For work I've found that Microsoft Teams no longer works on Debian + Firefox. My workaround is a dedicated VM running debian with Chrome installed (and nothing else). We'll see how long that works.

You have time on your side. You can afford to make a few mistakes.

And wear sunscreen (can't believe that song is >25 years old now)

OK @max, @thorbot, I didn't know about this. I'd written off all VR in protest against corporate overreach. Time to do some more investigation...

I love spaceship games (think Elite: Dangerous and the like), and motorsport games. Anything where you're set in a cockpit is a perfect candidate for VR. All I wanted was a headset that would act analagous to a dumb monitor - simply provide vision and audio and head tracking (with "simply" being a relative term - the challenges overcome and technology produced to date is, admittedly, amazing).

But no. What we have are a bunch of privacy-invading face huggers. I shouldn't need to sign in to anything to use a piece of hardware that should require zero internet access (which is why anything Razer is also on my do not buy list).

So am I concerned about the Apple Vision Pro? Couldn't give a shit to be honest. I'm not their customer.

(begging forgiveness, I haven't read the comments yet).

Regarding backups - I started with using Ubuntu and its Backup application. This application is a front end for a command line package called Duplicity. One of the things that annoyed me about the backup app was that I couldn't work out how to reschedule the scheduled backup.

Taking control of my own backup setup was the answer. Learn about bash scripting so you can create a short bit of code to handle your backups. Read up a little on duplicity, read up a little on mounting remote file shares, read up a little on setting up an ssh key for encrypting your backup.

This may be an heretical thing to say but I found ChatGPT quite useful in answering these questions (as always with anything you get from an LLM, double check it's answers against reliable sources).

for me that's enough of an inconvenience to wash my hands of the whole dual-booting scenario.

Damn you! Angry upvote.

Started with Ubuntu (but this was about 10 years ago). Tried out a few different distros - Mint, mostly. I've eventually settled on Debian. I don't got time for shit to randomly break with high frequency (/s). I don't really have a good reason for why I picked Debian. The best I can think of is that I considered that since so many other distros are derived from Debian, I may as well got to the source.

With my laptop, the biggest issue I have is it doesn't come back from suspend reliably. Other than that it's fully functional. I don't even think I've had an update break anything. The only reason I've reinstalled is because I broke it myself (like a few months ago when i was trying to install a C++ depencency so I could play dwarf fortress).

Wine and Proton are covering my gaming and Windows application needs. KVM with a (legit) Windows VM is also there to cover the increasingly rare circumstances where I need a proper Windows OS.

No brainer. Restart at 6 years old. Time is priceless.

Angry upvote. I've been holding onto the interpretation that Santa was an asshole for knowing nasty shit was going down under his nose, but not doing anything about it until there was something in it for him.

So I'd like to add to the chorus of those who appreciate this wholesome take.

(Santa's still a cunt though 😜 )