Welcome...you mad bastard.

Disclaimer. I have history with making computers and electronics do what I need them to do. I see them as a tool and entertainment. I am not new to this. But it is not scary and it can be fun experience learning. There are a lot of people out there that want to help. There are also some right @#$%. Hell even groups of @#$%s on various parts of the internet. If you find them, ignore and move on.

I have run server nix variants for years but not a Windowing sytem except for that one time back in '94 where I was given a set of Slackware CDs and thought I'd become the next Kevin Mitnick. X11 wasn't even a teenager and it was fun to get it working. But dev builds of Windows 95 were available and damn that was the shizz.

Why?

Windows is now a service. You are the product. Does this sound like a conspiracy theory? Well yes. BUT that's not the bit I care about. I pay a lot of money for expensive computer hardware and I am extremely lucky that I can. But the enshitification of Windows has meant that more of that hardware is being used to service a business model (Ads, telemetry and software I don't want) that it has annoyed me enough to look for alternatives.

I am also an EVE Online player. I love the game, I love the people and I love the premise. I play other games too. DayZ is another that during lock down I ran servers in the UK for a couple of years. It was fun! Until they got popularish and suddenly it wasn't a rag tag bunch of regulars, but a bunch of @#$%s making demands...

Triggered!

PC Specs (Pre boom)

• AMD 5950X
• MSI 3090
• 64Gig RAM
• NVME Storage
• Windows 11 Pro

...and everything worked fine. I could multi box 8 characters on high without any real degradation in performance. I'd have YouTube running on another screen, discord and mumble. Life was good.

Then Windows Update 24H2 rolled out and the problems started. Micro stuttering in multiple games, crash to black screen or desktop which is never fun when moving Supers around!

Hours upon hours spent tweaking settings, trawling forum posts. The fact the 90% of the searches lead me to answers.microsoft and the "HI, I am a Microsoft Certified Professional with 25 years experience I am sorry for any inconvenience caused. Could you please ensure you have run Windows Update." $%!@#$%#%!@^.....

Then Nvidia released 576.02 and the world was on fire. EVE wouldn't run with more than two characters. Peoples cards where failing due to thermal overruns and Nvidia slipped the 576.26 hotfix out without letting the world know. Thanks to JayzTwoCents for dropping a video on it and I got back to some sort of normality.

It was around then that EVE released it's GPU Driven Pipeline update. This, combined with 24H2 and Nvidia problems was the straw that broke the camels back...

I wanted to try something new....familiar but new. Apple it wa.....hell no. Linux..

My goal was to get off Windows and make EVE Online work in as similar way as to the Windows Experience minus the issues with Windows. More issues were introduced moving to Nix...but more on that later.

The first step is to pick a distribution. This can make or break an experience.

Set a goal...

Mine was to run EVE.