Computer Love

[maru]

So I had gotten into remission with my computer shenanigans. Then lately after a friend came over, it got reignited.

So, in sum:

1. satsuki: Razer Blade 14. Windows 11 Pro. Last time I used this was to beat Atelier Sophie 2 and I just felt like having to do it on PC made me less inclined to play it. Very few games will make me want to sit at my desk. I wish I could've just played it in bed, on the sofa, whatever. So, I recently moved her to be a Big Picture Mode computer on the TV and took the Steam Deck off of it.
2. Steam Deck: Has no name! Maybe should fix that. Mostly a VN device for bed or travel or whatever. Or a roguelike device. Whatever. Still counts as a computer.
3. nanami: a Thinkpad T500 17 inch beast I rescued from my sister's basement, put 8GB of RAM in it and an SSD and it's like, Fine. It's got a Core 2 Duo and it needs to be running Windows to run any games decently. I put FreeBSD on it making it entirely useless. So, I need to put Windows 10 LTSC back on. But then I sort of don't know what to do with it other than 2000s games.
4. tsubasa: Thinkpad X1 Carbon is still around. As my lightest and most precious she ends up coming with me on trips a lot. But, if my partner needed another computer, this is probably the one I would give. It's the most useful and recent with the least purpose in my life.
5. keina: MacBook Pro. Still more or less my main PC, though, who knows now.

And yes, now we have sadako, this ThinkCentre M710s sitting on the side of my desk.

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An i3-7100, 128GB SSD, yes it is definitely 2010s computer lab stuff. A librarian's computer. It had Windows 8 -> Windows 10 on it and left there. We ended up going with OpenSUSE for no reason besides curiosity and then put MATE on it after it defaulted to IceWM (if you don't want KDE or GNOME: that's what you want, right?).

We hit a weird hiccup with the DPI on that, but then got into MATE; we thought WiFi didn't have drivers (we're using a dongle that seems to max out at 20mbps) but it did, as soon as you boot into a desktop. Then we were figuring out graphics. Intel HD 630 on a 4k display; compositor wasn't having fun, but it turned out you need to set Xorg to use modesetting or something, and then it runs nicely.

Today I went out and decided to put a GT 1030 in it to help ease the bottleneck a bit, and yeah, it's comfy now! Firefox is good, can run whatever heavy web app you need, YouTube, plug into my Navidrome server well enough. Guild Wars runs at 60 fps on 1080p, very nice.

I guess when it comes to "what's the purpose of this?" it's more that I haven't had a desktop computer in twenty years. The feel of a desktop is very singular to me; it feels like a site, a space, a portal, a distinct appliance; I have a ton of portable devices that feel nomadic. I had an iMac for a few years in there, and it was better, but not the same as this box I crank open and start tweaking. I don't know how to describe the phenomenological difference. So I would prefer to think of plugging another machine at my desk as a 'visitor' and this desktop as my fun, default PC. My preferred desktop environment, childhood games and stuff I come back to. Something I can continue to tweak at and upgrade to an extent.

Also I ended up spending like 3 hours tonight figuring out Nvidia drivers. tldr; combo of TPM and the kernel being afraid of the Nvidia module and maybe defaulting to Intel drivers in the Xorg from the other day? It kept booting to a blank cursor without much guidance, and pinpointing the issue was not necessarily easy. It normally means "Xorg doesn't know how to render something so it's just not gonna do anything", and when nouveau is blacklisted, it comes down to whether it's allowed to use the module, if the module can even be loaded, etc.