Please stay to the end because it’s important, and it’s going to be a horrible bait and switch but it’s not INTENDED that way. I can’t think of another way to present the difficult combination of interests that seem to be driving MS software lately.

I actually quite like Windows 11, and I love Edge when they’re doing their core functions. Windows 11 is reasonably solid and useful for normal use. Edge is faster than Chrome and has the best vertical tabs implementation on the planet. Much of the baseline software that Microsoft is putting out has never been better, and is often really good at doing the basic things software should do. I really do feel like the genuine technology people in Microsoft are trying, and often succeeding, to make good technology products.

But… the bottom-feeder marketing drones and MBAs got their hands on them and started layering creepier and creepier nonsense over the top. Mandatory logins to glorified data collection engines. Monetization strategies masquerading as features. Overt advertisement. Heavy-handed promotion of Microsoft’s own products. I finally stopped using Edge (on Linux!) when I discovered that just looking at the settings the wrong way would re-enable every intrusive setting imaginable and ditched Windows entirely when I saw the same things creeping into the OS (as well as a general disgust with privately-owned OSes in general). They are destroying trust.

In the great irony of my life, because normally work PC Windows installs have been hot garbage, I have Win11 on a work laptop and it’s actually really great to use since all of the intrusive stuff is turned off by our security team. I would still prefer linux or macos (in that order), but as a “forced to use it” option, it’s not bad at all. Go back and read that again: it’s a pleasant and easy to use OS if all the intrusive marketing functionality is turned off because it presents a security hazard.

PS. Not sacrificing anything being predominantly linux-based and am in fact far, far more efficient on linux (and I am not a programmer or in any other technology role).

Endeavour is an Arch flavor that has a bunch of ease of use features, like a simple® installer.

It’s a fair warning, but on my M2 MBA the only things that don’t work are the microphone and some elements of graphics acceleration. I keep macos on a tiny partition for firmware updates and, I guess, to recover in the event of a catastrophic failure, but … it’s been rock solid. Most of the software I use has compatible builds, which might be the most surprising part.

I am similarly cis gender, straight male (much to my more fluid spouse’s amusement and dismay). I’ve just found the fem- voice actors to be better. Femshep, the female lead in Ghost Recon Wildlands, etc. Or maybe it’s that the brah actors for the male characters sound so consistently dumb. And now it’s just a thing I do.

PS. I hope you love yourself.

11 months later …

NixOS looks interesting whoosh sucked into a warp

NixOS on an M2 Air here. Works fine, other than the fingerprint reader.

The 2016-2017 MBP are unusually bad. Devices on either side of that? You’re fine. But the 2016-2017 devices? No wifi (except in some extremely unusual cases) is the big problem. Even then, it amazes me how much does work, with zero configuration, with a simple graphical install. The problem with this vintage MBP isn’t that it’s hard to get running–it’s that it’s (almost) impossible, but the parts that aren’t impossible are as smooth as they can be.

Yes, that’s cold comfort. But I’m speaking from the POV of an owner of a 2017 MBP who desperately wanted to keep it going.

The coda to the story is that my wife used it for a while with her business but it fell victim to an absolutely bizarre heat issue where the heat sink vents hot air directly across the controller cable for the display, leading to inevitable failure. Again: not an issue on either side of this model year. It’s sad because it could’ve served for another 4-5 years, making the initial purchase price substantially more tolerable.

And that’s without counting the roll-your-own variants. uBlue has been a remarkable project.

Apple IIc > Windows 3.1 > Windows 95 > Windows 98 > Windows XP > Brief experiment with Ubuntu in the REALLY purple and brown era > OS X > Elementary > Fedora > Endeavour > Fedora > Silverblue > ublue > NixOS

(not counting numerous VMs with everything from Debian to Linux From Scratch)

I’m on a refurb M2 Air that I picked up from Apple for peanuts. It took me about 15m to get NixOS running on the thing, and it’s going to last me for 10 years, if my old MBP is anything to go by.

Also, regardless of the hardware politics, I’m not sure I’ve been in awe of a project as much as I have the Asahi team. They’re just doing so much so quickly and with such command of the subject … and they’re so young. It’s a joy to watch them work.

Let’s see.

Bearnaise
Bechamel
Apple
Pesto
Ketchup
Sweet BBQ
Chimichurri
Gravy
Panang
Romesco
Tabasco
Mustard BBQ
Vinegar BBQ
Mustard
Mole
Garum

The scale admittedly ramps up exponentially at the end there.

I’m still saucy (in magnitude, bechamel not mole) that the version numbering is yy.n (24.2) and not yy.nn (24.02). The actual versioning combines the “was there a version .1?” problem with a sorting issue if there’s both 24.2 and 24.10.

I never sorted out what the answer was but I’m almost certain it was a gnome issue, possibly a conflict. I did manage to completely hose my system through troubleshooting, but, hey, I just grabbed an earlier version of my nix config, typed one command, and was back up and running in an earlier state. NixOS is weird and troublesome to learn but goodness it’s useful.

I have been entertaining myself by reading this post out loud. It sounds like I’m having a stroke over and over.

It’s a great suggestion (even kidding – though Doc Brown asking about the strength of gravity in the future crossed my mind), but that’s exactly why I don’t think it’s a hardware issue. It’s going to end up being some weird kernel/gnome conflict triggered by one specific flatpak.

Yeah, I will definitely try another live iso. The ONLY possible lead I have is that in btop there’s a .gnome-session entry that pops to the top of the list when the pause happens, but (a) the peak displayed CPU usage is like 10%, and (b) I can’t figure out what it is. So I’m going to try both a KDE session and maybe a new user just to see if there might be something config-related. Though, again, I didn’t change anything in my nix config.

Part of my issue is that I’m not even sure how to describe what’s happening to search to see if it’s a known issue in recent kernels, gnome, etc. I keep descending into insane metaphors, like “it’s sort of like when the cat is about to throw up a hairball and everything pauses while the horror unfolds in front of you.”

I haven’t updated firmware. And because I’m just going to be That Guy this week, I had done a garbage collection cleanup the day before this nonsense started.

Integrated laptop keyboard (so I assume USB under the hood?)

LOL.

Or, rather, LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

The repeating is a symptom, and the system pause/stutter/whatever is still happening regardless. I thought about it just as a sanity play, but I’d rather fix the underlying issue.