In Loving Memory

My mother, Bessie, passed away early Tuesday morning, August 6, 2024.  She was 88 years old.

The previous week my brother suggested I come visit, as she had gone into hospice care due to atrial fibrillation, and a pretty constant high pulse.  I arrived on Friday, spent time with her Friday, and Saturday.  Early Sunday morning we received a call from the care center that she had taken a sudden turn for the worse.

It appeared that she had had a stroke.  It didn't help her breathing, which was already labored due to fluid buildup in her chest and abdomen (from the heart arrhythmia) and she began to decline rapidly.  For Monday and even early Tuesday she was aware of us and would nod to answer questions and squeeze our hands.  But later in the day she began to be less and less aware and it really felt like she would probably pass that night.  And she did.

I think the only solace is that she was probably not very aware when it happened.

She will be missed.

Still moving along with 24.04.

 It has been pretty solid, like 23.10.  Ubuntu's implementation of gnome is very nice and wayland is working very well with my 7800XT card.  No complaints at all.

I did, for fun, enable the extension "Burn My Windows" which allows you to enable a variety of special effects upon window creation and destruction.  They are very efficient, being native shaders.  They are pretty cool too.  :D

I watched an interesting KDE6 review the other day.  I feel like I need to experience it, install OpenSUSE or something and try it out, despite how stable Ubuntu has been.  The only problem is I never really LOVED KDE and, while they have actually made some improvements around the decoration aspects that always bothered me, I am hesitant to try it.  The reviewer said "if you didn't like KDE before, you probably won't like it now" despite the improvements.

So anyway...

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

 I had already tried to upgrade from 23.10 to 24.04 about a month ago and ran into several issues (which I promptly forgot about once I reverted to 23.10, so don't ask).  Today I took the plunge and upgraded again.  I figured Ubuntu has had a month to iron out some minor issues.

So the install was relatively quick (I have a pretty good internet connection) and after the install and reboot Ubuntu came up fine.  It DID however break my wine setup, so I had to install a few components to fix it (there will probably be other issues)... it did not honor my dpkg architecture settings which indicates amd64 and i386.  I had to tweak it after the fact, but... after installing a couple extra things I was able to use wine to fire up a non-steam, Windows game.   And in fact I think there must have been some more AMD driver improvements because I swear the game actually ran smoother than on 23.10.

On steam, I fired up the frequently fickle World of Warships and it ran great.

I think it is (at least so far) safe to say the upgrade was successful.  I don't record much, I will have to install OBS and see how that works, and while I am sure it is just fine, I need to fire up some of my development applications.

A difference of one month, in this case, was pretty significant.  I am now rocking a safe, long-term version of Ubuntu.  Oh, and it is running gnome 46 as well, a minor upgrade from 23.10 which ran something like 45.x...

Ubuntu 23.10 and AMD RX 7800 XT and Wayland

I have been avoiding Wayland like the plague, mostly because my previous graphic card was an Nvidia 2060 SUPER...  and I read nightmare stories regarding Nvidia and Wayland.

It was time to upgrade my system (see previous entry) so I purchased an AMD 7800 XT with 16 GB of VRAM.  I was worried about this purchase as well because of the crazy forum back and forth attacks between fanbois ... and NVidia users tend to outnumber AMD users.  I decided to ignore those forums and picked up (based on actual testing by several different groups) the AMD card.  One bonus to that is that Linux tend to work more closely with AMD in regards to drivers (kernel supported).

I expected Ubuntu to self-implode when I swapped out the cards (again, because that's what SO MANY people said on the forums) but...  I installed the card, rebooted, and BOOM.  Came right up.  AND it came up automatically running Wayland.  I then fired up several non-steam games and several steam games and everything worked perfectly.

I have NOT attempted to install the 24.04 LTS yet, I will wait I think until the first point release or so, if I do it at all.  Right now 23.10 has been very very good to me.  No issues.

Anyway, just wanted to update about my old PC running Ubuntu, and with my new GPU.

For your pleasure:

Graphics card upgrade

 I picked up a very nice AMD RX 7800 XT graphics card with 16 GB vram.

Now, I run Ubuntu 23.10 and when I replaced the card, I assumed I would have to reinstall because of all the posts I read online that basically said a lot of bad stuff about the AMD card.

But, put it in, rebooted, Ubuntu came up like normal, except logging into gnome I found I was running Wayland and, to be honest, so far I have found it to be smoother and pretty nice in general.  When I opened Steam back up, it automatically installed some updates, I fired up a couple of games and they worked fine.

So, I am guessing I will stick with wayland and my AMD graphic card for now to see how it goes.

Spring update...

 I am considering purchasing new parts to build a new PC.  I've been on a Mac (M1) and Linux (first gen thread ripper and Nvidia graphics card) for many years now.  One of the reasons I am considering it is simply, Windows 11.  Now, I am not saying I am fond of Windows but, the truth is all my old games were really written FOR windows.   I haven't played Skyrim in years.  I can play a good number of games on Linux thanks to steam and thanks to Glorious Eggroll and his versions of Proton.

On the Mac, I am much more limited.  The M1 architecture is still not being accepted for most gaming companies and while Apple has done some wonderful work with emulation... well... you know.

SO!  I am considering a new build, even though I cannot REALLY afford it.  The current build I have spec'ed out is around 1800.00 USD.  And it will be the first build I've done with an Intel CPU in about a decade.

The other thing is two of the games I DO play on my mac and cannot currently get installed (easily) on my linux box are Star Stable Online and Diablo III.  They would run perfectly on Windows.

Not to mention, thinking Diablo IV might work on the Mac as well, I purchased it early.  But they have no plans on making it compatible with Mac OS or Linux so I am again, stuck with a pricey game I cannot play.  (Hey, I know, that is MY fault, not the game company's fault).

Anyway, that's my update!

I am a butt sometimes...

 I was a total jerk today.  There is a paleontology reporting youtube channel that I actually like a lot.  But I went off on the episode because of certain things said, and they were NOT the fault of the reporter, he was simply going of published papers.

But the part that bugs me is this new trend using statistical analysis to place finds into various clades.  Yes, cladistics.  The trend is to identify measurement points on fossil bones, compile them into this massive database, and run a program to try and sort out how these bones might be related to some other bones.  It really CAN'T take into account the sparse number of fossils, the massive amounts of time, and the chance that over 10s of millions of years animals can "evolve" to be so similar that even their skeletons are nearly identical.

Anyway, google BEN G THOMAS and go to his site and watch his videos, they are good.  Not quite as good as Raptor Chatter's but... better than most.

Dinosaurs are fun.  They were amazing creatures.  It is fun to imagine how they might have behaved.  But we can never actually KNOW things about them, because all we ever get are minute snapshots of a moment in time over 100s of millions of years.  We find a clutch of eggs and assume "oh the parents must have cared for the babies" or "younger predators were faster and more agile than adults so they MUST have hunted in packs, the juveniles driving prey right into the mouths of the adults!"  BZZZZZZT!  Dinosaurs MIGHT have packed around but it was highly unlikely to be a complex behavior like group hunting.  As proof scientists will haul out a fossil site where 20 of the same species died.  Turns out it could have been a million other things other than cooperative packing... it could have been desperation for water, or prey, or even a natural trap of some sort.  We simply can't know these things.

That's why it is FUN to imagine, but don't let imagination drive science.  That came off wrong.  You can use imagination to drive your interest in science, but don't use it to verify facts.