Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss

It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.

Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.

One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.

And more fun, lots of laptops have really goofy routing. I’ve got one where the DP alt mode on the USB-C ports are on the dGPU, but the HDMI ports are on the iGPU. And the internal panel is on the iGPU unless you switch it to be on the dGPU because yay mux.

Why? I don’t know. Too much meth while laying the board out or something I guess.

Everything is temporary, except for that 25 year old system that’s keeping everything running and can’t be replaced because nobody knows how or why it works just that if you touch it everything falls over.

You keep cloning and configuring shit on a Win10 instance because you can’t find the key?

That’s silly and you should just stop doing that: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

There you go! One less problem to deal with.

completely disable Windows Update

Since this is a work thing, I’d maybe check with whomever is in charge of your shit that you’re not violating any compliance shit by turning updates off.

If you’re not, cool, then whatever, but compliance bullshit is awful and sucks and it’s better if you’re not the reason you fail an audit.

Edit: for the OP, not you.

Question: how is LinkedIn useful to you?

For me it’s just a non-stop swarm of recruiters from India who want me to kindly listen to their offer of a job that pays less than I’d make picking up garbage, utter sociopaths dredging up some psychotic hustle culture nonsense, and previous people I’ve worked with/for asking for favors, which of course means free.

Is it somehow more useful for an actual business?

I wouldn’t argue with the dude; he’s got a clear case of bad-faith-itis. What you did was bad, so you shouldn’t have done it, but no I won’t tell you how to fix it.

The absolute best you could have done is cross-posted to a Mastodon/Bluesky/whatever account as well, but you can’t just always go around yanking the rug out underneath communities especially if you’re in a position where it’s not just lazy shitposting and worthless commentary.

…that said, you have moved anything you can to being posted somewhere in tandem riiiiiiight?

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One thing I ran into, though it was a while ago, was that disk caching being on would trash performance for writes on removable media for me.

The issue ended up being that the kernel would keep flushing the cache to disk, and while it was doing that none of your transfers are happening. So, it’d end up doubling or more the copy time because the write cache wasn’t actually helping removable drives.

It might be worth remounting without any caching, if it’s on, and seeing if that fixes the mess.

But, as I said, this has been a few years, so that may no longer be actively the case.

Stuttering and texture pop-in makes me immediately wonder if your SSD shit itself.

Maybe see if there’s anything in the system logs and/or SMART data that indicates that might be a problem?

I think the thing a LOT of people forget is that the majority of steam users aren’t hardcore do-nothing-but-gaming-on-their-pc types.

If you do things that aren’t gaming, your linux experience is still going to be mixed and maybe not good enough to justify the switch: wine is good, and most things have alternatives, but not every windows app runs, and not every app alternative is good enough.

Windows is going to be sticky for a lot longer because of things other than games for a lot of people.

It is mostly professional/office use where this make sense. I’ve implemented this (well, a similar thing that does the same thing) for clients that want versioning and compliance.

I’ve worked with/for a lot of places that keep everything because disks are cheap enough that they’ve decided it’s better to have a copy of every git version than not have one and need it some day.

Or places that have compliance reasons to have to keep copies of every email, document, spreadsheet, picture and so on. You’ll almost never touch “old” data, but you have to hold on to it for a decade somewhere.

It’s basically cold storage that can immediately pull the data into a fast cache if/when someone needs the older data, but otherwise it just sits there forever on a slow drive.

…depends what your use pattern is, but I doubt you’d enjoy it.

The problem is the cached data will be fast, but the uncached will, well, be on a hard drive.

If you have enough cached space to keep your OS and your used data on it, it’s great, but if you have enough disk space to keep your OS and used data on it, why are you doing this in the first place?

If you don’t have enough cache drive to keep your commonly used data on it, then it’s going to absolutely perform worse than just buying another SSD.

So I guess if this is ‘I keep my whole steam library installed, but only play 3 games at a time’ kinda usecase, it’ll probably work fine.

For everything else, eh, I probably wouldn’t.

Edit: a good usecase for this is more the ‘I have 800TB of data, but 99% of it is historical and the daily working set of it is just a couple hundred gigs’ on a NAS type thing.

I’ll admit to having no opinion on windowing systems.

If the distro ships with X, I use X, and if it ships with Wayland, I use Wayland.

I’d honestly probably not be able tell you which systems I’ve been using use one or the other, and that’s a good thing: if you can’t tell, then it probably doesn’t matter anymore.

One thing you probably need to figure out first: how are the dgpu and igpu connected to each other, and then which ports are connected to which gpu.

Everyone does funky shit with this, and you’ll sometimes have dgpus that require the igpu to do anything, or cases where the internal panel is only hooked up to the igpu (or only the dgpu), and the hdmi and display port and so on can be any damn thing.

So uh, before you get too deep in planning what gets which gpu, you probably need to see if the outputs you need support what you want to do.

If you don’t read the man pages, we’re going to ban you from the chat.

Better performance, but only for gay games, such as uh, well uh and um…

generally replaced by systemd’s journald service

Basically this, and quite a long time ago. Anything even remotely modern (and by that I mean like, the last decade or so) is either using systemd, or in the case of debuntu, rsyslog.

Wonder what kind of funky environment is using syslog-ng, and to what scale so that there’s literally a ‘syslog-ng engineer’ job posting.

Yep, and there’s a shocking number of them to pick from: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/qemu-cpu-models.html