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.

Your logic is sound.

The motive and skillet are certainly there.

But there sure are many eyes on RedHat’s source code, and IBM has a lot to lose if they got caught putting in a back door.

Plus, the US government uses it for their own sensitive stuff, so one would hope they have the wisdom not to shit where they eat, installing a back door that 100% would get used against them.

None of my arguments really outweigh yours, if I’m honest.

But I also don’t blame anyone who trusts RedHat Linux, today.

We need to find a way to cut the slop problem off at its source, but I have no idea how that could actually work.

Agreed. Stopping giving money to Microsoft seems like a place to start.

Github has gone downhill.

CodeBerg is really nice, has a free tier, and has guided tutorials for migration.

I moved my work out of spite for GitHub’s warmongering parent company.

And then I was pleasantly surprised by how nice CodeBerg is.

+1 to this line on inquiry.

When I’ve managed to get a modern Linux desktop to freeze, I’ve had a bad power supply, or heat issues, each time ( specifically when I have had a full freeze, where even the alternate terminals didn’t respond ).

No, I can’t access another tty during a freeze, unfortunately.

That’s may be a hint!

The only times I’ve had the desktop freeze on Linux and the alternate terminals fail to respond, I had a hardware issue.

In one case, I was on a Raspberry Pi, and my power supply was not delivering clean enough power for the board.

In another case, my fan wasn’t connected properly and the motherboard was overheating.

Edit: Oh! I think I had this behavior once with a RAM stick that was terribly subtly not quite all the way in the slot.

knowing nod

Yes. I used to de-bloat Windows, myself.

The path ahead of you contains power…and freedom.

Like how can it be fun?

So many cool utilities are Linux native first, today.

When I finally switched my work computer to Linux, various little tools I had been using were suddenly trivial to install, instead of maybe an hour each. I had restored my full favorite toolset in less than 30 minutes, and moved on to exploring things that never worked on Windows, for me.

The combined feeling, for me, is like when my father user to hand me $5 to shop at our local 10¢ candy store. “I can just have as much of this as I want.”

Well done! You’re doing important work, letting her chill instead of get scammed. Besides the money loss, many of those phone scams are also traumatizing.

/thread