Also if they want malware infections through notepad.exe - I can probably accomplish that on Linux with Wine, but it would take more effort.

Edit: I might give up and just send the Malware author a few bucks, out of pity.

Yes. Great point. I do try to give each game a test run before I schedule a group of friends to play it together. I guess I did that on Windows, as well.

When I was a big windows gamer the result tended to just be it works or it doesn’t, on my current hardware. But maybe that’s just gaming today. I think we have better optimization options, in general, now.

I’m not sure when things changed, as my journey was Windows PC Gamer to console gamer to SteamDeck to Linux PC gamer.

I think PC gaming, in general, got much nicer while I was only playing consoles.

I was gonna partition my gaming PC’s main drive and try Linux Mint on it.

Nice!

If you can afford it, I lately recommend getting a separate harddrive, and physically taking the Windows drive out, and putting a blank drive in, to run Linux on.

Windows has never liked to share, and has gotten worse (more aggressive preventing other operating systems from booting) with various integrations into BIOS for secure boot.

Also, either way, be sure to back everything up while Windows is still installed. It is much easier to lose data today, due to secure boot and full disk encryption being the default.

(Putting the Windows drive back in and resetting any BIOS settings should be enough, but it is possible that Windows will decide it wants the full disk encryption (FDE) password. I believe I have found my FDE password on the web through Microsoft account, but there’s just more that can go wrong, today. So I prefer to just have my files backed up so I can relax.)

(And be aware that it may not be possible to backup files directly from a removed Windows drive, if full disk encryption was enabled. There’s probably a utility for it, as long as you have the FDE password. But again, it’s much less effort to just make backups before pulling the Windows drive out.)

I’ve had the best experience booting to a fresh blank harddrive and installing Linux Mint on it, and throwing the Windows drive into a drawer until I find I want the extra drive space more than I want a retreat path to Windows.

It produces code that looks more like final code, but adds a lot of subtle unexpected issues on the way.

That is an excellent summary of the challenge. The code looks high quality sooner in the debug lifecycle, which actually makes debugging a little bit slower, at least with our current tools.

Yes.

And alternately, nothing interesting at all happens, and the AI just has one of it’s frequent hallucinations, and I’m fired.

There’s a special level of sociopathy happening to put today’s AI in charge of anyone’s livelihood.

My oldish Nvidia 4xxx GPU worked immediately and automatically on Linux Mint.

Your mileage may vary.

Edit: To be clear, I didn’t do any command line, or even change a setting. Mint just automatically detected my Nvidia GPU and got it working during the install while I looked at pretty pictures and new user tips.

(Disclaimer: Folks here have warned me this may have been some combination of luck and my Nvidia GPU being a few years old.)

When my Mint install finished, I searched for “Steam” in the Mint software center and clicked “Install”.

A few minutes later I was playing a game from my Steam library without any issues, without any config changes, and without any command line use.

Edit 2: On Linux, there’s a little Penguin icon in the Steam library filters. Click that, and it’ll only show your games that Valve is pretty confident will run without any issue.

It took me a few clicks to realize it did anything, at all. Very few of my games were filtered out. None of my games that were filtered out happened to fit in the first page of search results.

So at first it looked like penguin filter button did nothing.

90-99% of the solutions originally for Ubuntu worked for me in Pop.

Yes. When I’m running Debian, Mint, or various other Debian variants, the vast majority of “Ubuntu” recipes just work.

Sometimes on Debian, itself, an Ubuntu recipe doesn’t work because some feature hasn’t made it into “Debian stable” yet. But usually it’s fine if the Ubuntu article is at least a year old.

Want to test if a game runs on Linux? Great, set aside a couple of hours beforehand: first to install steam and set it up, then to figure out Proton, then to troubleshoot the game not even booting up, then to fix any glitches or whatnot, then to get your controller working.

Alternately, install Linux Mint. Search the software store for Steam. Click Install. Let Steam do it’s first run install stuff. Sign into Steam. Click the little Penguin icon to see which games should run fine on Linux. Install some by clicking on them. Enjoy games.

Code reviewing should be filtering out bad code whether it originates from an AI or a human.

But studies are showing it doesn’t work.

A human makes a mental model of the entire system, does some testing, and submits code that works, passes tests, and fits their unstanding of what is need.

A present day AI makes an educated guess which existing source code snippets best match the request, does some testing, and submits code that it judges is most likely to pass code review.

And yes, plenty of human coders fall into the second bracket, as well.

But AI is very good at writing code that looks right. Code review is a good and necessary tool, but the data tells us code review isn’t solving the problem of bugs introduced by AI generated code.

I don’t have an answer, but “just use code review” probably isn’t it. In my opinion, “never use AI code assist” also isn’t the answer. There’s just more to learn about it, and we should proceed with drastically more caution.

Also consider opening up your PC and physically unplugging the Windows drive, at least until you get your Pop! install sorted.

I just want to highlight this for OP, this is great advice.

It accomplishes two things:

1. It keeps the Windows drive from being accidentally changed.
2. It helps the motherboard decide to boot into Linux.

And of course, if OP needs to focus on booting back into Linux, the opposite also applies - removing the POP_OS drive can help the motherboard decide to boot back to Windows.

There’s ways to use BIOS to tell the motherboard which drive to boot to, but doing that doesn’t also protect the drive from changes. So I like to remove the drive I am not changing at the moment.

Here’s some videos:

https://youtu.be/-Qkn5uZUiJg https://youtu.be/6Puffq24nl8 https://youtu.be/_IPqfCy8Uew

And tips for OP from my own experience:

• I have not seen a heat sink of top of an SSD before. There’s a good chance OPs computer doesn’t have one, and that’s fine.
• The SSD might be any length between about an inch to about four inches. There’s usually multiple spots where the clip that holds it in could be installed, but OP shouldn’t need to move the clip.
• Those plastic clips can look very different, and may or may not need to be fully removed to get the drive out. I just fiddle gently with them until I can get them out of the way, or back. I usually end up accidentally removing them, but they go back in.

In case ops needs more videos, the search terms I used were “Remove NVME SSD”.

Good for you taking a break.

Here’s a few things I think you should know:

• You’re doing well, in your responses! This stuff is just hard to communicate about. You are succeeding in sharing information and asking questions. Keep it up.
• Everything I have seen in this thread indicates your computer can be fixed. I have broken mine worse more than once, and brought it back.
• Most of us have been in your shoes, with the same amount of fear, confusion and helpless feelings. So…uh…welcome to our little club. We get together sometimes and hang out (mostly virtually, admittedly).
• This sucks right now, but makes a hell of a story later.
• Everyone I know who is now way smarter than me, has a story like the one you’re having now. We learn by trying things. Sometimes we regret it for a few days.
• You can get through this. Breathe, take your time, and keep reaching out for help.
• None of us can pay back the folks who pulled our ass out of the fire when we were in your shoes, but we can keep helping you.

I love the phrase “ricing my daily Debian driver”.

I do often have this feeling “everyone could be enjoying this”.

Once in awhile it comes out when someone asks me about how I countered some Microsoft or Apple bullshit, and I admit I jumped ship and have been enjoying software freedom.

A few have actually switched after interrogating me about my experiences.

I’m also biased, because I was using Ubuntu since it came out, up until a few years ago 🤷‍♂️

Yes. Same here. I’ll complain about pain points in Gnome all day, but I owe the various gnome contributors many thanks. Gnome has been a more than good enough daily driver for me plenty of times.

If you have the luxury of access to multiple computers, or the expertise to dual boot, those are what worked for me.

I ran Linux and Windows side by side for years.

Over time, returning to the Windows shifted from “Ah, nice and familiar” to “oh, not this bullshit, again”.

Once I was comfortable with both, all the corporate bullshit became very noticable on Windows.

Well done. I read that in Ron Howard’s voice.

Does Vim have any live markdown preview or plugins that enable that?

Yes. I recognize some of the ones mentioned in this article as ones I have appreciated, in the past.

https://www.w3tutorials.net/blog/is-there-a-vim-plugin-for-previewing-markdown-files/

If it does that would be quite interesting

Oh yeah!

I’m not actually trying to get you to switch, but your post reads to me as someone ready to bring in some serious tooling to achieve a precise workflow.

Vim still might be a bit extreme, haha. As you know, it has a whole learning curve. If you decide to give it a spin, be sure to try :vimtutor, it is nice.

Anyway, setting aside vim, it sounds to me like your needs call for an editor with a strong open plugin ecosystem.

I understand that Emacs and VSCodium also have excellent Markdown plugins.

LoL.

I’m just sharing what I use. I can’t help that I was indoctrinated so young into the cult of Vim.

I don’t think Vim has a way to show all my notes in one place, or any way to organise notes? (unless it does, you never know)

Many use the “Nerd Tree” plugin for this, but there’s…too many options.

I want to explore other options before I fall into the rabbit hole

I respect that. The rabbit hole goes very deep. In your shoes, I might still take a look at an editor with a strong plugin ecosystem, like Emacs or VSCodium. Is Atom still around? Atom was nice.

You have very specific requirements. You may attract the Vim and Emacs fans…

Joking aside, I have very specific requirements, and I just use Vim to edit Markdown, on desktop.

So of course anyone decent boycotts JP Morgan Chase.

Yea. I do.

Haha. Of course, I also boycott mobsters, murderers and carjackers to the best of my ability, out of the same instinct for self preservation.

I hope folks are wising up about the dangers of getting involved with Chase.