Black Sails is definitely my favourite pre-STS album. Absolutely solid front to back

I’ve since graduated to scripting stuff to launch through wine (mostly chummer5 for shadowrun) but proton was a great lazy way of doing it

I’m pretty fresh to Linux myself, but as far as I know it’s exclusive to steam. You can launch non-steam stuff through it by adding the .exe to the Steam client, I played Fallout 1 this way

My go to favourite band is AFI, and they have a great back catalogue to dig into as they’ve been going since the 90s but have changed their style with the times (although always sort of emo/punk adjacent). I flip flop on my favourite album from them, currently I’d say it’s Sing The Sorrow but sometimes it’s Decemberunderground.

My taste changes frequently though, so for something with a completely different style, I find myself constantly returning to Personal Protocol by 8485, a wonderful hyperpop EP with Drum & Bass influences.

I hope you get something out of any of this, and would love to hear what you think!

If you don’t have prior experience with Linux, I’d advise making the switch before the end of win10 support. I made the switch a couple of months ago with no experience in Linux, and while it wasn’t a horrible experience it also wasn’t the easiest thing to do. Having the safety net of a Windows partition was really useful during the month or two as I got used to Linux, which I wouldn’t have wanted to do with Windows not in support anymore.

I might give Summit a go at some point then. I was never a power user of rif, so thumbnails appearing in the same places and general text size / layout etc was enough for me to draw comparisons.

I’m also way more active on Lemmy than I ever was on Reddit, I probably have more comments here in just over a year than I did in like a decade on reddit, so my use case has also changed I guess.

Thanks for the recommendation!

I’ve been using Thunder since I came to Lemmy, and I’m shocked to not see it mentioned more. It’s fantastic, and seems to just feel right as someone that used rif for reddit

I made the switch 2-3 months ago, and I went with Kubuntu. It’s absolutely fine, but if I knew then what I know now I’d likely have gone pop or mint, just to not bother with snaps (although they’re pretty easy to get rid of).

As others have said, get Ventoy on a USB stick, use that to have a play with a few live environments and get a feel for what desktop environment you might want to use. KDE and Cinnamon I think are pretty good Desktop Environments if you’re used to Windows, but have some fun with it and also try a few that are very different to windows, you might find yourself liking them (I really like using i3 on my laptop where the screen is fairly low res)

Agreed on the vaping. When I went to vaping, I was smoking about 20 a day. There was a short time when I went back to smoking after vaping, and it was around 30 a day at that point, because I was so used to a constant feed of nicotine.

Playing devil’s advocate though, it’s still not a bad thing. If the goal is 0 nicotine, it’s a problem, but if the goal is specifically not smoking then I find it to be one of the easier methods. I always said at the time “we don’t know the long term effects of vaping, but we do know the long term effects of smoking”

Nicotine patches are what finally allowed me to quit. I quit over the course of probably about 5 years, trying all sorts of methods.

I went to vaping, that killed my dependence on the taste of cigarettes by changing the flavours constantly. I went from 12mg liquid to 3mg liquid, but then when I found nicotine salts went back to 10mg but lowered my intake significantly.

After a while, I moved to nicotine pouches, to get rid of the mental requirement to inhale nicotine (and also because I was no longer able to vape indoors). They’re not the nicest things when you’re starting, but they give a full hour of relief and it’s very easy to keep track of how much you’re using compared to vaping. I started on the stronger ones, and got myself to the point where I was having 9mg pouches 2-3 times per day.

Last New Year’s Eve, I broke my leg rushing out of my house. The nurses at the hospital weren’t sure if the pouches were going to be safe before the surgery (it’s different dosage than they’d expect, and it’s synthetic nicotine) so they put me on patches. And I found that they worked perfectly, so after being discharged I followed the process outlined on the box for them - 21mg/day for 2 weeks, 14mg/day for 1 week, 7mg/day for 1 week, although for that last one I stopped after four days, as my partner was going away for a few days and it made sense to get through the worst of the withdrawal when there was nobody around for me to be snappy with.

So yeah, the point of nicotine patches are to quit, but in my experience they were best as a “last step” rather than a 1 fix solution. Quitting an addiction is not easy, and there’s absolutely no shame in taking a long time to do it. In all honesty, if I hadn’t been sent to hospital that night, I’d still be shoving nicotine pouches in my face. At this point I’ve not had any nicotine for 11 weeks, and the cravings stop being so intense, but I do still get them after meals.

At every step in the process, it looked to those around me that whatever I was using was going to be used forever. I didn’t set any lofty goals, I vaped for several years, used the pouches for a full year, and even in my own mentality thought that “if I do this the rest of my life, I’m okay with that”. Usually moving onto the next method was because it was cheaper, not because I wanted to quit. But it’s worked out in the end I guess.

Sorry for rambling, I kinda missed the point of the original post, but I’m hoping this story might help someone if they’re trying to quit or at least help people reframe their idea on what quitting can look like.

This is why I get anxious playing with new groups, especially because if I draw a token that let’s me try something out of left field, I can rarely resist going for it. Thankfully, so far everyone has been really excellent, but it takes me a while to slip in and get comfortable