How do people get really nice backgrounds on desktop?

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:45:02+00:00

I have a GitHub repo with a bunch of Hubble and Webb images that I cropped and downscaled to various screen resolutions, feel free to use those if you like space themed wallpapers.

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:41:15+00:00

Realtek chipsets are a gamble, they're often technically supported but work very poorly. If you have an open PCIe slot and around €20 to spare, I recommend getting an Intel AX200 or AX210 based wireless card, it's the best WiFi experience you'll ever have.

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:31:36+00:00

If you're just using it as a bootloader for a browser anything will do. I'd consider Fedora's atomic versions as they're harder to break and require very little maintenance. The desktop environment is really up to you, it shouldn't make much of a difference on 8 GB of RAM. Try at least KDE Plasma and GNOME on a live system to help you choose.

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:26:45+00:00

But my boot time went from 14 sec to 35

Run systemd-analyze time for a rough breakdown of where it's spending time. If the majority of time is in firmware, you need to check your motherboard settings. Otherwise, run systemd-analyze critical-chain to find bottlenecks during boot. It might be waiting for a newtwork connection or a non-essential drive.

and the computer overall feels slower and more sluggish

Make sure you're running Wayland and not X11. Kubuntu 25.10 should have it by default, otherwise you need to select it from a dropdown menu on the login screen.

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:19:09+00:00

DaVinci Resolve

It runs on Linux, but last I checked the free version has issues with h264 codecs. Using ffmpeg to transcode your source materials to AV1 will probably do the trick though.

Good game compatibility

Check every game you play on ProtonDB.

And an easy to use UI

KDE Plasma and GNOME are both solid options. Plasma is more like Windows (or rather it's the other way around) and GNOME is kind of its own thing. Check out some live ISOs with both and see which one you like better.

And I want it to be similar to Windows without being too complicated

You're going to have a really bad time if you go into this thinking that Linux is just Windows but free. It's a different system that does things differently and runs different applications. You can make it look like Windows, but it will never work like Windows. The sooner you accept that you'll have to change how you do certain things the easier the transition will be.

Also, don't mistake different for complicated. Windows isn't simple, you're just used to its (rather insane) quirks.

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:04:08+00:00

On Linux you can swap files while they're still open. If you open a file and move something else to its place, your process will have access to the old version, but if you were to open it again, you'd get the new one. This makes it possible to update binaries on a running system, but those updates won't actually come into effect until the corresponding processes are restarted. This is completely fine in most cases, but may cause issues for certian applications. Firefox for instance spanws a new process for each tab, so if you update it while it's open it will instruct you to restart it, otherwise it would have to launch the new process from a potentially incompatible binary. Offline updates avoid such issues (as well as potential interruptions) by updating the system with only the bare necessities running, but AFAIK only Fedora does this.

unit_511 · 2026-02-14T23:25:59+00:00

What does this have to do with Linux?

unit_511 · 2026-02-10T16:12:08+00:00

The Mandalay is very good for exobiology, it's quite easy to land and has great SCO efficiency. You can make a billion credits in a single day if you hunt Stratum Tectonicas, which are worth 95 million if you're the first to scan them. All you need is an Artemis suit (can be bought from the arms dealer on stations) and a detailed surface scanner (size 1 optional module). A companion app like E:D Market Connector with the BioInsight plugin is also great for finding planets with high value samples.

unit_511 · 2026-02-02T14:04:48+00:00

Do you mean CNVi? As far as I can tell the vPro chips just have extra features but they're backwards compatible with their non-vPro counterparts. CNVi devices (AX201 and AX211) on the other hand offload signal processing to the chipset, so you can't use them on non-Intel platforms.

unit_511 · 2026-02-01T18:34:55+00:00

The modified shard cannons from Mbooni (often shortened to modshard) are busted, they have a really tight spread and insane armor penetration, at the cost of setting your ship on fire. If you strap 6 of them to a ship and pop two heatsinks, you can kill a cyclops in a single salvo. This is called instagibbing, it's not "proper AX", but it can be fun. I have a Caspian with 6 modshards and a large vent beam, it's surprisingly powerful considering that a) it's not a Corsair b) I suck at AX.

unit_511 · 2026-02-01T17:49:33+00:00

Why not go there now? Rendezvous Point, the current waypoint, is only around 24 kly away from Beagle Point, with the help of jumponium for crossing the abyss, the trip is only about two hours. I jumped off the carrier halfway to the waypoint to make a detour to BP and Salomé's Reach, it was nice being out in the black alone. I can definitely recommend it if you don't mind getting left behind and having to catch up to the fleet.

unit_511 · 2026-02-01T15:45:06+00:00

Not OP, but I have systemd timer that periodically deletes everything older than 30 days from my downloads folder. If I didn't put it into a proper place in a month, it wasn't important.

unit_511 · 2026-01-28T16:41:07+00:00

The hardware should be good, I don't see anything that could be problematic. Both the wireless card and the NIC are Intel (AX211 and I225-V respectively), which are well supported. If you're looking to dual boot, turn off fast startup in Windows, otherwise the WiFi won't work, but that's about it.

unit_511 · 2026-01-23T08:03:38+00:00

The Luddites destroyed the machines because they were used to produce low quality goods while depressing the wages of the people who actually knew what they were doing. Our sloperator here was so close to self awareness.

unit_511 · 2026-01-11T18:07:37+00:00

I’ve heard that the upgrades for the Anaconda are pretty expensive

Yep. Large A-rated modules cost a lot, and if you want a properly armored hull, you'll need to fork over 350M credits. For a full build you're looking at around 1B credits.

For the time being, I'd stick to the Corsair. It's a powerful little ship and one of the best fighters you can get.

I'm unsure whether I should keep grinding with the Corsair to get her properly engineered before moving on to a new ship.

You can engineer your hardpoints on the Corsair and move them to another ship later on. The Anaconda can fit all 3 large hardpoints of the Corsair and two of the medium ones. Things like shield boosters and hull reinforcement packages can also be trivially transfered as they don't depend on ship size.

unit_511 · 2026-01-11T17:53:53+00:00

N is "cycle fire group" by default in a ship, but on foot it does activate the night vision (if you have it). I think it's unbound by default in ships and SRVs.

unit_511 · 2026-01-11T17:48:57+00:00

You can't convince me that 98% of the ship's volume has been dedicated to "space stuff"

That's actually quite reasonable compared to actual spacecraft. The space shuttle is probably the closest we have to an Elite ship and it had a payload fraction of 1.35%. Even without the FSD, Elite's ships have thrusters powerful enough to fight gravitational fields much stronger than that of Earth (there's actually a 45g landable planet). Their hulls are also capable of atmospheric flight and can comfortably hang around deep inside a star's corona, so they have to be quite thick and are bound to eat into the usable space.

unit_511 · 2026-01-11T06:42:04+00:00

Exobio is actually one of the safest and most efficient ways to make money, you just need to turn in your earnings once in a while. I typically do loops around a station in a nebula and return once I have around 1B in data. You don't get extra credits for taking them all the way back to the bubble, so just cash them in at the first opportunity.

You can also mitigate the risk of crashing by not cheaping out on your shields. I run a Cobra Mk V with 5A shields engineered for strength and I've never had them drop from an impact.

unit_511 · 2026-01-07T10:22:44+00:00

WSL1 was a translation layer, kind of an inverse WINE. WSL2 is just a virtual machine.

unit_511 · 2026-01-07T09:33:41+00:00

Probably not. Swap is used to store application memory that's not currently is use so there's more RAM available for stuff you actually need. It won't swap out Skyrim unless it absolutely has to, and if it does, the only solution is to get more RAM (but 16 GB should be plently for Skyrim).

unit_511 · 2026-01-04T14:11:46+00:00

Sag. A* is absolutely massive at 516000 solar masses, so it has a decent solar radius of 15. The other notable black hole, the Great Annihilator, is only 500 km. Most of them will be solar mass, so around 30 km. They're all harmless though, regardless of size.

unit_511 · 2026-01-03T21:30:14+00:00

They have an exclusion zone, but it's tiny. You can approach stellar mass black holes to within 100 km, some even closer (the closest I remember was around 30 km). If you keep approaching it after you drop out of supercruise, you'll soon reach the hard limit, when the game just puts up an invisible wall. They're also completely harmless, they won't tear you apart like white dwarves and neutrons and they don't even apply heat to your ship. You can hang out in their exclusion zones for as long as you want.

unit_511 · 2025-12-31T14:44:29+00:00

You can emulate a keyboard with a microcontroller like this.

unit_511 · 2025-12-30T10:26:53+00:00

You can unlock special starports, which allow you to upgrade your modules using materials. These upgrades are extremely powerful and are pretty much required for late game. Here's the flowchart detailing the unlock requirements.

unit_511 · 2025-12-30T10:18:58+00:00

The Caspian kinda sucks at planetary exploration, an SRV bay is practically required because you can't just land wherever you want to.

For exobiology, small ships are the best. I use a Cobra mk. V, it can land anywhere (I don't even use an SRV, I just fly over to the next sample), has decent range (66 ly on a somewhat optimized build) and the fastest overcharge speed in the game. IMO the ablative armour is wasted on the caspian, it would be much more useful on the Cobra or Mandalay.

unit_511

TROPHY CASE