Bits & Bobs - Linux Adventures and Switch 2 Launch

I managed to pick up a cold this week, so this week’s newsletter will be a bit thinner than usual this week. Any typos or errors are the result of head congestion.

Desktop Linux Notes

I did some distro research, and I decided to try CachyOS first. It’s based on Arch, the same as the SteamOS, but they recompile software to require the latest CPUs. That awoke something inside my performance obsessed heart.

The install and setup process was really straightforward, with NVIDIA drivers and some of my most commonly used apps working seamlessly on my first boot. I followed the Cachy install guide, which worked for me after a few false starts. I had originally resized the partition on my SSD using the Disk Manager in Windows, but the Cachy installer didn’t like that. Once I restored its original configuration and let the Linux installer handle resizing it worked fine.

Before I committed drive space to installing Cachy, I tried it out for the better part of a day using the live install USB image. Most Linux distros provide something similar now, which lets you take the OS for a test drive before you commit SSD space to it. Instead of building a dedicated bootable installer, the Cachy installer is a bootable version of the OS with an installer app that you can run when you’re ready to commit. The installer will help you format or repartition your drive, walks you through your configuration options, and copies everything over to the appropriate partitions.

A note on dual-booting: In order to boot multiple OSes on the same device, you need software that sits between your OS and your UEFI that will let you I decided to use rEFInd, which is a boot manager that sits between your UEFI (what you probably think of as your BIOS) and your operating systems. I put it on its own partition and set my motherboard’s UEFI to boot to the rEFInd partition. When I rebooted my PC, rEFInd detected my Linux and Windows installs and presented me with a slick graphical UI to choose the OS I wanted to boot into. Each subsequent boot goes into the OS that I used last, although I’m sure that’s a configurable option somewhere in the config files.

Once I had the OS installed, I installed flatpak, using the instructions at Flathub. Different distros package applications in different ways, and your favorite services that distribute Linux versions of their applications—like Dropbox, Notion, and Slack—may not provide their software in your distros preferred format or repositories. This is where flatpak and Flathub shine. They provide a cross distro way to distribute software that handles installation and updating across multiple distros.

Once flatpak was installed, I was able to download and install almost all of the software I use on the regular, including Audacity, OBS, Notion, Slack, Discord, Dropbox, and a bunch more stuff that I’m forgetting.. Up next is getting my video and photo editing software working, and setting up a backup process to save everything to my NAS.

More updates soon.

Switch 2 Thoughts

It’s lovely to pick up a piece of hardware that’s barely been touched by the enshittification hammer. Products cost money not attention, I’ve only spotted one dark pattern (it’s difficult to figure out how to download the free-to-subscribers updates to the Zelda games), and they seemed to have a whole lot of hardware available for sale. So far, it’s the smoothest console launch in years.

We discussed first impressions at length on this week’s Techpod (posting tomorrow), but the TLDR is that they made another Switch and it’s good. I’ve been playing a few older games at a smooth 60fps—Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, and Super Mario 3D World mostly—as well as Mario Kart World, but my favorite part of the launch lineup is the Switch 2 Welcome Tour.

It’s hits me exactly in my nerdiest parts, with surprisingly detailed motion graphics and demos showing how the new (and old) stuff in the console actually works. It’s unfortunate that it costs $10, because it’s packed with the kind of tech demos and cool facts that makes me feel good about spending money on the hardware and gives players a ton of material to evangelize the console.

Hopefully I’ll be back for a regular newsletter next week, but in the meantime please keep sending in your favorite Stream Deck tips and tricks. I’m collecting them for a future newsletter, and you all have sent me some really clever stuff so far. It’s changing the way I think about my Stream Decks, and I already think about them quite a bit.