I know you probably mean one of those serving-sized cereal boxes, but the mental image of you pulling out a family-sized box of cereal from some portal-to-Narnia pocket in your pants is fucking hilarious to me.

I need to try that. Thanks for the tip!

Mine have a setting to disable the light outside of initial startup so thankfully I’m safe here.

LEDs on electronics need either a maximum brightness or an adjustable brightness. I have taken to covering the LEDs on charger bricks with Sharpie/tape (often multiple layers of tape) to dampen the brightness because I cannot function with these damn things at night.

I personally use Matrix. I haven’t gotten very far into using it but it does have groups, text, calls, and encrypted messaging so I’d say check it out.

Yeah, I got mine for 98 cents a can. Highest price I’ve seen is like two bucks.

Element. It’s a popular client for Matrix, which is a federated messaging platform (similar to lemmy and mastodon) with different instances.

Honestly, I’d like to see this version. This might explain better why the machines using humans for their own benefit is such a bad thing since, presumably, using humans as CPUs would take up brain power that we could use to build a better society or something.

I celebrate Christmas (not as festive as some people but still) but I generally am apathetic to Christmas music at best. That being said, Carol of the Bells by Transiberian Orchestra still kicks ass and I would say it is the one Christmas song that I would actively and willingly listen to.

I had a slightly screwed up Fedora install due to being a noob with an NVIDIA 1060 and little clue on their drivers. I hooked my laptop up to an old TV (720p if that tells you how old it is lol) and… my entire desktop got absolutely screwed up. Everything was stuck in 4:3 resolution for some reason and my icons got bloated (for lack of a better term). I tried to fix it but IIRC, it just got worse and I had to reinstall.

I’m not sure which programs you’re using so hopefully something here can help but here’s some stuff I’ve read/done:

• For MS Office, I believe you can just use it in your web browser or use LibreOffice as an alternative.
• If you use anything Adobe-based, you’ll probably have to keep a Windows partition around or find an alternative. I haven’t seen anything for running Adobe in WINE or WINE-based tools and I’m not sure if Adobe functions in a virtual machine or not.
• Most gaming-related issues can be dealt with via Proton (Steam’s compatibility tool). I’ve successfully gotten just about every game I play to run in Proton, with the only issues being EA’s launcher (the game still launches though).

If you have any specific programs that you have questions about, feel free to ask. Hope this helps!

Found my hobby

I’ve been using Mint for a few months now after initially trying Fedora and Kubuntu. Mint has been by far my favorite experience and I’ve even gotten a few people converted to Linux via Mint. Definitely my recommendation for any Linux newbies.

As someone who switched to Linux primarily because of Windows 11’s never ending BS (bugs, resource mismanagement, etc) and the inevitably end of Windows 10, I can confirm that Windows 10 will be my last.

I initially switched because I heard about Windows planning to drop support for Windows 10 and I knew that Windows 11 was slow as hell so I jumped ship. I stayed because I really like the customizability and all the options Linux affords me as well as being able to just… switch distros if one company does something I don’t like. Being able to update when I want to is also amazing.

I’ll see if any of these steps work. Thanks for all of the possible troubleshooting steps! I’ll update you on the results.

Thanks for the really detailed explanation! This is a really nice overview for me.

I’ll try again to run the game on Steam on a few versions of Proton. If that doesn’t work, I might try relinking my accounts as another commenter suggested.

I’ve been trying to stick with Steam because Steam has been such a pleasant experience for me (besides some issues with NVIDIA but that’s not Steam’s fault) but I might have to take a look at Lutris if none of the other fixes work. Thanks for the recommendation, though!

I looked through these yesterday and I’ve tried several of these fixes with no luck. Is WINE a prerequisite to running The Sims 4 off of Steam (given that I’m using Proton for all Steam games)?

I have an NVIDIA 1060 and it is such a pain in the ass to deal with. The number of random problems I’ve had with it has put me off from ever buying a computer with NVIDIA hardware ever again. Save yourself the constant walking on eggshells and get AMD.