This is a bit of a hack, but while you wait for a new drive or laptop, you could install Linux onto a thumb drive and run it from there.
When you use Rufus to write the image to the flash drive, it should give you the option to create a persistent storage section with a slider to say how much of the drive to allocate to that. At least this should keep Microsoft from destroying the data on it, lthough it will probably ask every time it starts up whether you want to format that drive.
This way you can just use whatever your BIOS boot key is, probably something like F12, to boot onto your Linux and keep it away from Microsoft :)
Bitcoin is basically only mined via ASICs now. You can still mine something like ETC but honestly chains have (rightfully) been moving to far more efficient consensus using Proof of Stake.
For the amount of electricity you would need to mine a meaningful amount of BTC, you'd be much better off buying spending $50 or $100 worth of BTC or ETH every week. Either hodl or DCA sell when prices bounce up.
Yes you'll fuck things up. Don't keep anything remotely important on it and screw around with it. That's how you learn. Blow your install away intentionally, try a different distribution the next time. There's a lot more variability between distros, and more customizability compared to Windows too.
If you want to learn something new and different anyway. It's definitely not like Windows except at the most surface level; you can get by in the GUI for almost everything until something goes wrong, but that's exactly when you want to have been learning cmdline stuff, so you can try to salvage it.
I was looking for a smaller (14" and not bulky) gaming Laptop, and ended up with the Lenovo Slim 7 Pro X. And I'm very happy with it; feels fairly future proof with 32GB of Ram and runs NixOS like a champ.
Only has a GTX 3050 though, so it's not for the highest end gaming, but that's never been my priority anyway, it runs BG3 quite well and that's the beefiest thing I've thrown at it.
As mentioned, Minisforum and Beelink make great APU-based Ryzen systems which are going to give a great bang-for-buck. Get them from Amazon vs their dedicated website as some folks have had shipping delqys with the OEM website. ETA Prime does great reviews on YouTube of these boxes and shows what the FPS is like on some current, a few years old, and retro games for each one.
If you want the smallest possible system, with room for one the smaller form factor discrete graphics cards I'd say the NUC 9 Extreme works very well. I have a GTX 1650 in it and it is perfectly fine.
Steam Deck with a usb c dock is also a great option.
Funny how "muh freedom" means you should be able to not wear a mask, but others should be disallowed from wearing masks, even if they have actual safety or health concerns. Very consistent.
GooeyGlob @ gooeyglob @lemmy.world Posts 0Comments 8Joined 2 yr. ago
This is a bit of a hack, but while you wait for a new drive or laptop, you could install Linux onto a thumb drive and run it from there.
When you use Rufus to write the image to the flash drive, it should give you the option to create a persistent storage section with a slider to say how much of the drive to allocate to that. At least this should keep Microsoft from destroying the data on it, lthough it will probably ask every time it starts up whether you want to format that drive.
This way you can just use whatever your BIOS boot key is, probably something like F12, to boot onto your Linux and keep it away from Microsoft :)