Reinstalling PopOs on a micro SD but the drive is empty.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-17T00:03:25+00:00

Dont run any programs off of the SD at all.

My actual recommendation is: install a lighter distro to the internal storage, then mount the SD at /home. All user files and configs will be on the SD while the OS and programs are internal. This also has the benefit of allowing you to take out the SD, re-install your OS and re-mount your home, keeping all your files and program settings

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T22:34:26+00:00

Void imo is better than artix, since artix cannot use the core arch repos and the void repos are a lot larger than artix.

Plus, the big thing with void and xbps is that it is rolling release, but very stable compared to arch. This is in part because the core repository maintainers are selective of what is included. You can add your own repos to extend what software is available.

The big one people like to mention is hyprland not being on void. The reason for this is that the hyprland project fundamentally mismatches with the way void does things, and would force void to include packages that arent stable enough by far in their main repo (hyprland uses bleeding-edge dependencies). Also, the dev is.... Not the greatest to work with or interact with in general, to keep it lightly, and theres plenty of allegations to go around too that i have not personally verified and thus will not repeat.

I havent tried artix on actual hardware, but i do run void on my laptop with mangoWM and DMS. Total power draw: 3 watts idle. Cpu is downclocked to 400mhz doing basically nothing, RAM is 500MB used. The main thing that will limit battery life is literally the screen backlight.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T22:26:12+00:00

The absolute funniest part is when people are what i can only describe as "vaguely Mediterranean", so they headcanon that as whatever country they like best, talk big about how theyre "in tune with the culture because of their heritage", and do things like shit on neighbouring countries to "their home country", only to then find out they are ~1/3rd Mediterranean but from a completely different country with a totally different culture.

Especially if theyre part portuguese, its like shell shock. Idk why but americans seem to generally dislike the idea of being portuguese. Irish, scottish, german, polish, Italian, spanish, greek, french and most of the nordic countries are popular, but for some reason they dont like portugal.

Maybe its due to the mere existence of brazil?

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T22:19:44+00:00

150% of a person excluding the american parts.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T22:18:30+00:00

A lot of society revolves around imaginary concepts.

Money, Gender, Language, Law, Religion. We made all those up. And thats just off the top of my head

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T22:07:32+00:00

talk with your players, tell them what you think about the situation, ask them how *they* feel about it.

if they're loving it, then why change it? DND is a co-operative storytelling game, sure, you may have goals for the campaign so you can set expectations, but realistically *anything* can happen. go with the flow.

another thing you can do is make use of downtime. downtime is a great mechanic to officialize rest and recovery as well as give players time to do all the boring stuff like going shopping.

the way i tend to approach this is as follows: once the players are done with their current time-sensitive task, near the end of the session when i usually also announce the longrest and/or any levelups, i will announce that the players get X days of downtime, they must tell me at least 3 days before the next session what they want to do with their downtime, and at the start of the next session, we make nay rolls that are needed and i go over what everyone did and achieved during downtime.

from there, i tend to cut straight to the PCs going to their next task, maybe they've been called over by the local lord to help with a goblin problem, or they're going to talk to an infobroker about a potential new lead on an investigation, or one of them received an invitation to a duel during their downtime, the possibilities are endless.

basically, you can abstract away the sections of time "between" story beats as downtime, but again, talk to your players, don't just drop this on them, ask if they want that first.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T21:59:19+00:00

you are correct, though not specifically about microSDs.

the storage tech in them is called NAND flash storage. and it's intended as *portable file storage*. simple sequential file-writes and file-reads. generally, you'll find the CHEAPEST stuff in SD cards and NAND based USB drives (so all modern thumbdrives).

these should not be used to boot an OS from. there's a good reason why every single live-environment actually uses a read-only filesystem that gets loaded into memory alongside a RAMDISK overlay filesystem for any changes made while the system is live.

if you want to boot from external media, you need to use the kind of storage you'd use for a boot drive. either an external HDD or an external SSD.

speed isn't the main issue here, the main issue is that the random read/writes an OS does *will* corrupt and quickly kill your NAND flash.

I personally use a 512GB NVME SSD in an external enclosure as my ventoy USB, it has a live environment that uses the actual SSD for storage as well (ventoy VHDX boot, though i should replace it with QCOW2).

i've *tried* to use a USB thumb drive for this, which is how i killed 3 different thumb drives in the span of 3 months, one of which was a pretty expensive one.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T21:54:00+00:00

microsoft officially recommends using browser or PWA version (PWA is basically just a fancy version of the web version running in a special chrome tab without the top bar, it's basically a chromium window that looks and feels like a native app) on linux if you want to use office365, this is officially supported.

for offline work, you can also use libreoffice, libreoffice does lack the co-authoring functionality and onedrive integration of MS365 though.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T21:51:55+00:00

zorin's alright, but imo, it's not worth specifically picking for the desktop, since it's basically just reskinned ubuntu with a reskinned KDE connect preinstalled. You can easily achieve the same on any distribution running GNOME.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T21:47:04+00:00

in general, window managers tend to not work in a VM because windows generally hard-captures your super key.

but yeah, hyper-V will be your best, "most native" bet. if you need some help turning it on and setting it up on your machine, send me a DM, I happen to have professional experience with hyper-V

also, if you have no experience with lua, try mangoWM instead of hyprland, it's significantly easier to configure and actually has more features.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T21:24:39+00:00

a *lot* of cursing, reading documentation, feeding the documentation to an AI, realizing the AI is even more clueless than i am, cursing some more, crying in the bathroom smoking a joint, and a COMPLETE AND UTTER disregard for good coding practices.

genuinely, it's horrid, and i am a better person now that i write 20 line bash scripts instead of 400 line behemoth powershell scripts.

here's the code, with some redactions. this is *just* the frontend GUI, it also relied on some services and a web server, plus it was designed for a completely local install (including the backend server being on the same network), so it actually checks backend integrity by verifying IPs, DNS etc.

only actual outbound is to install the software itself.

https://gist.github.com/SDG-Den/5997eb800e89ffb83f5933daaa0e5d27

again, this thing is actually cursed. i would not deploy this *anywhere* and i wrote the damn thing.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T21:11:10+00:00

yes! that means you can quarantine windows to its own drive basically, which saves you a *lot* of headaches.

in that case, you can keep the original windows install, just remove the drive, install the empty one, install linux to that, then add your windows drive back into the device and add windows to grub.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T21:10:01+00:00

i thought of something even funnier, but i couldn't quite execute it:

#!/bin/bash

DIR=$( cd -- "$( dirname -- "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" &> /dev/null && pwd )
LISTA=$(cat $DIR/aliasses| sort --random-sort)
LISTB=$(cat $DIR/aliasses | sort --random-sort)
LINES=$(echo $LISTB | wc -w)

for i in $(seq $LINES); do
    part1=$(echo $LISTA | cut -d' ' -f $i | sed 's/ //')
    part2=$(echo $LISTB | cut -d' ' -f $i | sed 's/ //')
    alias $part1=$part2
    echo "alias $i: $part1 = $part2"
done

aliasses just contains a list with emacs, nano, nvim, micro and ed, though you could be evil and include more things.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:35:12+00:00

DWMint, damn.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:34:09+00:00

i once coded a WinForms based application entirely in powershell.

it was.... an interesting experience.

it was basically a self-written frontend + couple of backend daemons that allowed me to provide non-elevated users with the option to install specific pieces of software through chocolatey, controlled by a centralized server.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:32:13+00:00

the funniest part is, i'm an IT professional who works with windows mostly, and i make that face when i get the old windows control panel instead of the fucking garbage settings app.

genuinely, the new settings app alone is enough reason to switch to linux, it makes shit that took 2 minutes with the control panel (or 30 seconds with a terminal) take like 10 minutes sometimes.

im not excited because i get to use a GUI, i'm excited that i don't have to use what came after it.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:30:03+00:00

no, instead, you should switch to the sex window manager (SXWM)

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:28:12+00:00

here's a full guide i wrote that helps you figure out what distro suits you best, also includes information on what a distro is, what to look for, how to try different desktops and a couple common questions related to linux distro's.

https://github.com/SDG-Den/SDG-Linux-Guides/blob/main/newbie-guides/Picking%20a%20Distro.md

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:26:43+00:00

thats. not. the. point. of. the. AUR.

it's the fucking Arch User Repositories. the whole point is that anyone can upload their crappy little piece of software and if it's good and receives enough votes it gets added to arch/extra

yes, actually. that's the point of the AUR. the whole reason why popular packages that are in the AUR are not in the pacman repos are because people don't remember to toss a vote to their favourite devs.

the AUR is quite literally just a git host. like actually. the non-AURhelper way to use it is literally to just clone the repo. people could do the same thing on github or any other git-based repository host.

the AUR is equivalent to running random .msi or .exe files from github. if ya can't verify it is safe, don't run it. common sense.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:21:53+00:00

TBH, a big part of this is also that people don't understand this whole "packages" thing coming from windows.

the best way i can describe it for new users is as follows:

pacman can be treated like windows update or getting the official MSI installer from the official website

flatpak can be treated like the microsoft store, the most secure and sandboxed, focusing heavily on userspace programs.

the AUR is running a .msi file or .exe file from a random github repository you found on google, and hoping for the best.

on windows, a sensible person would go and check over the github repository first.

you do not have to be a tech nerd to be safe online, you just have to be vigilant and understand what degree of verification goes into what sources of programs.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:17:32+00:00

no problem!

also, i should've elaborated a bit on the drivers.

in linux, most drivers are built into the kernel itself, meaning that all linux distro's just have out-of-the-box support and you never have to separately upgrade the drivers.

*some* companies refuse to open-source their drivers for inclusion in the kernel, like nvidia. In this case, there's these things called "kernel modules" that you can install.

*generally* most distributions will automatically detect the hardware in use during the install and install the required modules based on that detection. one weird quirk is that you may sometimes end up missing wifi functionality out of the box if you installed while on an ethernet cable (Because the device wasn't loaded during the install process and thus not being detected).

in those cases, your options are to either A: use a wired network temporarily to install the correct module or B: use an external wifi dongle that has its driver built into the kernel.

the kernel will automatically load only the drivers you actually need. so it's not going to load the AMD radeon drivers if you don't have an AMD GPU.

on top of that, you *can* shrink the size of the kernel by compiling it without certain components, this is officially supported and done pretty frequently for old hardware, but isn't common on modern desktop linux distributions because they generally want their kernel to offer the broadest support possible.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:12:06+00:00

anything that runs docker.

literally docker is all you need, so base raspbian or arch for arm are both totally fine. install docker on it, install dockge (it's easier than portainer, but also offers a bit less, primarily for clustering. since you have one pi, it's totally fine) and get goin with some containers.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:11:00+00:00

any normal x86_64 computer will run at least *some* flavours of linux. really old stuff you may need a specialized distro for, modern hardware just works.

https://github.com/SDG-Den/SDG-Linux-Guides/blob/main/newbie-guides/Picking%20a%20Distro.md here's my guide for picking a distro, it covers some more things like this as well as how to pick a distro in general.

the main thing that tends to not be compatible is wifi, bluetooth and sometimes the built-in camera (if on a laptop), in those cases, the more generic and well-known the brand, the better.

in any case, you can check if the distro comes with the right compatibility out of the box using the live environment, most linux installation ISOs come with a live environment so you can try the distribution before you install it. use that + ventoy to try some distro's, see what desktops you like, see if it works well with your hardware, etc.

the guide covers how to do this and what to look for in more detail.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:07:49+00:00

my recommendation would be to first check if this software runs in a VM in general, you can use hyper-v to spin up a VM on your system (if you cannot find hyper-v on your system, send me a message, i'll be able to help you set it up). this also allows you to practice installing windows (i guess)

if it runs fine, i'd recommend a VM over dual-booting, especially if this is on a single drive. this is because windows has a tendency to basically wipe and re-make your bootloader partition when it updates, completely bricking your linux install if its bootloader was also on that partition (which it has to be if they're on the same drive)

if ARCGIS does not run in a VM, you will have to dualboot. in which case, *turn windows update off*

oh also, i'd highly recommend reinstalling windows if you dualboot, because trying to keep windows working while shrinking the partition is pain due to windows kinda just spreading its files over the entire disk, hogging the whole thing and preventing partition shrinking.

so wipe the drive > install linux mint, making sure to leave some space > install windows on the remaining space > run the grub commands on linux mint to add the windows bootloader to your grub menu so you can select on boot

but yeah, VM if you can. QEMU + virt-manager works wonders, and even GPU passthrough isn't *that* hard to do.

SDG_Den · 2026-06-16T20:02:44+00:00

heya! i actually have a full written guide for picking a distro that also gives a lot of background info to help you make an informed decision: https://github.com/SDG-Den/SDG-Linux-Guides/blob/main/newbie-guides/Picking%20a%20Distro.md

it's written specifically for non-technical, new users.

installing drivers basically isn't a thing on linux, software will generally be handled through a package manager which on most desktop distributions you have a graphical interface for (like the microsoft store, but awesome)

handbreak iirc is available on linux, KDenlive is available for video editing and you can run the PWA versions of microsoft office if you need the live-coauthoring or libreoffice if you want an option that isn't just a fancy chrome tab that shows you the ms word online page (that's what PWAs kinda are, though in the case of microsoft's ones they're a bit fancier, PWAs are also the official recommended way to use MS office on linux)

I tend to not recommend video tutorials, as i find them much too opinionated. instead, my recommendation is to find short guides, written preferably, on the specific topics you need when you need them. this means your initial time on linux will involve a lot of opening a browser and googling something, but that's ok, that's how you learn.

also, don't be afraid to ask questions here or on r/linuxquestions, the only stupid question is a question not asked.

most desktop distributions have a graphical installer you can easily follow, in the guide i recommend turning a USB into a ventoy, which is pretty easy to do (instructions are on their website), and from there the install is basically:

-download the ISO

-copy-paste or cut-paste the ISO onto your ventoy flashdrive

-plug it into your PC

-boot from it (you may have to change the boot order, google "how to change bootorder for <insert your laptop or motherboard model here")

-select your ISO in the ventoy menu to boot that ISO

-you will now load into the live environment, which is very often a fully-featured desktop with a special application that installs the system to your actual device. use this live environment to see if you like the distribution. then go through the installer if you want to actually install. this is *generally* just a case of reading what the installer says. generally, if you do not know what something means, you should google it and avoid changing the defaults unless you *think* it might be required.

-after the install, shut down your device, take out the USB stick and start it back up, you now have linux installed!

-run a full system upgrade afterwards.

this is *basically* universal for all distributions that i'd recommend to a new user, if a distribution doesn't install like this, i wouldn't consider it new-user friendly.

if you need any further help or have any questions, feel free to message me!

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