Here I'll post some of my progress turning myself into a Linux user.

I am staying on Windows 10 on my main machine for the purposes of university and playing Valorant, I'm most certainly a noob at this stuff.

In fact, my story of gaming and computers starts on the original XboX back in the day. I had access to an N64 my sister shared with me, but I personally only got into games on my Xbox. I stayed loyal to the Xbox up until the Xbox One, which is when I began to lose interest. In high school I only ever had weak laptops and would play pirated versions of Minecraft or free-to-play games like Runescape and early War Thunder which weren't too demanding of the computers. But in the big pandemic I got back into PC gaming for real. I bought a used desktop and upgraded it along my journey. Started with a GeForce GT770 and now I have a GTX3060.

Now I'm feeling a pull to de-centralized and user-driven experience. Linux is sounding more and more appealing than selling my soul to big corpo tech. It's time we all learned some tech, I think. I wanna build SBCs and gaming devices, so I'm learning more and more, even just building this website has given me a lot more confidence in working the terminal in Linux

Images to peruse

The HP laptop I got when I was working as a teacher. I worked there for just under two years and had to torture myself through using this laptop as a tool for my students. It was abysmal. No surprise as it's running, what, 6gb or whatever of RAM, and less than 200gb of actual storage? With a little searching I found Ultramarine and gave it a go.

This HP was actually BIOS-locked because of the school's IT office services. So I was fairly certain that it wasn't going to simply install. This is where I was wrong, the HP Probook installed Linux with absolutely zero issues.

So now we have one laptop running Ultramarine, and the laptop on the left, my Acer Aspire from my last year of high school, we'll give it the Linux Mint treatment.

Fret not, Mint loyalists, this was also painless. However, my experience of Ultramarine on my HP was much smoother and nicer than how Linux Mint was feeling on the Acer, the Acer is technically a more powerful computer (running an entire 0.10gHz faster CPU clock-speed), and even has an Nvidia iGPU, but the slower HP (which to its credit is a much newer device) was somehow just feeling better.

Update, February 23rd, 2026

I decided to switch the Acer to Ultramarine as well. Interestingly this has been an issue. The HP can download and run Steam, but only has integrated Intel graphics. The Acer actually has an Nvidia GPU which showed up as a GT900-series on Linux Mint, but on Ultramarine I can only read the Graphics processor as "NV117" which is an Nvidia GPU Chip. Nvidia drivers don't want to work now, and Steam crashes for some unknown reason. We'll have to see if I can find out what the actual GPU comes out to be. I DID discover that the Acer is VERY expandable. It turns out it has an entire slot for a SATA Hard drive and two screws expose the very interchangeable RAM-sticks. I unfortunately don't have any firstborn sons to sacrifice for the price of a single stick of RAM, but it's good to know we have a laptop motherboard with expandability.

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If I can get to the bottom of the mystery of the maybe dedicated laptop GPU, maybe we'll give Bazzite a go?

Or some other gaming-oriented OS, I'm actually interested in trying to find out if there's an available PciE slot I could maybe slot a low profile GPU into and make a dedicated small form-factor games machine.

Update, February 25th, 2026

Due to continued issues with Steam and Ultramarine not being ideal for the work and gaming I have in mind for the Acer, I'm probably changing gears.

I recently stumbled upon a GitHub project that I can get behind. Someone built a recreation of NothingOS on Manjaro GNOME. I have a Nothing Phone (3a) and I love NothingOS 4.0, so this looks really fun to try out.

Github link to NothingOS setup

Update, March 4th 2026

Linux is fucking hard

Update, March 16th 2026

ARGH!!

I decided to do Bazzite, fuck it.

Oh guess what, the only USB stick I have is this Tweety Bird from like 2004. It had a MIGHTY 8GB of storage (back then) but it is unfortunately stumped by the 7.9GB size of Bazzite's image. So we head to the electronics store and pick up a new one.

Kinda wild to be able to pick up a cheap USB stick now that has 32GB of storage like its nothing.