Hack The Planet!
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I took a break from being social via the net to enjoy life offline. Here's what I did:
I recently got a new PC. It took me months to save for it.
I'm not sure if I should go into detail on the specs of it all, because I don't want to seem like some selfish moneybags who has cash laying around that could be better spent helping those in need.
While I was waiting for it all to arrive, I got some ice-cream while shopping one day.
"Crunchie Blast". For context, a Crunchie is the name a 'candy bar' here in the UK. It's 'honeycomb' coated in chocolate.
This ice-cream however, was structured like a Cornetto. It had chocolate flakes and popping candy on the top, the ice-cream itself was honeycomb flavoured, and it had chocolate chips in it.
Besides my PC parts, this was one of the better purchases I've made this year.
Building my PC was a fun experience as well.
It's something that I've always wanted to do. It took a lot longer than I thought it would. Around 3 hours I think :/ Double what I thought would be the max time.
I think a lot of it was just trying to get cables for all the parts in the right place and organised.
It almost worked first try too!
One of the cables was a lot more slack than the others and was brushing against a fan and making this weird noise.
But other than that... PHENOMENAL LIKE PHOENIX ;)
Phenomenal is actually my middle name y'know.
This is where the meatspace stuff ends unfortunately.
A lot shorter than you were expecting huh?
Yeah... I've got a horrid memory I'm afraid.
A lot of what happened next is largely based in meatspace.
If you count me sitting at my desk as that I suppose. But I wasn't active on the wider internet. I was configuring fresh new application installs :3
Oh boy...
I've installed arch before, and honestly, it was a breeze. All thanks to the built in Archinstall script. It gives you less control over the installation, but I wasn't looking to make specific changes based on the hardware I was using, so I was all good.
This time however...
I think this months arch iso might just be broken.
I spent the whole evening after building my PC trying to get arch on it. Unsuccessfully.
I couldn't backspace at all during the user creation process and over such things.
Looking back, I might have actually got it working once or twice but the login-manager or whatever uswm is wasn't launching correctly. I don't have the energy to look it up and check right now.
The next morning I caved and downloaded a version from a previous month, and it worked perfectly fine.
Weird.
I wanted a cool looking and highly interesting WM/DE for my new setup. And after cruising through r/unixporn for a few minutes, it became clear that this was the hot new thing. I think.
I had already downloaded and tested this on my laptop weeks prior, so I knew it would fit my needs. I also learnt a few things via good ol' mistakes, and I made sure not to repeat them.
Oh, and the archinstall script is able to download it for you which is nice.
The biggest mistake - which was probably the cause of the other 'mistakes'/bugs - was downloading some dotfiles (what? did you seriously think that I'd make my own? It should be clear from the state of this site that I'm no wizard-class programmer ;) ) and then it turning out that they weren't very good. I wasn't able to properly purge all of what was added/changed, because I'm not 100% what the install script did and there doesn't seem to be an uninstall script.
Oh well. I haven't even used my laptop that much since I've got my PC because it boots so fast.
I found someone else's dotfiles that work a lot better. I might change up the colour scheme at some point, but for the most part: everything works, is fully functional and looks nice.
One of the best features that it 'focuses' the tab that my mouse is hovering over, without having to click on it. I acclimated to that so fast, and it's a feature that I wish I had but never new I needed.
The first thing to do with a new PC, is to push it to it's limits. Gotta find 'em and respect 'em, y'know?
Cyberpunk2077 was first on the list and all 80 Gigabytes were downloaded in ~70 minutes.
That's fast. Very fast. I had a peak speed of 220 mb/s and an average of 200 mb/s.
Compared to playing it on GeForce now, the graphics are noticeably a lot better.
I still have yet to upgrade my monitor from 1080p 60Hz, so I can't even imagine what I'm missing out on.
It's a whole new world.
After that resounding success, I installed and tried another game that I was only able to play through GeForce now prior to the upgrade: Dying Light 2
As of now. It doesn't work.
Booting the game locks me out of my desktop until I ALT+F4. And I can hear the intro-cutscene, but I can't see or input anything.
At least I choose a nice wallpaper :P
Looking around on the net, it seems that not a lot of people have or are experiencing this issue - perhaps it's a Hyprland specific issue?
None of the things I tried worked.
If I try to modify the launch parameters, it won't even boot at all.
I also tried playing some of the games I had on windows, that weren't from steam.
Most of them, due to the way they were 'acquired', require an installer to be run, but the one's I've tested just won't work.
And I even got a Windows VM working, and it didn't work in that either for some reason. So maybe the installer I used for that was just bust.
For anyone who wishes to help little old me, the error I got in the Win11 VM was: `External Error: x80000004`. I can remember that much because this was pretty recent. At least I think it was that.
I feel as if there was another thing that happened after this, that I was going to talk about, but I've procrastinated it too long, and now I can't recall.
If I ever do remember, I'll update this post, and this message will be deleted.
So if you're seeing this: stay tuned!
Or otherwise: there was no fourth thing or I never remembered it.