BananaTrifleViolin

hehe, true. I’d just buy a used one off ebay. It doesn’t have to be a good drive really as it’s not going to have critical data on it. People don’t want them because the drives are old and could fail, but for this would literally just be windows and an online game so I’d take the risk of the inconvenience of having to replace it in a year. Any data lost can just be re-downloaded onto a new drive. E.g. I found a bunch of second hand SSDs for £30-£40 on a quick search now. Wouldn’t touch them for data storage but for this - why not?

I’d just get a cheap small second hard drive for your PC, install windows on it, dual boot set up (keep linux as the primary drive and Grub will have Windows as an option) and use it to play Fortnite. Windows will pester about activating but if you’re just using it to play Fortnite so ignore it.

I Linux main, but kept my old Windows drive and install in case I ever need it. Haven’t used it in ages, but it’s pretty harmless to have an old drive sitting in my PC. I don’t even mount the drive in Linux, it’s just there if I need it.

Wow the internet really is just bots talking to bots. Even your off brand TV stick is just a bot farm.

Are your windows drives mounted in linux? If so comment them out in fstab or nofail them as a minimum, although it wouldn’t normally manifest as a root drive error (unless you’ve set up a strange mount point for the windows drives outside /mnt on root or even in home folder? or do you have them listed above your root drive in fstab so they are trying to mount first and that fails?).

Also you said elsewhere your linux drives can be “seen” in windows. Just to be clear, you’ve not mounted the drives in Windows right using a tool like Ext2Fsd? Because if so, go into windows and unmount the drive.

And have you disabled fastboot? Not just rebooted but disabled fastboot completely?

The hospitals position is clearly ridiculous. To say there is no evidence staff were responsible is nonsense and them trying to not admit liability. But one of the men has the bracelet that has the wrong name on it and someone put that on him.

It comes down to the cost of changing. All these systems were independently developed as electricity become standard in homes. In the UK for example, the standard was developed in 1947 - electricity was already in the country but there wasn’t national standardisation in infrastructure, so when that happened a standard plug was introduced. And this was also done in other commonwealth countries including Ireland (which is very integrated with the UK grid), Australia, New Zealand and others. They are so embedded in each country that it’s near impossible to change them all - or when it is possible (e.g. the UK & Ireland could change to an EU standard gradually) it’s just not deemed worth the cost - the old standard would need to be maintained for a long time, and at some point people would need to be forced to change to get it done.

There was never a successful global effort standardise plugs. Globalisation wasn’t really a thing in those days so there wasn’t enough support for pushes for global standards. There was a lot of regional standardisation though - large parts of Europe have the same electricty supply and separately North American between Canada and the USA, due to the pragmatic issue of sharing grids. 8 Plugs when there are over 100 countries isn’t terrible.

“Region” locking now is basically 3 types. Some devices don’t have transformers, so those devices - like kettles - are designed to directly use the local electricity supply. Those are very much more “region locked”, but not necessarily to 1 plug; for example in Europe while the plugs are different the actual grid is pretty similar.

Many devices do need transformers - like modern Laptops / TVs / Mobile phones etc - the local supply is converted from high voltage to low voltage. Most of those transformers are external or can even be built into the plug, while others are built into the device. That means items can be sold to multiple areas with just the external power supply being different. When the transformer is built in that does “region lock” the products. An ATX desktop PC for example has a Power Supply Unit which is regional; but all the components are international and inter changable. Meanwhile a small form desktop these days has an external transformer much like a laptop and is much less region locked.

And now of course, USB has become a defacto standard to the point that many new devices don’t come with their own chargers and rely on whatever the customer has. And increasingly USB outlets are being added to public spaces across the globe, and people can change their own plugs to include a regional socket and USB outlets.

USB is probably going to be the defacto consumer facing charging for many uses, alongside the regional plugs for devices where USB doesn’t make sense. But the background grid differences between say North America and Europe is unlikely to ever change, due to the massive cost of changing the entire grid.

It very much depends on starting weight. Is it possible? Theoretically, yes. Is it safe? No, unlikely for most people.

20lbs or 9kg is a month is extreme weight loss. To lose 1kg of fat, you need a deficit of 7700kcals. For 9 kg that’s 69,300 kcals deficit needed over the month. Lets say thats over 28 days / 4 weeks: that’d be an average deficit of 2,475 kcals every day.

An average 30 year old man, who weighs say 80kg and average height.

• Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) - 1750 kcal a day
• Total Daily Energy Expenditure (BMR x activity factor, lets say 1.2 assuming they are sedentary) - 2,100 kcal a day.

So they need 2100kcal a day just to stay as they are. If they did nothing else, the maximum possible deficit they could have is to eat nothing - but they’d only achieve 2100kcal deficit a day, and they’d not last very long.

For that person to lose 9kg in a month, they would realistically need to massively increase their exercise. Even if they increased their daily energy expenditure to 3,323 kcal a day (1.9 x BMR for a very active person), they’d then need to calorie restrict their diet to only 848 kcal a day to achieve the deficit. Even then a 848kcal intake is dangerously low intake and would require very careful management. And somehow that person would also need to have enough intake to feel able to do all that extra exercise.

It would put the body under extreme stress and be very difficult to maintain.

Now if the person was very severely obese - lets say 200kg - the BMR would be 2949kcal (it takes energy just to maintain the fat), and the TDEE would be about 3540kcal if sedentary (even doing nothing, they use more energy). In that situation, if they suddenly became very active, they could boost their TDEE to say 4000-4500 kcal, and would be able to eat 1690-2190kcal a day, and still have a 2475kcal a day deficit. They could lose the 9kg weight in a month. However it is not very realistic for a severely obese person to go from sedentary to extreme activity in such a short period, and maintain it, and while calorie restricting too.

So it could be done by an obese person, but it’s not realistic then and certainly not for anyone who is only overweight.

A big mistake people make when they try to lose weight is to try and fix the problem as fast as possible. But fast dieting leads to over exertion, over strenuous food restriction, failure and then despair. Even 1kg a week lose is a very high rate and difficult to sustain. Instead of trying to lose as much as possible in a month, it’s better to aim for a sustainable amount every week for a long time - such as 0.5kg. 6 months of sustained slow lose is generally much more successful and achievable than crash/fast/extreme diets that just fail over and over for 6 months. And generally when people do slow diets, they change habits and have a better chance of maintaining it.

If someone is actually considering a diet then the real key is: don’t make it a speed race, make it a marathon. Slightly reduce intake, slightly increase activity every day, and aim for a slow but steady loss. A 550kcal deficit every day is much much easier than trying to rush with 1100kcal deficit, and allows a sustainable lifestyle. For example the 80kg 30 year old person could do moderate exercise (e.g. 10,000 steps a day just walking), they could realistically consume 1900-2000kcal a day, maintain a 550kcal deficit each day and lose 0.5kg every week. In a month they’d lose 2kg, and in 4.5 months they’d lose 9kg.

So Kazeta as others mention is about putting games onto SD cards.

Another project is https://zaparoo.org/ - this one doesn’t store the data on the card, but instead uses NFC so people can have “fake” cartridges that trigger the load of a game on the Linux system. This allows people to make something that looks great but is simply a stylish trigger to load the media (games, sites, movies, doesn’t matter what).

SteamOS is optimised for Valve’s hardware, and at present it only officially supports AMD GPUs, and not all of them. They are rolling out support for more AMD hardware, and “working with” Intel and Nvidia to do the same. Support is a big deal, especially as it’s an immutable system and it’s not got a big ecosystem of users/volunteers managing the packages and providing alternatives. Configuring and modifying it is more difficult than a non immutable system, so you are very dependent on the official options the distro provides to customise your system. It’s based off Arch which is completely different to Bazzite. Arch doesn’t have it’s own immutable versions to work with (there are immutable distros based on Arch, but not ones that SteamOS is based on), so if you need to problem solve you’re restricted to SteamOS specific advice, and whatever Valve currently has within it’s repos. It’s likely 3rd parties will add more options but at present it’s a focused distro.

Bazzite meanwhile is an open distro project, which is also immutable but built from the start to support (and tested on) a huge range of gaming PCs and other hardware, including with Nvidia GPUs. There are lots of users & volunteers already involved that are motivated to ensure it works with all the major graphics cards, and keep up to date as they use it themselves. It is also based off Fedora Kinoite, which has an established immutable ecosystem which eases some of the friction when finding support. This also means likely more software within the main Bazzite repos already tailored for the immutable system, alongside the usual options in Flatpaks and AppImages. But Bazzite also includes Waydroid to allow android software use, and is already set up with Homebrew & Distrobox to give more options. It’s unlikely SteamOS has these things set up or at least easily set up for users.

With an immutable system it’s important to have options to get software installed, although it’s possible in a HTPC set up you’ll find what you need in the main repos of SteamOS, Flatpaks and AppImages so maybe it won’t be an issue.

SteamOS is a great concept and I like it on my Steam Deck, but it’s not really something to run on your devices while so early in it’s support system. If your device is AMD based then maybe you’ll have no issues, but I don’t think being an early adopter on a system you want to use daily is a great idea. Maybe you won’t need the wide range of software and options Bazzite offers, but Bazzite does offer much more “out of the box” at the moment as a mature and established distro.

I’m in the UK, we have a registration system for Tennis courts in my local park. It’s to ensure it’s only accessed by people who are supposed to be using it, not kids damaging the net for example. It is also to prevent people arguing or overstaying for ages when other people want to play or prevent private tennis coaches/business abusing it. It’s particularly useful in busy times like the summer.

Check the privacy policy of the 3rd party company. They may need to match you up to local records to ensure you’re entitled to use the tennis court as it’s publicly funded? Or to ensure you’re a real person and not someone wanting access to steal the net or something random for example. Collecting data is not an issue in itself unless their privacy policy means they can use your data for anything else or store it. If so then complain to your city.

So I’m not condoning or condeming.

I would say you can dual boot linux - that is have TWO entirely separate Linux installs on your PC. Have one be your main Linux desktop, and have a separate partition which you boot into to use for riskier stuff. Just ensure it has no access at all to your other drive and be careful mouting peripherals like USB drives. That way you can get full native experience with your PC, without having to sacrifice performance for a VM set up. I would also set up a VPN to run at all times within that 2nd Linux install, with kill switch for the network if it disconnects.

I’d say distro choice for newbies should probably come down to the following questions:

• What are you using Linux for / what device will it go on? A desktop distro is very different from distros for servers, or single board devices like Raspberry Pi. Also even for a desktop, a modern PC versus an older device changes things up too.

• Which desktop do you like the look of the most? If you like the look of KDE, go for something KDE based like OpenSuSE or Kubuntu or Fedora KDE spin. If it’s Gnome then Fedora, or Ubuntu or OpenSuSE Gnome. If you want something windows like and straight forward, then Linux for Cinnamon. If you want something newer then Pop_Os! for Cosmic

• What kind of release schedule? Do you want something stable and robust; big well tested upgrades every few years but otherwise just something very reliable - then go for Debian. Want something cutting edge with all the latest packages then go for a rolling release distro like OpenSuSe or Fedora or Arch based distros.

• How popular do you want it to be for support? If you want to have lots of simple advice and tutorials then maybe go for something thats been widely popular like Mint or popular and around for a long time like Debian. If you want a technical challenge but with good documentation then go for Arch. Otherwise most mainstream distros will have support or you can learn to turn generic advice to your chosen distro.

• Does the distro’s ethos or location matter to you? If not then go by other factors. Location generally doesn’t matter too much, but if it does to you (e.g. such as the legal system the orgs are under governance with), then maybe for European distros like Mint, or OpenSuSe. If you don’t mind American based then maybe Fedora. etc. Similarly ethos - free software only vs proprietary software.

Moving away from Ubuntu makes absolute sense from what they describe.

I do wonder though, is basing a distro on Debian Testing a good idea? I understand them not wanting to go to the Debian stable as they already have issues with big drift for the cutting edge tools they want to ship breaking have the unintended consequences of breaking stable software. But Debian Testing will add in a constant shift in all the packages; they may be more recent but there is a much greater exposure to bugs.

Tuxedo’s OS will itself become a testing ground for packages in a way it wasn’t before. They’re both moving away from Ubuntu AND moving away from a LTS base. Though I suppose they can always re-base to Debian Stable at it’s next big release if they do find it too cumbersome.

Still, I wonder if this will happen with other distros. I know Mint has a Debian flavour which is seemingly described as a backup “plan B” in-case they felt the need to shift. I can also see the constant forcing of Snap into the ecosystem, and now the vague AI stuff that Tuxedo quote would also prompt a lot of distros to decide how dependent should they be on Ubuntu going forward.

Ok, the best way to do this is to install VM software on linux (I use KVM/QEMU) then make a new Windows guest and install from scratch using a Windows install ISO file. It’s the better method as the new Windows install will have no bloat from your original install, the boot partition will be set up properly and there won’t be redundant old drivers and configuration issues that could be very messy in the guest.

I have a KVM/QEMU windows VM with a license that runs fine; I use it rarely mainly to use work’s version of MS Office. You can migrate the license from your original install over to the VM so you don’t have to pay for a new Windows license. If you also have data to transfer into the VM from the original windows partition, you can either directly mount that partition inside the VM or mount the partition in your Linux host as a read only partition, and then share that as a folder into the VM. Then you can transfer any files you want into within your guest machine (e.g. within the windows guest copy files from the shared folder, drive D: onto the guests machines drive C:). It’s much much easier than the complexity and issues of cloning an existing partition and trouble shooting it to work in a VM.

If you really want to go down the route of taking the current installed OS and move that into a VM image, then the best way is making a disk image of the whole windows drive (assuming it’s a boot partition + C: drive) or clone both the boot partition + windows partitions into their own files if it’s a shared drive with Linux. There are lots of tools that can do this; “dd” and “partclone” are 2 particularly common tools you can use from a linux terminal to create a .img file of the partitions, and then you mount those into a VM. But messing with Windows boot partitions is always messy, and you’ll likely also need a Windows Recover disc to also mount in the partition to “repair” the boot partition in the new machine. You will also have to troubleshoot hardware issues if Windows can’t cope with the sudden complete hardware change from your host PC to the new virtual hardware.

Honestly, make a fresh Windows machine in a VM and transfer your files in. It’s far easier.

EDIT:
Here is a good guide to setting up a Windows guest in KVM/QEMU including TPM 2.0 for linux.

https://computingforgeeks.com/windows-11-installation-on-kvm-with-virt-manager/

Then with once you have a working Windows VM, this is a good guide for setting up a shared folder (I’d mount your windows drive within your Linux host as RO, and then share the mount point as a folder into your guest; that reduces the risk of data loss):

https://www.debugpoint.com/kvm-share-folder-windows-guest/

I didn’t write these guides but have read them through and they’re what I’d do/did for my Windows VM. If you choose to migrate your drive instead, you’ll still need to set up the hardware of the virtual machine as in these guides, but instead of creating a new virtual drive file, use the disk image you create from your windows partitions.

Before you do anything, backup /home.

You can reinstall your system while preserving and expanding your /home partition; this is probably the cleanest and safest way to sort your disk. It allows you to move the boot and filesystem partitions to the start of the disk while keeping /home untouched, and then separately resize /home to fill the rest of the drive. You could not reinstall and manually move the partition but it’s slow and riskier when messing with a boot and main filesystem partition; much easier to start again tbh.

I’d get a USB and install Ventoy on it. Ventoy is a great bootable USB tool that lets you drop multiple different bootable ISOs on it (instead of reflashing the drive every time) & pick one at boot; great for installs and also to keep around as a recovery drive. I’d then put on it an ISO file of your preferred linux distro, and also a separate ISO file of a good live distro for recovery. GParted Live is particularly good USB live distro for this because resizing the partition is the aim, but almost any good USB Live Distro will do

I’d then boot up the USB drive and select the ISO for your Linux distro’s installer. During install, in the partition section, I’d then use the partition tool in your installer. Dlete all the windows partitions (sda1, sda2, sda3 and sda4), and then delete the exisiting boot (/boot/efi) and root file system (/) and create new ones at the beginning of the disk: 1gb /boot/efi and 85gb / system partiton as you have now, and ensure the existing /home partition is kept and mounted as /home in the new install. You’ll have loads of free unpartitioned space; leave that for now.

After the system is reinstalled, I’d boot in, check everything is ok, and then restart and boot the USB again, this time selecting GParted Live. Then with GParted Live, I’d resize the /home partition to fill all the empty space.

But as I said, before you do anything, backup /home. Also before you do anything you can use a partition tool now (like KDE Partition or Gparted) to add a label/name to your /home drive so there is no confusion when you use use the Linux installer or Gparted later. But it should be clear from the size alone.

Switchdesk is a GUI for changing the default desktop once they’re installed, not for installing desktops.

The top of the page you link explains how to install alternative desktops which is using DNF. The GUI route to do this would be to use a DNF frontend like DNFDragora and search for the relevant desktop metapackage, and then install that.

NixOS config just sets Fstab. The issue was “nofail” was not set. This config calls that out which is good, but the issue isn’t fstab, it’s wherever OP got guidance on automounting drives in fstab as that guidance clearly failed to highlight the importance of the nofail mount option.

The issue isn’t fstab. The nixos thing posted there would have the exact same issue: if nofail wasn’t included in the configuration, the system would go to emergency mode when it can’t find a drive.

Fstab is the “File System Table”, and NixOS still uses it. In your case, a non-essential auto-mounting drive was not correctly flagged as “nofail” in your Fstab; when the system couldn’t find that drive it treated it as essential and locked the system down.

This is very frustrating, and I’ve been there myself by accident but the system does this for good reason. When you have a drive listed to automount in fstab without the “nofail” flag set, if the drive is unavailable the system will boot into emergency mode. This is because without “nofail” it is deemed the drive is an essential part of the system, and Linux won’t boot to prevent unintended damage. A drive might be unplugged or it might be failing and corrupted; but the OS has no way of knowing why the drive isn’t there; it juts knows it’s essential and locks itself down to allow you to fix the problem and prevent damage.

Emergency mode is a bit daunting, but booting into it when a essential drive is missing is actually a safety feature to prevent you experiencing data loss or unintended consequences.

The real issue here is not how fstab works, but rather wherever you got guidance on auto-mounting a drive in Linux. You have to actively set up a drive to automount (linux by default only automounts the root system) - so either you yourself edited the fstab or you used a GUI tool to do it. Fedora does not do this automatically. Whatever guide you followed is the problem here: A good guide should have explained how fstab works, and particularly what “nofail” is and how important it is. If it was a GUI method (like Gpart of KDE Partition Manager), then they also include methods to mark a drive as non-essential (in KDE Partition Manager for example, when setting up a mount point you’d need to ensure “Don’t prevent the system from booting if not mountable”). The guide you followed should have flagged this things up. I know it seems harsh but brutally, you did this. It can be a tough pill to take with linux but the more you tinker, the more you are responsible for when things go wrong; so it’s honestly really useful to actually learn how the things you’re changing work.

If you’d like to understand fstab, the Arch linux wiki has a decent overview: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fstab
It links through to a page on mount options in fstab for ext4 file system, which includes nofail and many other options: https://man.archlinux.org/man/ext4.5#Mount_options_for_ext4

I would go through your fstab and ensure that any other auto-mounted drives not essential for boot (e.g. media drives or external drives or USB drives) are marked as nofail. Last thing you want is being locked out of yourself if an unessential drive does fail, as emergency mode can be tedious way to problem solve that issue. But before you make any changes, back up your fstab file, and also briefly learn how to use emergency mode (you probably already have learnt how to manually mount the root file system in emergency mode from Chatgpt, but this is an essential first step to fix most problems in emergency mode)

I would bet on painful collapse, because the whole model is “winner takes all”, which means there is an awful lot of duplication. Even if it ends up more like a commodity with multiple players (because why pay for super powered AI for a task if there is a cheaper low powered alternatives?), the constant scale up makes no sense at all economically. We’re already well into diminishing returns with each scale up, and the models continue to be fundamentally flawed.

Lenovo are right that prices won’t go back to “normal” - I think there will be a huge crash in prices due to oversupply when the AI boom ends, and some of the big AI companies collapse.