genuinely, truthfully say that I never want to return.

There's a reason why, despite having an Instagram account, I made it private. My Instagram is just for my friends. So is my Steam profile. There's a reason why I'm so stingy & not willing to trust people anymore on any platform unless I already know them.

I want to disappear from the internet eventually. I think, over time, I'm just slowly going to start deleting a bunch of my social media accounts, emails, etc., to slowly start minimizing my footprint on the internet. This might even include my YouTube videos - things I've had public since 2011.

Obviously there are things I'm probably never going to delete. You know, things like my osu! profile or my Steam account. osu! because I do enjoy the game, want to play it & don't want to effectively permanently ban myself from online play. Steam because I've invested so much time & money into it that getting rid of it would feel like burning thousands of euros for no good reason.

But things like...Mastodon? Yeah, that can go. My Reddit account? Don't need it. Hell, even this website? Well, okay, maybe not that drastic, but I guess anything related to me specifically - yeah, all of that crap can go.

At some point, I just want to become a background character again. There is an audience of those who say that I already am one and that no one really gives a shit about what I do or what I say, but to them I say - you're the one trying to tell me that, which effectively proves the opposite - you're here because you do care, whether you admit it or not. Whether anyone pays attention to what I do these days - I want that to no longer matter.

I just want to vanish into the night, be forgotten by everyone and disappear from the public spotlight. I just want to feel like a human again. I want to stop feeling like a fucking robot made of flesh, mindlessly consuming content. I want to feel like my life has meaning beyond this virtual box that I've been a part of for more than half of my damn life now.

One day, I'll accomplish my goals. Until then, I'll take small steps toward it to make sure that I do.

Thanks for reading if you see this.

- huu

Well, it unfortunately happened. As of typing this post, I am now back on Windows 11. But I'm back to Windows not because I wanted to be. I rage-quit out of Linux for an entirely different reason, but we'll get into that later.

I wanna talk some positive things that I accomplished in Linux before I inevitably decided to go back to Windows, because all was seemingly going really well for me on Linux. Believe me when I say this - I had no intentions to just go on & drop Linux like I did, I had full intentions to keep going.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I was pretty bummed that I could no longer play Honkai: Star Rail while on Linux, due to the anti-cheat HoYoverse implemented into the game, as well as it being a Windows-only game.

Fortunately for me though, there is a group of dedicated individuals who managed to figure out a relatively painless process of getting the game to work on Linux. They asked not to link any repositories or mention them by name, so all I will say is that one quick Google search and you'll find all the resources you'd need for this.

But yeah, here's one of the final few screenshots I took while I was still under Linux!

The experience wasn't flawless though. Namely, whenever I would encounter an area with a lot of particles, the framerate would tank. Not unplayable for the type of game that HSR is, but very noticeable.

But there was a bigger issue. Take a look at the image below.

Do you notice anything? I'm sure those who are keen-eyed have already, but I'll post a picture of the same area taken from my phone below. UID is censored just in case HoYoverse, you know, doesn't like this...

The difference is much more obvious, right? That's right, pieces of geometry would literally fail to load. There were even instances where entire areas wouldn't load, although this only affected Penacony, funnily enough. Herta's Space Station, Jarilo VI and the Luofu were all unaffected.

I did ask around in, you know, a specific place about this & got told to change the DXVK version in the launcher. I downgraded from 2.3.1-1 to 2.2, rebooted, and...fixed!

Once that was done, I did notice a few minor errors still, like certain effects looking corrupted or the CG cutscenes showing artifacting but it was very ignorable & then proceeded to...dump 20 hours into the game in 2 days. I really like Honkai: Star Rail. The Penacony arc is insane, but unfortunately I'm still not...done with it. Even after 28 hours.

Halluci-Sabbat of Koishi is a Touhou Project fan game I took interest in back in November 2022 but never actually got around to playing. The whole reason I got the game back then was just because I was looking for more Touhou content to consume, and despite my favorite Touhou Project character being Satori Komeiji, I thought a game focusing on Koishi instead would be neat to try.

So I thought - what better way of experiencing the game to begin with than to try playing it on Linux?

Unfortunately for me, the game does not work OOTB. No matter what Proton version you use, even if it's the notoriously better Glorious Eggroll Proton, it won't work. So that's where my negative report on ProtonDB came in for the game.

But I didn't give up. I kept prodding. The reason? When I posted about this game not working on Linux, I actually received a response from the developer. After explaining a few things about Linux in...painfully brief & potentially inaccurate detail...I got to work trying to see if there were other methods of trying to get the game going on Linux.

I then installed protontricks & using its GUI, I spit-balled guesses as to what dependencies the game needed to actually run. I think I installed everything related to Visual C++, .NET & DXVK for the game. I'm not really sure, I just kinda installed everything that would "make sense", you know? Eyeballed the whole thing.

And eventually - voila!

I got the game to run! It wasn't without any problems, however.

One thing that I intended to figure out was why the game stuttered every single time I did any type of action, including but not limited to - selecting menu options, moving in-game, attacking, talking to NPCs...seriously, this made it pretty much unplayable. Oh, and the initial loading screen when you first boot the game took around 5-10 minutes each boot to load.

The developer suggested that it could be because I potentially installed the game on my HDD (which I did), but even after moving the game to my nVME SSD, it still exhibited the same issues it did before. Nothing changed. I'm convinced that the issue was either:

• GPU caching
• Lack of additional dependencies

Leaning more into GPU caching being the issue though. My guess is that because launching it on Steam doesn't pre-cache any shaders for the game, or do any kind of caching at all, it tries to convert DirectX to Vulkan on the spot whenever you do anything, hence the stutter.

I was planning on setting aside Sunday, July 7th, to figuring this ordeal out but as you'll soon come to find out, that would never end up happening...

On the night of July 5th, well July 6th at that point, I was ready to clock out for the night. I had a trip on July 6th with family & saw that my Fedora install had a whole bunch of updates. It has been a while since I last updated my system, so my thought process was "I'll install these updates, reboot to make sure everything still works & go to bed". That was a mistake.

When I first rebooted my PC & logged in, I noticed something unusual. Only 1 of my 3 monitors was displaying. The cursor appeared on the other 2 monitors, sure, but I couldn't drag any windows into them. I could still technically interact with the windows that opened on the other monitors but I just couldn't see them, like there was just a black overlay over the whole thing that I couldn't get rid of. I thought it was a temporary bug at first. After all, I mentioned in the past that I did have issues with my monitor failing to initialize & a reboot would usually fix that. So I rebooted but...this time the problem remained.

Thus, at 1AM, I began searching around to see if anyone has encountered this. Keep in mind, my desktop GUI was KDE Plasma X11. More on that later. I kept encountering posts from like 2014, 2009, 2017, etc. - varying time periods mentioning the exact issue but to my utter dismay - most people's solutions to the problem were either:

• Use 1 monitor & wait for a fix for the GUI
• Update the GPU drivers
• Use a different desktop GUI
• Rollback updates

Option 1 is immediately out the window. I've grown very comfortable with having 3 monitors. It genuinely helps with multi-tasking various things - one monitor dedicated to Discord for chatting, one monitor dedicated for video games or other "primary tasks" (my 144hz panel), and one monitor for content on the side to consume or manage, such as YouTube videos or music. Stuff like that.

Updating the GPU drivers felt suicidal but I've kept it on the backburner for then. As a "last resort" sort of thing as a hail-marry.

And option 3 - I've tried to get it to work for an hour straight. Installing different GUIs wasn't the issue - I managed to get both Cinnamon, XFCE & GNOME installed with relative ease. The issue was that the problem I had with the monitors wasn't resolved by it. No matter which desktop GUI I used, the other two monitors remained blank, with the cursor being the only thing that worked.

The only thing that actually got all 3 monitors to boot up & show an image was KDE Plasma on Wayland. BUT, you already know my woes with Wayland if you've read my previous blog post. And this time, the experience was much worse, since it lagged very bad. I could barely even log out of it.

So my final option, aside from going nuclear & trying to update my GPU drivers on a still unsupported distro for them, was to try to roll back whatever it is that Fedora updated then.

Here is an image of the issue I was dealing with, so you'd understand the predicament I was in. The one in the middle is my 144hz monitor, the other two are the 60hz monitors that I have.

You can see in system settings that the other two monitors are indeed enabled & recognized by Fedora. And, as mentioned, the only thing I could actually see on them was my mouse cursor.

So I began trying to roll back Fedora updates. I genuinely thought the issue was with KDE Plasma X11, since Wayland worked "fine", so I asked for help on Mastodon about this. Predictably, at the hour I posted, no one was online to come to my aid this time. Except for an Aussie guy named GNU/Matt who tried to help point me in the right direction (shoutout to you by the way, thanks for taking the time to try & help).

Unfortunately, no matter how much I tried rolling back the updates, be it OS or KDE Plasma updates, nothing ever fixed my issues.

Here's an image of my terminal screaming at me regarding a file conflict that I couldn't get around. I even tried manually changing or moving these files out of the directory using the root account, but even after the files were literally GONE from the directory it's screaming at me about, it still didn't let me downgrade even KDE Plasma X11.

It was then when I pulled out the hail-marry. Updating the GPU drivers from 550.90.07 to the latest version that Nvidia has released. The GPU driver update went successfully. It asked for a reboot, gave it the go-ahead and...my Fedora installation was bricked. Kaput. All I could use upon reboot was just the Linux Terminal. Nothing else.

After losing 3 hours of sleep to this & knowing I have to be up by 9 AM that day to go on the family trip, I just decided - enough is enough. That is where my Linux journey ends...for now.

Well, no. I fully intend to go back to Linux in the future, but I guess right now - my hardware is not cut out for it quite yet.

A lot of you will say that I could've just distro-hopped. Go to Linux Mint like I initially planned. Try a different OS entirely like openSUSE. Maybe install Arch. But understand my perspective that after losing 3 hours of sleep that night, and oversleeping & missing the family trip as well, I was very burned. I did not want to deal with this headache anymore.

The thing is, the villain of this story isn't Linux, or Fedora, KDE, what have you. In the 2.5 weeks that I full-timed Linux as my main OS, I genuinely had fun with it. I got to learn so many cool new things & get a different perspective of using my computer. Truthfully, it was very fun & I love how supportive the Linux sphere, no matter where I turn to, was.

The real villain of this story is Nvidia.

I've mentioned in the first post that Linux & Nvidia do not mix. And Nvidia is the one that I blame my issues with Linux that I've had. The clipboard? Wayland issue because of Nvidia's horrible support of Wayland. Firefox being broken? Nvidia, because of the Wayland support. Games starting with garbled graphics or flicker like crazy when in use? You've guessed it - Nvidia.

Nvidia is a company that, henceforth, I've decided I'm boycotting for any future hardware purchases. My next graphics card will 100% be an AMD graphics card. The reason? AMD has open-sourced their drivers for their graphics cards, leading to the Linux community basically being given free reigns to fix any Linux-related issues on their own. And that's awesome!

Nvidia, however, doesn't. They insist on keeping their drivers closed-source & releasing their own versions of Linux drivers with zero guarantee that they'll work with existing elements in your install. And for this, you often have to wait weeks, even months until you get a stable Nvidia driver update. And even then, you will STILL be several driver versions behind.

Mark my words with this - when I eventually replace my RTX 3060 with an AMD graphics card, I will be back on Linux. I'm not giving up because of my experience. It's just that, for my sanity, and for the sake of being able to sleep at night, for now I've turned back to Windows. Not for long though, I definitely hope.

And don't worry...

My Intel NUC that I have will continue to run good ol' reliable Linux Mint. So it's not like I'm completely out of the game quite yet.

Like I said, I'll be back.

Just once again I would love to thank everyone who I've interacted with the Linux sphere in the last ~3 weeks. The amount of support & willingness to help a complete newbie at this sort of stuff has been nothing short of heartwarming, and an impressive display of camaraderie amongst yourselves.

It's this reason why I'm saying that I will be back on Linux some day. That's a promise!

Special thank you goes to shavit & Ravener for dedicating so much of their time towards helping me make my Linux experience the best it can be.

In the meantime, you can find me probably trailblazing the galaxy in Honkai: Star Rail on Windows. Not happy to be back on it so soon after leaving, but let's just hope that it's not for that much longer.

And hey, keep me in touch with things going on in the Linux sphere, alright? I'd love to hear more often from you guys about nerdy stuff regarding Linux. Just...don't hate on the Windows users though...take aim at Microsoft rather than the people who use Windows. Thanks!

- huu

So, it's been a week since I've switched to Linux now. A bit over a week now, actually. I've had time to acclimate & get used to doing things a bit "differently" than what I was used to with Windows, but overall - I'd say I've gotten to the point where I no longer really feel the difference between how I did things with Windows & how I do things with Linux.

The road was a bumpy one though and frankly - I still have loose ends with Linux that I'm dying to iron out, but little by little I'll figure it out I guess.

Also, truthfully, this post was meant to be put up much earlier than now but I forgot to save my previous post & lost it because I misclicked the back button...and Weebly does not have an autosave feature for some reason. Then again, what I wrote in the previous post was probably too bloated & emotional anyway. Without further ado, let's get into how the Linux adventure has been for me so far.

A majority of the issues outlined in my previous post, such as the clipboard not working & Firefox refusing to co-operate were actually the result of Wayland, believe it or not.

I've heard many warnings from all walks of life that Nvidia GPUs & Linux don't really tend to mix together. While the Linux kernel has an open-source driver for it called Nouveau & Nvidia technically does provide drivers for Linux, I've heard from many people all across the web that Nvidia GPUs don't tend to mesh together with Linux all too well. It's why most people just recommend using AMD instead because AMD open-sources their drivers & lets people fix any issues that arise when using Linux.

I don't have the luxury of just swapping out my RTX 3060 for a different GPU though so I'm stuck with what I have. The way I installed KDE Plasma when I first installed Fedora was just installing the default KDE Plasma package that you get when you type in the terminal command for it, and KDE Plasma (to my understanding) comes with Wayland as the default.

Wayland sucks on Nvidia. Yes, my clipboard & Firefox woes were caused by it but I've also experienced many graphical freakouts on the way as well. I'll show what I'm talking about in a later section of this post but yeah, the experience wasn't pleasant.

A guy from Mastodon then told me to try installing KDE Plasma with X11 instead & try using that, gave me the terminal command to install it. Tried it & all of a sudden - every major issue I've had with Linux vanished almost simultaneously...but a few others cropped up along the way.

When I first installed KDE Plasma X11, the first thing that I immediately noticed was that my mouse felt...off. It's then that I realized that mouse acceleration was permanently enabled, despite the fact that I unchecked the setting in System Settings for it.

I can't stand mouse acceleration. It messes with my aim in FPS games & osu!, and generally just doesn't make for a great user experience for me. The mouse feels imprecise with it & often feel like I'm fighting with it more than I'm using the computer.

So, with some guidance from folks in various Discord servers knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, what I ended up doing is I created a file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ called 40-libinput.conf and pasted the following:

 Section "InputClass"
  Identifier "libinput pointer catchall"
  MatchIsPointer "on"
  MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
  Driver "libinput"
  Option "AccelProfile" "flat"
 EndSection

After making the file, pasting the above in there & rebooting - my mouse was fixed! Felt usable, finally.

But there was another issue. Sometimes, for an inexplicable reason, one of my monitors would just fail to start up. I'm running a 3 monitor setup, 2 of which are running at 60hz and my primary one is a 144hz panel. The 144hz monitor would usually be the one that would fail to initialize and I'd be stuck with 2 monitors, but it's not consistent. Sometimes one of the 60hz monitors would fail to start up in the same way.

Unfortunately I didn't find the reason for this happening but often times a system reboot would just fix the issue so I don't see it as that big of a deal.

Though despite the issues I've come across thus far, I'd still say that it was worth the switch from Wayland to X11 in my specific use-case, since I'd rather just have games not start up with garbled graphics & for my clipboard to work as it should...it even fixed unplayable flickering in osu!lazer & somehow fixed Vulkan failing to initialize on it!

One of the early goals I had set out for myself was not just to get osu!lazer up & running, but to also get my Windows backup of my osu! (stable) install going as well. Truthfully I believed that the process would be as simple as just installing Wine & running the osu!.exe file under Wine. That train of thought didn't get me very far.

So I got some help from a guy called Ravener, who came across my Linux-related posts on Mastodon. They actually started out with the osu!lazer flickering issues I mentioned above & helped me solve it under Wayland, as well as gave me a genuinely useful resource to use called "Gear Lever" for AppImage management.

Anyway, the steps I had to go through to get osu! (stable) working on Linux were as follows:

• Set up osu-winello
• Realize I am an idiot and do not know how hidden folders on Linux work (CTRL+H btw)
• Install/update winetricks
• Configure fonts & fail at it (for JP/KR/CHS/CHT/etc. text to show up properly)
  
• Download the osu! installer & run it under Wine after putting all the necessary files in necessary directories
• Figure out why the osu! installer isn't starting & fix it (had to rename the install file)
  

And voila! We have...osu...?

This is what I was talking about with garbled graphics under Wayland, by the way. osu! isn't the only game that did this under Wayland for me, I had similar freakouts with the likes of Sonic Origins as well a couple of times.

The way to temporarily fix this was to press ALT+ENTER to enter windowed mode, then I could go back to full screen. But I got osu! to run on Linux!

After that, I had to fix some stuff in order for the game to not cap its framerate to my monitor, install gamemode for further optimizations (I think?) & create shell scripts to launch the game natively without needing to go through my terminal every single time.

Oh, and fix the non-standard character fonts too. Those were showing up as squares. Fortunately, I was handed a nice handy-dandy install for those character sets which...I might actually back up on my site at some point, since the way you find it right now is...tedious to say the least, yeah.

I did freak out a couple of times when installing it, since it spewed errors out at me when installing, since it was trying to add registry entries that literally can't exist because we're on Linux, not Windows, but I was just told to ignore all of them & let everything else install as needed.

After that was all said & done, all I had to do then was just migrate my osu! install to the environment I had just set up, create a Desktop shortcut for osu! & I was done!

There are things I am unhappy about with Linux though, albeit these things aren't necessarily the fault of Linux itself. Just an unfortunate side effect.

Namely, I cannot seem to get my capture card - the Hauppauge HD PVR 2 - to work with Fedora Linux. The capture card itself is very old. It's also not very good. I don't complain though, because it was the first ever IRL donation I received from the days when I used to livestream (thank you again crafciak31!).

Sadly, because this capture card is so old, the only distro Hauppauge provides drivers for is an old version of Ubuntu. Or, well, any Debian-based distro would work, I suppose. I think you can get it installed under Fedora Linux too but I've just decided that trying to get this ancient thing to work with my Linux install is honestly more effort than it's worth. I saw that there was a repo for a community-made driver for it but it hasn't been maintained in a very long time & saw that you can't get it to work with OBS or get audio streaming to function so I quickly shelved the idea.

Maybe if there's someone knowledgeable enough with this topic who can help me set it up so it can capture both video & audio through OBS, then I'd be more than willing to set aside some time to tinker with it to try & get it going, but right now, seeing how almost utterly hopeless it is to get it to work, I've given up. If I ever need to use the capture card again, I still have my Windows 11 laptop that I can plug it into, I guess.

One of the more eventful & funny things that happened was when I accidentally killed my entire OS because I decided that I wanted to reformat my now-formerly NTFS drives into EXT4, so I'd stop having issues with running games on Steam.

Before doing the conversion, obviously I backed up all of the important data on them onto an external 2TB hard drive I have with an adapter so that I don't lose anything important. Then just thought it'd be as simple as going into KDE Partition Manager & reformatting the drives. Haha, how foolish, looking back at it...

Because I also completely forgot that I manually edited my fstab file. And I forgot to edit the fstab file before reformatting. That caused my OS to absolutely freak out, to the point I had to boot into a Linux Mint environment through a Live USB in order to comment out the lines I wrote...then I had to re-edit my fstab file again to properly mount my now-EXT4 drives, after also figuring out why they were showing up as removable media of course (hint: DISABLE SATA HOT-PLUGGING IN YOUR BIOS PLEASE).

Another annoying thing that happens is that some games, particularly Source Engine games such as Team Fortress 2, for whatever reason, force my 144hz monitor's refresh rate all the way down to...24hz...? And if I attempt to manually change the refresh rate back to 144hz - it...crashes my whole OS, forcing me to hard reboot...thank goodness for the -freq 144 launch option, otherwise I would've been on my way to ProtonDB to complain that TF2 runs like shit on Linux or something.

Oh, and I had to completely disable sleep mode. Why? Because every time my computer wakes from sleep, one random monitor for an inexplicable reason will be permanently dimmed to about 30% brightness. And if you attempt to raise said brightness back to 100%, it crashes the whole video driver, causing me to have to hard reboot the computer...again. There's probably a solution for this but I didn't bother with it. I don't need sleep mode on my primary desktop computer anyway so I didn't have any problems just parting ways with it entirely.

Processing Vulkan shaders is a huge pain though, every time I start any game on Steam. However, I am genuinely surprised at how good & versatile Valve's Proton tool is on Steam.

I've been trying to actively report findings on ProtonDB about games I've tried out on Linux thus far, and despite a couple of hiccups here & there, I'm able to play pretty much every single game under the sun that I would want!

I am, however, starting to miss Honkai Star Rail a little bit, since I know that game will just not work on Linux. Or if there is a method of getting it to work, it's most likely way more effort than I'm willing to put in for it.

Parting ways with Star Rail does sting a bit, especially since I don't really have a way to play it anymore now. Sure, I could play on my phone, but I'm really not much of a mobile gamer anymore. My Girls' Frontline phase ended back in 2020. I could also run it on my laptop but the game takes up an ungodly amount of space & the poor 240GB SSD in my laptop doesn't have much more wiggle-room left, especially since I loaded it up with osu! maps in anticipation of COE 2024. So I guess I'll just have to live without Star Rail then, none of the consoles that I own can run it either so...oh well. Maybe one day HoYoverse will release a native Linux port (they won't).

Other than that though, yeah, anything & everything I want to play - Overwatch 2, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered, Palworld - all of them work & play wonderfully on Linux, which I was very surprised with. I guess I'll have to find out how the likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon 4 fare on Linux though.

Since I don't know how to properly end blog posts like this, I'm just gonna stick a quick life update.

Tomorrow, June 28th, is going to be my last day at my current job. It's gonna be a bittersweet day for me, that's for sure. But leaving the job I'm currently at is the best thing that I can do right now. Don't wanna get too deep into these types of personal matters but yeah. At least I'll have the entirety of next week off to kick back, relax, go on a short trip or something, and just enjoy life itself.

That's all I have for now. Thanks for reading!

- huu

Yesterday, June 18th 2024, I decided to finally make a big leap, one that I was contemplating for a very long time. I finally swapped from Windows to Linux.

But why? What distro did I end up going with? What's my history with Linux anyway? I want to make this blog post pretty much to talk about why I switched from Windows, how I even got introduced to Linux to begin with, and then discuss the personal hell I've walked through ever since I made the switch.

Truth be told, Linux is something I've had an interest in since 2013. Back when Steam first added support for Linux. Up until that point, I had never heard of Linux. I didn't know what it was, nor how to use it. My friend had invited me over to his house to try to help him set it up, so he could get the Tux item in Team Fortress 2, which was a promotional item distributed for about 2 weeks to players on Linux.

Back then, we managed to figure out how to dual-boot Windows 7 & Ubuntu together, and after an entire day's of effort - we managed to get Ubuntu, Steam & Team Fortress 2 installed. It felt like a herculean effort but we managed it & my friend still has the Tux item in TF2 to commemorate that. I didn't get it though, sadly. One of the biggest things I regret missing out on in TF2 during my time. And the fact Valve never made the item tradable despite promising to really, really irked me to no end, but whatever. It's been 11 years since then, I've made my peace with it.

But that day in 2013 lit a spark that never really faded away. I took a genuine interest in Linux. I was already skeptical of the direction Microsoft was headed towards with Windows even back then. Windows 8 failed to impress with its tablet-esque UI that just sorta ended up driving me away from it all. When Windows 10 was announced & then released in 2015, I tried it out day 1...and hated it. But I'm willing to keel over in the sense that I don't think my issues with Windows 10 were as bad as I mentioned them to be in my original video. I think it was more-so the fact that, unknowingly, my laptop at that time was just dying. You could even see it in some of my other videos too where the graphics chip in it was starting to beg for its life, an example I keep pointing to is this TF2 video I made back in 2015. Just look at the framerate absolutely tanking & the graphics glitching out on a constant basis. I thought it was just one of the many mods that I installed that caused the game to glitch out like that, but I'm way more willing to believe that it was because of the graphics chip being almost literally on fire.

Over the years after, while I continued to stick to Windows, as I have been using it my whole life, my interest in Linux never faded. I was always hesitant to make the switch because I was just afraid of how would I manage doing anything - video editing, gaming, livestreaming - all of that. These were factors that kept me away from ever jumping from Windows to Linux full-time.

The way I evaluated the Linux experience over the years was simple. I just tried it. When I upgraded my PC over the years, my old ones, especially my laptops (fun fact - I full-timed laptops from 2010 to 2016!) were just kinda there sitting around, not really doing much. So, since I wasn't using them anymore, I've used them as my testing beds for Linux.

Most distros I've tried over the years were Debian-based:

• Ubuntu
• Lubuntu
• Linux Mint

These were the three main distros I used to go with. Ubuntu is obvious - it's pretty much everyone's first distro of choice. Lubuntu though, I tried it on an old Pentium M laptop I had, which was the Windows XP laptop I used to use as my main PC from 2010 to 2014. Only reason I ever gave it a shot was because it was advertised as a very lightweight distro for older computers, and considering that Pentium M laptop only ever had 1GB of RAM & Intel 965 GMA graphics, I thought Lubuntu fit the bill on it nicely. And it was! Lubuntu ran pretty nicely on it back in late 2016 until the hard drive in the laptop finally died & refused to boot ever again. I ended up selling the laptop the next year for 5 euros, since it was old & in very, very poor condition.

I have a video of that laptop running Lubuntu on my YouTube channel, but that video was later made private. Mainly because I didn't know what the hell I was talking about, it was filmed on a phone camera & trust me, the laptop really was that disgusting. It's a video I'll never put back up for public view again, but you can at least have the title & thumbnail of it down below. That's about as much publicity I'm ever willing to give that video again.

Yeesh, that description really is....something. Remember back when I used Twitter? I'd say those were the "good old days" or something but I'd definitely be lying.

The point is, I'm no stranger to Linux. I've known about it since early 2013 and have been keeping tabs on it every now and then.

My most recent experiences with Linux were, surprisingly enough, with Linux Mint. It's a distro I've used consistently on my old college laptop that my brother gave me back in 2018 as a present for managing to enroll into college, constantly flip-flopping between Windows 10 & Linux Mint, mainly because Windows 10 on that laptop ran horribly. AMD's driver support for their R5 330 Graphics chipsets are...bad. Just straight up bad & unusable.

Funnily enough, I never dual-booted Windows and Linux on it. I always had one or the other on it. I did have a brief stint using Manjaro Linux on that laptop though, was generally not too happy with how Manjaro worked on the laptop though, but it was cool to try an Arch-based distribution for once, rather than always sticking to Debian.

Just a couple of months ago, I bought a cheap Intel NUC from my workplace during an auction. I managed to snag an old Intel NUC for about 30 Euros. It came with Windows 10, but having only 4 GB of RAM on it, you can just imagine how..."well" Windows runs on it (hint: not great). So I installed ol' reliable Linux Mint on it, and have been using it ever since! Mint did give me some trouble initially, with it not recognizing the external mouse & keyboard combo I plugged into it and constant issues with Wifi where it would kill the Wifi driver outright as a power-saving measure, forcing me to restart the whole computer outright. But I did manage to resolve all of those issues with enough tinkering & messing about, as well as using a variety of tools. Now it's a pretty nifty media consumption device that sees regular use by me, mostly during the night time when I'm trying to fall asleep & I just put on a podcast on.

My experience with Linux Mint was so good that I was considering putting it on my main PC as well, which we now pivot to the next question...

My reasons for switching out of Windows are pretty simple, albeit might be seen as petty by some. I'm just not happy with the direction Microsoft is headed towards with Windows. Again. Same thing I said about Windows 8, now the same thing is being said by me about Windows 11.

But this time, it's more than just because they are trying to turn Windows into a tablet OS or whatever. It's not because of that.

First reason - I'm not a fan of the fact that Microsoft is killing off older hardware with Windows 11's system requirements. This move by Microsoft is the reason why I even got a new PC in 2022 at all, actually. Because the threat of not being able to use Windows anymore past Windows 10 really fucking sucked. And it still sucks, even now.

My old i7-4790k PC can still kick ass. It can still do things. I know this, because I still used it up until recently. Everything I threw at it, it handled everything flawlessly. Be it video encoding, gaming, video editing, even being a damn server - it can hold its own still. Yet Microsoft deems it "too old" for Windows 11, all because of TPM 2.0 not being supported on it.

Listen, I know that there are still ways of getting Windows 11 installed on "unsupported hardware" but that's not my point. My point is that Microsoft is pretty much just forcing people to ditch their perfectly working hardware arbitrarily. The TPM requirement for Windows 11 is very arbitrary and what sucks is that Microsoft doesn't give you an alternative outside of "get a new PC loser".

Second reason - artificial intelligence. I've made a blog post about it here and even reiterate constantly that nothing on this website is AI generated. With all of that, you can probably guess that I'm just not a big fan of AI. I personally think it's a very dangerous tool that has been used, so far, for more harm than it has been used for good.

AI-generated art is an example I love to bring up. What does "making" AI-generated "art" do? It leaves actual artists without a job. AI-generated news articles only serve to destroy trust within the news system because no one is fucking proof-reading or fact-checking anything anymore. Now we have AI-generated voice models, which have already been used for criminal activity to impersonate other people, and even AI-generated videos are now starting to be a thing.

Just...no. I don't like this whole AI shtick, and I really wish they did what NFTs did and just fucked off back into irrelevance but that doesn't seem to be the way the industry is headed. Everything is just becoming more focused on AI.

And Microsoft now incorporating AI into Windows itself is where I draw the line. Especially with that whole presentation where they basically introduced the AI version of built-in Windows spyware called Recall that takes screenshots of your whole PC screen, so their Copilot AI can give you "suggestions" on what you should do next. I think the funniest part to me about this presentation was when they kept reiterating that "none of the screenshots get sent to any server, only ever stored on your PC", like they were desperately trying to calm people down about it being a security risk. And then, turns out - it's a security risk anyway.

Windows 11 24H2 looks to be like it's just going to be a shitshow. And these two reasons were enough to be the straw that broke the camel's back for me. These two reasons are why I finally decided to make the big leap from Windows to Linux.

So, after consulting about with one of my friends who is far more knowledgeable on Linux than I am, what distribution of Linux did I end up going with? Was it Linux Mint like I had planned initially? Maybe Manjaro, so I could be closer to the "cool kids" who use Arch instead?

Nope, neither. I went with Fedora Linux, as recommended to me by one of my Linux-enthusiast friends, as it's supposedly one of the easier Linux distributions to work with, especially for Linux beginners such as myself. Reminder - even if I've dabbled with Linux in the past, I was never proficient with it, only ever doing the basics with it.

Why didn't I go with Linux Mint like I planned? My friend advised me against it, as apparently Linux Mint uses an old kernel. 5.15 LTS as of right now, meanwhile Fedora Linux runs on 6.9, which is far newer and has better support for newer hardware. I was told that this isn't strictly a bad thing, especially for older hardware, and that Linux Mint shouldn't be discounted as a choice because of this. And I agree! Linux Mint is still a great distro that would also probably be the one that I recommend to those looking to take their first steps into the Linux world. But for my purposes, it wasn't going to cut it, sadly.

How has the Linux experience been so far? A little bit...hell-ish, not gonna lie.

A lot of that has to do with my lack of experience in using Linux as a whole beyond the surface level. If you recall, I've been a Windows user my whole life. I'm 25 as I'm writing this, and I started using a computer when I was 3 years old, with Windows 98 being my first ever operating system. It's been well over 2 decades since I've been on Windows for.

The first day I installed Fedora, I told my friend that I didn't really like the UI of it, more resembling macOS than anything I'm used to. So they tried to help me install KDE Plasma, which is a GUI that's a lot more like Windows. Installing KDE wasn't that difficult, a few lines in the Konsole (Terminal) and KDE was installed and I was able to switch to it on login.

Problem, though. I couldn't select it when first booting up my PC. It would just default to GNOME instead and didn't let me switch until I log into Fedora under GNOME, then log out & switch to KDE. So my friend looked around for a script that would, theoretically, just remove GNOME from my PC & leave KDE, and make my computer boot into the KDE Plasma GUI every time.

I ran the script and......deleted both GNOME & KDE. No, seriously, I was stuck with just the terminal upon reboot. My friend gave me a few commands to run to check what GUIs I have installed, ran them, and that's when we found out that the script they found force-uninstalls any desktop GUI in the system. So that was a little bit of a colossal fuck-up, not reading what commands do. But, we were able to reinstall KDE Plasma afterwards & my Fedora was, once again, usable.

The funny thing about that script, though, is that it didn't just uninstall GNOME & KDE Plasma. It also uninstalled a whole bunch of apps. Firefox was gone. Steam was gone. All my media players were gone. So were my image viewers. It even uninstalled my graphics drivers, which I'll talk about a little bit later. So I had to spend a couple of hours reinstalling pretty much my whole system, thankfully none of the user data was touched so it was less of a hassle than I thought.

After that kerfuffle happened, I started downloading some games. Things like osu!(lazer), which now has a native Linux port, Counter-Strike 2 and Team Fortress 2, as well as some Windows-only games to give Proton a shot. The games of choice for that were Sonic Origins, 100% Orange Juice, Apex Legends & NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD.

First, when I tried osu!, I noticed that it ran...somewhat sluggishly. That's when I googled around and discovered that there was a thing called Nouveau, which is an open-source Nvidia driver that's built-in to the Linux kernel that gets loaded as a fallback if it has nothing else to use. So I looked around on how to install the proper Nvidia drivers, got that sorted and...well, osu! is now utterly unplayable. The framerate has improved significantly but it flickers constantly. Not only that, the flickering caused by it also causes other programs in my system, such as Firefox & Discord to be basically unusable unless I disable hardware acceleration, which is just...huh? How did osu! manage to screw everything up so spectacularly?

I wanted to try seeing if osu! would run better on Vulkan over OpenGL, except for the fact that Vulkan literally fails to initialize on my PC, for some reason.

I asked around a few Discord servers and was told to try to do a symbolic link of the 32-bit version of Vulkan or...something like that, I genuinely do not know what this GitHub comment on the osu repo is talking about, I just blindly followed the commands, got a "success" from my system, tried Vulkan again and...got the same error. So it did nothing to resolve my woes.

Currently I'm stuck on what to do about the flickering of osu!(lazer) on my Linux system. Technically it's not unplayable, the frame rate is very good & there are zero input issues, it's just not very pleasant to look at, y'know? Having random elements of the game just flash about as you play? Regarding the Vulkan thing, I did try to look for commands that would essentially try to reinstall all the necessary dependencies for it but no dice. Vulkan still refused to be used on osu!(lazer).

Counter-Strike 2 and Team Fortress 2 (#FixTF2 btw) I have nothing to comment on. Because these games are native on Linux, I haven't had any issues with them at all. Counter-Strike 2 stutters like crazy, but I'm assuming that's just because it's compiling shaders in the background. I'm also not very interested in playing CS2 at the current time anyway so it's not a huge loss for me either way.

Now, Windows-only games...I should mention that I currently, as of writing this, still have 2 NTFS drives mounted onto Fedora. The reason for this? Those are separate drives that I used to use for additional storage in Windows. One is a 640GB hard drive that I pulled out of my original laptop that died in 2015 and continue to use to this very day, the other is a 500GB SSD that I just use for storing games & downloads of all kind.

Why didn't I reformat the drives to EXT4 so they play nicer on Linux? Because they still have data that I would like to not lose. However, losing data is part of the Linux experience I am told. So while I haven't done it yet, I am planning on moving any data I deem important onto an external 2TB hard drive that I have & keep it there, then reformat both drives to EXT4 so I can actually properly use them on Linux as additional storage drives like I intended.

Why do I bring up this NTFS mumbo-jumbo? Because it's been the bane of my existence so far when using Fedora. Every Windows game I've installed - Sonic Origins, 100% Orange Juice, Apex Legends - all of these were initially installed on one of the NTFS drives that I have. They. Just. Would. Not. Launch. AT ALL! So many frustrated hours spent googling, asking around to see if anyone has had the same issue, with no dice. No one knew what my issues were. The most frustrating part as well was that no error logs were being generated anywhere. So there was quite literally nothing to go off of in terms of fixing this!

That was when I decided to try installing NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD onto my EXT4 drive, which is where Fedora is also installed on. I hit "Play" and...it just booted right up. No fuss. Sound works, framerate's perfect, everything works. I then sanity-checked myself again by trying to launch 100% Orange Juice, which is still installed on one of my NTFS drives - no dice, it still doesn't work. I try moving the install folder from the NTFS drive onto my EXT4 drive but that doesn't work. So I uninstalled it completely and reinstalled it onto my EXT4 drive, launched it, and the damn game works with no issues now...

I repeated the same step with Sonic Origins as well, and...it worked. At first I thought it was because I was using Nouveau initially but it didn't work even after I had switched to the Nvidia drivers. Then I thought it was because of Denuvo. You know, the horrible and unnecessary DRM that SEGA tacks onto their games these days? But turns out the issue this whole time was NTFS.

The same thing was even true for Apex Legends. But Apex was a little bit of a more interesting story than the rest. This story begins with the fact that my friend & I both noticed that my two internal SATA drives were being shown as "Removable Media" on Dolphin. My friend then suggested I edit the fstab file & put in entries for both of my drives so that they end up being mounted permanently & I wouldn't need to manually mount them every single boot. The way we mounted my drives was by first figuring out their identifiers, a.k.a. /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1, which are the identifiers for my HDD & SSD respectively. After that, we edited the fstab file by adding these lines into them:

• /dev/sda1 /mnt/toshiba ntfs defaults 0 0
• /dev/sdb1 /mnt/gamessd ntfs defaults 0 0

Reboot the system and voila - both drives were now permanently mounted. "That's that" I thought and proceeded to install Apex Legends onto the SSD, only for the game to not work.

The same symptoms as with the other games - I hit "Play", it would show me as playing the game for a brief moment, before the process in the background terminates and the "Play" button would become active again. I then scooted over to the ProtonDB page for Apex Legends. Saw launch options, tried them, didn't work. Saw that you can use a custom version of Proton called GE-Proton. Installed it - no dice still. I even wrote a frustrated report on the page, which you can still see being up, of me just not being able to run the game at all.

I was bashing my head against the wall, trying to find ANY way of getting Apex Legends to run. My friend then links me to this guide by Valve on mounting NTFS drives on Linux. I thought "what the heck, might as well" and edited my fstab file again, in accordance to Valve's guide, and re-mounted my drives anew.

Once I did that, Apex Legends finally got just a little bit further. Now, it just gets stuck on "Running install script (Easy Anti-Cheat Service (EOS))". I thought that because it's trying to install an anti-cheat dependency, which Linux is known to be not friendly with, it'll just take a while. So I left it be. In fact, I left it overnight! Accidentally, mind you, because I was in the middle of transferring about 210,000 files from my backed up osu! install on Windows onto my Linux install...yeah.

But even when it was left for 6 hours, Apex never got past the Easy Anti-Cheat Service install script. No matter what I did, no matter what I tried, it wouldn't budge.

I threw out a hail-marry into the Apex Legends Steam discussions, and tried to ask for help on Mastodon as well, when a user in the Steam forums suggested that it was because of NTFS. I tried to do what they suggested and reinstalled Apex on my EXT4 drive. And you won't believe it - it actually worked. Apex Legends FINALLY started up.

I've never felt more satisfaction than this moment before. Apex Legends actually booted up on Fedora Linux successfully. I even played a quick solos match, and despite eating complete shit 'cause I'm bad at the game, it ran beautifully. I didn't even run into issues others have reported, such as character models showing up as white or weapon charms not loading. Everything just...worked. Granted, I did have to spend about 4 hours of that time waiting for shaders to compile, but it ran. And I was able to play Apex on Linux!

I'll keep this one brief but I'm also trying to look into these issues as well. If you can help, please reach out, I need help...

• The clipboard
  

I don't understand why is the clipboard on Fedora Linux so...bad. I can copy & paste between the same program no problem. Copying within Firefox & pasting within Firefox works perfectly fine. But when I try to copy from Firefox into Discord as an example, it just doesn't work. It's in my clipboard, yet try as I might - I can't copy or paste between programs, forcing me to write practically everything by hand. When you want to share a YouTube video or something to your friends on Discord, or copy settings into Steam launch options - that's a pretty big annoyance to have!

• Firefox
  

I love Firefox. I've been using it as my main browser since 2011. But my god is it buggy on Fedora. Moving around bookmarks? Yeah, good luck. Trying to accept pop-up prompts on Reddit to grant permissions for RES to, you know, do anything? Nope. It's beyond frustrating how horribly Firefox has been working for me thus far in these niche situations. It works fine otherwise.

• Dolphin
  

I've had Dolphin crash on me on a number of occasions thus far, especially when I plug in my external hard drive to move data to and from it. It LOVES to crash or hang or whatever. It often takes me several attempts to get my drives going & reading properly. Just doesn't work as I expect it to.

I am not giving up on Fedora because of these issues that I've run into though. Nor am I giving up on Linux either because of these. Why? Because funnily enough, this was a lot of fun.

Breaking out of my comfort zone has given me a genuine enjoyment in using my PC again. I was stuck in this endless loop of being utterly bored for the past few months, not being able to really engage myself in anything. Gaming was boring. Social media is boring. Everything was just boring.

But installing Linux? Genuinely been a lot of fun despite my troubles & frustrations with it. I'm eager to continue my journey through this unfamiliar landscape & learn more. Customize Fedora to my liking so that it becomes the perfect operating system for me.

We'll see how I feel about it in a month from now but so far - I'm liking it, despite the annoyances.

Should you switch to Linux? That's hard to say. If you truthfully don't give a shit about what Microsoft is doing, I don't see a reason for you to switch out of Windows. And why would you? On Windows, everything just works. You install a program - it runs. Resources are abundant for Windows too, be it drivers, guides, troubleshooting steps, etc. - all of it is simple and easy.

You should switch to Linux if you're really just into having a more hands-on approach towards everything. As you can probably read from my blog post here, it's been quite an adventure so far, and I'm only 2 days in!

I don't know how to wrap this blog post up, so I'll just say go sign the petition for #FixTF2.

Thanks for reading.
- huu