Work and 4 years later...

If you read my blog back in June and July of 2014 you will what I was going through in regards to work.

I had lost a job of 14+ years and then, a miracle, found a job immediately.  I stayed there for about a year but the commute was murder.  I am convinced it would have been the death of me eventually in the form of some blazing wreck.

I then took a Job with the company I am currently with and have been for 4 years.  Unfortunately for me my tech knowledge has waned since the job is more administrative and more about leadership than putting your head down and pounding away at the keyboard.

I miss coding.

I have to say though despite hard times at my current position that it has not been BAD for me.  It has been... different, and not necessarily what I wanted.  Still, the people I work with are great and I do still get to hack away at some python programming from time to time.

I encourage anyone who is seeking a career change to pray about it.  I did before I lost my job in 2014 and God forced my hand as an answer to an ongoing prayer.  Now, it isn't exactly what *I* might have wanted but... it has been good for me.

Pop_OS! and silence

I haven't heard much about Pop in the "news" lately.  But it has been silently updated with some of the latest and greatest versions of software.  It has been very solid for me lately, nary a freeze (knock on wood) and I feel as though somehow the font rendering is even better than it has been.

Anyway, it is a new quarter so I downloaded a bunch of Linux-based distros and stuck them on sticks and booted into them to see how they were.  Prepare yourself for my completely scientific and rigorously methodical analysis of each...

Elementary was flaky for me.  Perhaps an install to hardware would have been better but... it had a couple of minor issues.

Solus seemed pretty solid, but oddly enough I did not find myself attracted to it as I once was.  I guess I will keep an eye on it.

I downloaded a KDE spin of MX Linux.  It ran well but the version of KDE was a good bit behind.  Still, it worked well. 

I downloaded Zorin, it was... uninspiring.

Neon, I like.  It is pretty nice but... there are some restrictions.  I downloaded Bodhi 5 but did not try it yet, and I also downloaded "stretch" and "buster" to try.  Have not gotten to them yet.

That's it for now.

Self promotion

I have a youtube channel where I post up videos of a game our whole family plays, put to music.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSrCwyF4Wzxwb1vAPScL-kqS-l3JooZV_

Tuishimi's Star Stable Youtube Channel

Fedora, Fuel and KaOS

Well you know me by now... can't settle down for anything.  I have been back on Fedora (I have been flipping back and forth between Pop_OS! and Fedora for awhile now) for a couple of weeks.  The terrible GNOME visual eye candy performance drove me crazy and, as I have noted in a previous web log entry, Fedora is vastly superior in that regard.

So I installed and configured Fedora 29, using a grey theme, easy on the eyes (similar to MX Linux greybird theme), got Nvidia going, got PlayOnLinux, Steam and other tools that I like to use up and running.  But... I am always looking at odd new distros.  Today my three choices were Slackware, SolydK and KaOS.

I've run all of these for at least a day at some point in time.  A LONG time ago I ran Slackware on a machine with Gnome 2 or something like that.  But, Slackware is nice, but it is work and I am lazy, but it was nice to see it booted fine off my thumb drive!  Solyd might be a solid distro, but it did not work very well on my hardware.  KaOS...

Well I had tried KaOS over a year ago and thought "this is a nice distro!"  My problem with it then was its come-hell-or-high-water-we-will-only-be-64-bits mantra.  And honestly I get it, the keeper/developer worked HARD to make a gorgeous, usable KDE distro unlike any other.  When I say gorgeous I mean GORGEOUS!  Very nice to look at.  But even better than that... it supports flatpak.  Yes, you can install flatpak on KaOS and (if you are not familiar with flatpak) because of that you can now use any application in the flatpak library.  STEAM is one of those.  In fact in a previous incarnation of Fedora I ran a flatpak version of Steam!  Not only that, Wine 64 runs on KaOS and really, my favorite game runs on 64 bit Wine... so, while I might not have PlayOnLinux to install it on KaOS, I should be able to figure out how to manually install my game through Wine.

This means that if I WANT to switch over to KaOS, nothing is really holding me back.  I need to think about it though as Fedora is a very good Gnome/Gtk based linux distribution.

Ahhh the FUEL part.  Nothing to do with Linux really.  I ordered some gasoline additive that is supposed to raise your octane points over 10!  And I mean 10 Octane as you read it at the pump, not octane points... it raises over 100 of them.

My gas tank is down to about 1/2.  I figure I will use a little more up tomorrow and add this to my tank and fill it with regular unleaded.  That should get me over 95 octane easily.  I am curious to see how my engine tuner responds to that.  I thought about going with 91 octane + the additive but, that seems like overkill++.

Also, I have narrowed down my "hesitation" issue.  It happens usually when accelerating half-heartedly between 40 and 50 miles per hour... I believe the tuner I have on confuses the transmission somehow... so unless I am mashing it or just driving plain-jane style around that speed the engine starts up-down-up-down shifting, or just stops shifting and almost seems to get stuck in neutral.  It is a bizarre thing.

Good night!

I am not much of a mechanic but...

...I do manage to perform some maintenance on my vehicles.  Tonight I replaced the spark plugs in my R59 mini S, and boy the old plugs looked bad.  I got the old ones out easily, put some anti-seize on the new ones and they went right in.  Took the mini around the block for a test drive and, call me crazy but I think the exhaust smelled a lot cleaner.

It will be interesting to see how she performs over the next week.

I am also...  such a dork...  I am also back on Fedora.  Love Pop, but the gnome performance is terribly sketchy.  I can get Nvidia drivers and non-free audio drivers installed on Fedora, AND gnome runs like butter.  So ... here I am.

Other than that, not too much to report.  Gotta go to bed soon.  Have a 6:30 AM meeting in the office tomorrow.   :)

Welllll you know me...

Fedora was fun.  But I am back to Pop.  Could not help it.  It just feels better for some reason.

Different theme for me...  a little bright though.

So any linux users out there who have successfully installed and run Lollypop?  Any tips, because I just wanted to try it but... when I kick it off to scan my music folder it hangs my system.

I don't have to use Lollypop, I can use one of a myriad of music apps but... I had heard good things about it so I wanted to take it out for a spin.

I could try building it from scratch.

Link to Fedora 29 / NVidia driver install guide

https://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2015/fedora-nvidia-guide/

Fedora NVIDIA Guide