I work warehousing; no IT background, I just like to tinker with whatever. Have since I started breathing.
I was a fairly casual pirate, grabbing movies/shows I couldn’t find elsewhere (or just couldn’t afford). Got into Plex/Emby for my first real exploration into self-hosting (if you don’t count SRCDS and/or Minecraft Server at like 13yo); and expanded my knowledge from there. Reverse Proxys, the ‘arrs’, DNS, Docker, VPNs, etc.
Now a days, I’ve got 20+ services that I mostly access via a VPN I host, and I’m always interested in messing with new things :)
I am 6’ 6" and most of my life I’ve been between 145 to 165. So incredibly skinny, always under weight. I never struggled with women as an adult, but I also didn’t chase too many shallow women. When I was young i certainly got told by a few that they weren’t into skinny guys, but it was almost always by people that were incredibly socially controlled people, the type to “keep up with the Joneses” so to speak. Once I stopped chasing after people for the wrong reasons things improved dramatically.
Do you have close friends that are women? I wonder if there is a communication aspect to this if not. Do you date outside your culture? I grew up around mostly white rural Christians and they were more judgy about being skinny than other cultural groups, in my experience. Maybe something about rural people doing a lot more hard labor and it being culturally homogeneous.
If you want wireless, one thing to be concerned about is the latency of the gamepad. gamepadla.com tests many controllers for their latency.
Personally, I’ve just gone with xbox with their PC dongle. I only like controllers with the sticks in the xbox/nintendo configuration and the latency is great with their dongle. I also like that it uses standard batteries so I just keep some rechargables at hand for when it runs out. On the downsides, there is no low battery indication on the controller, so occasionally it just dies in the middle of use.
I also use and recommend Xbox controllers. Although I wish I knew about these cool high end brands before I bought. I grew up in a time where all third party controllers were trash, and I carried that opinion for too long.
I read this thread and I saw 8bitdo recommended a lot and I’ve seen them recommended elsewhere. The hall effect sticks seem to be the gold standard.
My main issue with the Xbox controllers (mine are for Xbox one) is the d-pad. It’s not terrible but it’s not even as good as say a super Nintendo controller for fighting games and retro games in general.
I actually like it when these code helpers guess from one line what the rest should be and suggest it. It’s even more fun when it keeps guessing and the suggestions get progressively more whacky. Then they just start making completely unrelated shit up.
Once you say no, it goes back to the beginning and meekly repeats the very first suggestion, like a scolded puppy.
I recommend going to a pawn shop. They likely have a variety of late model controllers. You can then hold them and see which speaks to you. I bought a ps5 controller from a pawn shop for like $50 over a year ago and I’ve loved it. I use it over Bluetooth with steam and I get rumble and all that.
Unfortunately, those of us that make games in Unreal Engine are stuck writing a lot of C++, unless we want to do everything in BPs (no thanks, they’re fine, but it’s not coding, and it’s difficult to maintain and refactor for complicated projects, they’re good for taking C++ components and building bigger components out of the base C++ functionality though).
With that said, UE’s support for C++ is decent. Which is, that as long as you tag all your fields, properties, methods, classes, etc. with some UnrealEngine attribute filter (like UCLASS or UPROPERTY), Unreal will handle the memory management of those constructs for you. Which is nice.
Unfortunately it has some other limitations to the C++ language that you can’t work around, like disallowing pure abstracts because every C++ derivative class based on any UE construct (Actor, Character, Pawn, etc.) has to be instantiatable in the editor. So no pure abstracts and such.
In general, I’d give it a 6/10.
It’s still mostly C++, but some of the things suck less.
The standard route is to decrypt on boot. It happens after GRUB but before your display manager starts. IDK if there even is a setup that has you “decrypt on login”. Thats sounds like your display manager (sddm for KDE) is decrypting system which is not possible IMO.
Unless your laptop somehow has multiple drives you’ll want to use the “LVM on LUKS” configuration. 1 small partition for /boot. The rest gets LUKS encrypted, and an LVM group is put on the LUKS container. Or you could replace LVM with btrfs.
This will require wiping your system and reinstalling so you have some reading to do.
The arch-install script in the live iso has options for full disk encryption.
If you suspend to RAM your system will stay unencrypted, because your ram is not encrypted. if you suspend to disk (aka hibernate) your system will be encrypted. You go through the boot loader when waking from hibernation but it just drops you off where you left off.
You need a swapfile for hibernation so make sure its inside the LUKS container.
Looks like they use eCryptFS. Never heard of it before so thats neat. I can see using it on systems where you can’t reinstall the system with Dm-crypt but it most cases I suspect Dm-crypt is a better alternative.
I’m “techy”, but not in a tech career. By that I mean I’ve always been casually interested in tech, and enjoy building my own PCs, and am usually the one people come to for tech help, even if I just end up googling it for them haha.
Got into hosting through Home Assistant and Foundry VTT.
I use an Xbox controller with Linux. Only issue I ran into was a firmware update for the controller before it would work with Linux. I had to do the firmware upgrade through a Windows VM.
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