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A new PC

2021-04-13

Here comes another pointless ramble.

Over the last year Jena and I have been collecting parts to build a couple of cool gaming PCs.

Naturally, we picked the worst time in history to try to do such a thing. Processors and GPUs are in short supply, largely due to a bunch of cryptomining losers who are trying to make an easy buck.

We ended up getting some pretty basic video cards, but our processors are fairly beefy Ryzens, so games at least run...if not at the speed and clarity that we were targetting.

The big question, now, is what to do (for myself) software-wise.

Windows is a stinking dumpster fire, and anyone who says otherwise is _wrong_. It is so backward and hacky. Using Windows 10 is in so many ways the same experience as using Windows 95. And no, that was not some heydey of magical computing. It was good for the time, but it was also 26 years ago!

Linux used to be my go-to but it has, it its own way, become less impressive over the years. It's not fun, anymore.

I'd love an alternative. Haiku looks amazing. Of course, I love my 9front, the various BSDs are always there.

But this is, after all, intended to be a gaming PC, so realitically my options are Windows or Linux (with SteamPlay), and in that equation, there is one clear winner.

For a long time, Debian was my distro of choice. Stable, easy to use, predictable. But they were so quick to jump on the systemd wagon, and at the time I was working on a project that ended up pitting me against some systemd issues that were dismissed by Poettering in a mailing list post. Couple that with random freezes during boot on a laptop that worked fine previously, and it soured me pretty completely on the whole systemd thing.

So, Debian is dead to me, but fortunately a very capable replacement has appeared in the form of Void Linux. Its tool xbps is very reminiscent of dpkg, so there's not too much to learn there, and they are blissfully free of the systemd cancer.

So, the main OS will be Void Linux, but for those windows-only hairballs that I just can't dodge, I'll have a dual-boot situation so I can pop into windows whene I really have to. It's sort of like insurance. I hope I'll never have to use it, and I'm sure I'll get screwed whenever I do. But since Microsoft is still what most hardware manufacturers target first, I may still end up there now and then.