You’ve just never seen him because he hasen’t accepted a meeting invite is 14 years.

And counting!

If your monitor is currently connected via HDMI, and supports any other type of cable, I would try any other type of cable.

I have had similar issues when the Digital Rights Management (DRM) layer of HDMI was having timing issues, causing a blank screen.

In my case, it would sometimes work, if the power up / wake up / boot up cycles of the monitor and CPU happened to align, but on certain of my PC builds the timing tended to not match up during most boots, and I usually got a blank screen.

Edit: Oh, and classic advice for the ages - when I have the monitor hooked up to a graphics card, I switch it over for one boot and see if that fixes things long enough to pull some log files and get more info.

was working for 30 mins until I realised that Firefox was “stuck” and unclickable.

I had an issue like that come and go on Gnome (Ubuntu’s default desktop environment) with Firefox and Chrome. I never tracked down a root cause.

I switched to KDE Plasma, instead.

I feel like Gnome is going through a finding itself phase, right now.

Edit: That’s the beauty of open source. I can help fix the problem, or…if I can’t…I can nope out of the way onto another solution until it is solved.

Ansible has extensive tools for applying partial configs to specific configuration files, leaving the rest unchanged.

It’s meant for remote hosts, but it works fine pointed at localhost.

Ansible might be overkill - might be enough to make a quick bash script that finds the most recently active Firefox profile and just drops the files you care about there.

This does sound like more than most dotfile managers as are able to handle.

I believe it is already illegal, but the ultra rich don’t expect enforcement, so they don’t care.

I mean, Microsoft could supply an option to safely install Linux as a dual boot, alongside Windows, done by Windows, itself.

That is the only way I would trust such a tool, and even then, I might not.

There’s so much closed source code involved in doing it that way - it feels like only Microsoft staff could have any hope to verify compatibility of all the necessary components.

Booting to a Live USB Linux first provides a clean-room - a known, publicly verified open source platform - to perform the installation from.

Such a clean room can be avhieved within Windows, but only by Microsoft engineers with full access to the entirety of Microsoft’s source code.

Once time I’ve had two bad installs in a row, it was due to my install media.

Many install media tools have an image checker (check-sum) step, which is meant to prevent this.

But corrupt downloads and corrupt writes to the USB key can happen.

In my case, I think it turned out that my USB key was slowly dying.

If I recall, I got very unlucky that it behaved during the checksums, but didn’t behave during the installs. (Or maybe I foolishly skipped a checksum step - I have been known to get impatient.)

I got a new USB key and then I was back on track.

Sorry for your headaches. The door prize is you get to tell this story - to the un-envy of peers - in the future.

or load vim to practice vim motions

Because I sometimes forget, here’s your reminder that vim has a built in :vimtutor command which I have found surpringly good for a few minutes of guided practice now and then.

If you need to reimage it, it sounds like you’re looking for “Headless Rasbian”. As others have said, it is based on Debian.

A lot of stuff I want to learn/practice “work” on windows but are native to Linux, like vim/neovim nmap gcc etc. Is this feasible?

Absolutely. And it’s fun.

Am I under estimating what’s possible with it?

Haha. Yeah. I read somewhere that the Pi3 is the most capable budget PC ever produced, and I have no reason to doubt that claim.

But you can always do more with it later. May as well start with trying what you’re interested in now.

I think they meant Vim-golfingor other code-golfing?

Which…uh…yeah, I’ve been guilty of. Maybe not formally, but I’ve definitely made changes just to satisfy my private pride.

I tried to get on board with this one, but “cross platform apps” made me throw up in my mouth a little. The unholy things we did back then are best left forgotten in their shallow binary graves.

I worked directly with the last one on the list. I got his laptop approved to install Microsoft Access, by submitting a formal request to IT security.

I will share my first honest draft “justification” here:

“This man can achieve miracles with nothing more than Excel and VBA. His true skills unleashed are exactly what all of our draconian IT policies are afraid of. I don’t know what will happen, to any of us - after you approve this request. But i believe that standing in the way of his destiny is foolish futility, and I want him to remember me fondly when his full powers emerge.”

I replaced it with meaningless business speak bullshit, and cited a couple of uninterpretable but urgent business office priorities before I submitted the form.

There’s a such thing as too much honestly.