D and I are getting ready to go to a family wedding tonight. I've got my makeup on and am just sitting here for a little bit relaxing before I have to get dressed.

So this week, I "dropped" my Networks class at school. I used "dropped" in quotes because technically, at WGU, we don't drop a class, it's just marked as Incomplete and then you pick it up in the next term. However, I needed one more class for some credits this term so my student mentor suggested I go for the Linux Foundations course.

I've been reading and watching videos on it for the past few days, and I'm not going to lie - this REALLY makes me want to scrap Windows off of my gaming machine and install Ubuntu instead.

Now before you go all "HOW DARE YOU DO THAT TO A GAMING MACHINE", here me out.

This other machine was bought back in 2020 as a replacement for my then-dying laptop. D and I had some money as a result of his mother's passing, and he was looking at upgrading his desktop anyway, so he said we could both upgrade. So we went to the Origin website to check things out. I didn't want a desktop machine - I like being portable - so I picked the "thin and light" laptop. We tricked it out all the way, at his insistence, and after it came in, I LOVED it. It was powerful and lightning-fast, and ran my standard stuff like Photoshop, Lightroom, and the smallish games I preferred to play smooth as butter.

However, the "thin and light" moniker was not exactly correct. Thin-ish, sure, but the sucker was a lot heavier than I wanted. Plus, even though under the hood it was AWESOME, there are some build issues I don't really like. One, the keyboard is...well, it's shit. No two ways about it. When I type I tend to type hard, and that keyboard and its teeny chiclet keys just don't seem secure. They seem to wiggle around a little too much for my tastes. Plus, the webcam is also kinda awful. Not that I use it that much, and I have a better webcam for school, so that's not a huge thing. Also, the hinges on the laptop seem a little bit wobbly. They haven't broken, and the laptop lid stays up and closes with no issue, but it's just kind of...off.

So, it ended up staying on my desk as my primary machine. I got an iPad Pro for school, and ended up trading it in for a Macbook Air, which became my preferred machine.

Fast forward to now, and sure, it's still fast, but Windows is...not great to it. The last time I fiddled with it, it was because I kept getting a BSOD, and I finally said fuck it and wiped it, starting from scratch. Not a huge deal, most of my stuff was backed up to assorted clouds, so anything I needed I could download again. I got it running, and for a few days I enjoyed using it and getting back into working in Win11...

And then another BSOD.

I shut it off, and haven't used it since. I need to actually get into the BIOS and see if there's a deeper issue - hopefully there's not - but at this point I'm honestly just thinking of saying chuck it in the fuck-it bucket and doing a full wipe and reinstall of Ubuntu.

I'm truly sick of Windows anyway. I have to use it for work, no getting around that, but I'd rather start moving to more open-source software anyway.

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