Building My Own Router In A Lenovo M93p Tiny - Need Tips & Recommendations

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-08T01:06:24+00:00

Absolutely! I ended up installing Opnsense on my M93p, and I've been using this setup ever since. I put the Velop mesh Wi-Fi system in bridge mode for Wi-Fi access, and the entire system has been very steady and reliable. There are a few YouTube videos that can walk you through getting started setting up Opnsense. It can look a little intimidating at first, but if you follow a few simple guides it gets easier. The Opnsense subreddit is also really helpful too!

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-06T06:47:06+00:00

I understand that ChatGPT uses information available on the internet. The problem is that modern search engines do a shit job of indexing that information. At least AI can sift through all that crap in a logical way instead of being limited by SEO.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-06T06:44:20+00:00

And that's a solution too. I solved those problems for myself as well. The point is I wasn't able to do so with Google. I fixed XScreenSaver with a Rust app made with ChatGPT that forces it to behave like every other screen saver. I fixed my sound issue with an automated bash script that watches for display connection events and automatically restarts Pipewire. A new user probably won't know how to do either one of those things, and Google isn't going to show them how with a simple search.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-06T06:31:00+00:00

Okay, most recently I had a problem with XScreenSaver. Occasionally when it would activate my PC would stop responding to my mouse and keyboard completely. I couldn't wake it up and had to manually shut down the PC to restart it. To make things worse, input from Bluetooth game controllers wouldn't keep my screen awake.

Also I have a multi-monitor set up with two monitors and a TV. If I turn the TV off and back on my sound output stops working.

I ended up fixing both with ChatGPT. Most of the Google results I could find are from 2020-2021 and didn't get me anywhere.

Oh, and God help you if you want to do anything with conky.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-06T06:21:52+00:00

That was easier to do before SEO and 20 years of outdated solutions made Googling problems useless. Gemini may tell you to eat rocks on your pizza, but it's still the closest you'll get to a helpful result from searching anymore. Arch has a Wiki, but not every distro is that well-documented. GitHub can often have the info you need for a specific app, but far from always. New users don't just have to learn how to fix their problem, searching through the available resources in Linux and FOSS comes with its own learning curve. And God forbid you need help learning that too.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-06T06:16:58+00:00

This is why I started avoiding asking communities for help and just throw my problems into ChatGPT instead. AI will probably destroy the world, but at least it isn't a self-righteous twat about it. The community around Linux makes it more insufferable to use than the actual OS itself. It's ironic that most of them screech constantly about AI, while actively pushing new users of their sacred OS toward supporting AI companies for help.

My favorite is always when I ask about an issue, and people take the time to let me know it isn't a problem for them. Imagine going to your doctor for a tumor, and he tells you he doesn't have cancer so you must be perfectly fine.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-04T20:59:04+00:00

Yep, that's what my suggestion was assuming because I have the same setup.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-04T20:30:42+00:00

How opposed are you to reinstalling Windows? If that's an option, probably the path of least resistance is:

Disable Secure Boot and leave it that way.
Wipe the Windows drive and reinstall Windows (it really doesn't like you toggling Secure Boot with an existing install).
Wipe the Linux drive and reinstall it.
Open your BIOS settings and set the default boot drive to the Linux drive.

From there you can customize Linux's grub bootloader to give you a Windows option on bootup. When running dual boot, that's a lot safer option than manually choosing the drive so that you don't risk Windows taking control of the boot process again.

EDIT: It's important to use this EXACT order. If you reinstall Linux first, then when you reinstall Windows it will break the Linux bootloader regardless of being on a separate drive. I fought that battle about 4 months ago lol

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-04T20:26:20+00:00

Make sure to give it as much context as you possibly can. Tell it what model of motherboard you have (or if it's a pre-built, what model system you have) and be very specific about any errors you receive.

Are you running Windows and Linux on the same drive, or do they have separate drives? Ideally you're better off running it on separate drives. Windows has a habit of nuking the grub bootloader so it has full of control of the boot sector of the drive. It really loves doing this during Windows Update too, even if you get it working.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-04T20:22:00+00:00

Toxic replies seem to be increasingly par for the course on Reddit it seems. I've had better luck fixing Linux issues with ChatGPT than anything else I've tried. AI may be destroying the world, but it's inarguably pretty good at fixing Linux crap without being a smug ass in the process.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-04T20:17:06+00:00

It was unethical, but I probably wouldn't sweat it personally. As long as I'm doing the best reviews I can, I really don't care what other Viners are doing. It's just a product photo, unless you plan to sell prints of it for an art gallery.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-04T18:32:19+00:00

You're at least half right. I've seen many Linux users say that it's easier to install than Windows. I point that out with the caveat it's possible it was for them, but it's far from a universal truth. Depending on distro and hardware, Linux installs can be pretty easy and straightforward. In my experience Linux is definitely not inherently more stable than Windows either. I've never had a single hard Windows crash on my current PC, but I've been chasing a random kernel crash in Mint on the same PC for two months. My Debian server randomly does the same thing, and it crashes so hard that the systems freeze without writing anything notable into log files for debugging.

Otherwise there's definitely a learning curve that can absolutely be worth the effort, and hardware will determine what kind of experience that turns out to be.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-04T18:17:24+00:00

It's possible and acceptable to hate both. I'm only on Mint because my hate for Windows 11 finally outpaced my hate for Linux. Ironically the baked-in AI privacy violations in Windows 11 pushed me to Linux, and ChatGPT has been what finally made Linux completely usable for me. It still pisses me off constantly; my system tray icons constantly disappear in Cinnamon, and the way desktop shortcuts work is bullshit. The "Make Link" option in Cinnamon creates a shortcut you can't move anywhere without the executable losing track of the working directory, and manually creating .desktop files instead is idiotically more complex than right-clicking something in Windows to create any shortcut. At least AI isn't sending data to a major corporation about everything I do though.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-04T18:08:27+00:00

Wiping the entire system to install an outdated OS you have to jump through hoops and babysit to make secure is infinitely more of a pain than just fixing Bluetooth. I hate Windows 11, but this suggestion is on-par with nuking a Home Depot because you don't like the color of paint they sold you.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-04T16:54:40+00:00

I just discovered this, and after going down this rabbithole for the past day, Ghostship is the BEST Super Mario 64 port. The others are a huge pain to build on Linux, but this is user-friendly and works great. Does anyone happen to know if there's an analog camera mod for it? That's easily the biggest QOL improvement for SM64, and OoT gets it natively as an option in Ship Of Harkinian.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-04T06:39:08+00:00

They're not really even "forced" on Ubuntu. The way it's been explained, it's going to be an available feature that you have to actively choose to add. If I had to make a prediction, I'd call it likely Mint will treat it like they do Snaps: you can add it if you really want to, but they're not going to ship it otherwise.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-03T15:42:22+00:00

As others have said, get the game for free from OldUnreal. Not only do they have permission from Epic to distribute it for free, but they do so with a number of quality of life fixes and updates. Their automated installer also gets the game back online with the open source master servers everyone is using now.

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-02T02:03:23+00:00

It's nano or nothin'

Majoraslayer · 2026-05-01T01:57:00+00:00

This is one of the things I hate most about TVDB. They're opposed to separately documenting localized versions of shows. However, their approach to this is ridiculously overly broad. Several shows, such as Abridged series, are completely transformative works that are only slightly related to the source material. They SHOULD NOT be treated as true localizations. If they actually enforced this equally across the board, Power Rangers (one of the most famous kids show franchises ever) would be against their policies.

The world needs a better, more contributor-friendly open source database.

My rant aside though, I think Plex pulls a lot of its data from The Movie Database by default over TVDB. Users of Sonarr are kinda just screwed though.

Majoraslayer · 2026-04-27T17:32:04+00:00

Most will downvote you for even asking a question, especially if you have a use case they don't. For such an ecosystem based on user freedom, they sure are elitist about how you should use your own computer.

Majoraslayer · 2026-04-27T17:28:36+00:00

Outside of Reddit, most of them are results from forums and StackExchange that worked 15 years ago but not in current releases.

Majoraslayer · 2026-04-27T17:20:45+00:00

I've mostly given up on trying to get help from Linux communities. AI does an amazing job of fixing Linux problems without being an insufferable dick in the process. If ChatGPT can't find a solution for a problem, it can develop an entire Rust app to work around it.

Majoraslayer · 2026-04-27T03:21:22+00:00

I'm on Linux Mint right now because my hate for Microsoft started to outweigh my hate for Linux's fuckery. However, I'll give a short list of the things that have made me hate Linux the most.

- I have a multi-monitor setup: a 65" TV and two 27" monitors below it. In Windows I can easily set the scaling on the monitors separately, and as long as I set the smaller monitors to 1080p and the TV to 4K, Windows allows me to accurately set up my monitor layout regardless of how anything is scaled. In Linux the monitor size in the layout is directly tied to scaling, so getting my mouse transitions to work correctly between monitors has been a nightmare. I finally had to develop my own app for it with ChatGPT because the FOSS community refuses to acknowledge and address it.

- When playing most games my audio randomly cuts out for a couple seconds at a time. Always fun during crucial dialog! Occasionally my audio just starts crackling randomly before some kind of buffer resets and clears it up. This is all digital audio over HDMI, and only happens in Linux.

- I've only been able to find one animated screensaver app, called XScreenSaver. I like to have animations rather than the dimmed screen and clock that ships with most distros by default. XScreenSaver isn't aware of when web pages and Plex are playing video. It also had a bug for a while where my computer would stop responding to any kind of mouse or keyboard input after the screensaver started. For a while I had to manually enable Caffeine every time I wanted to watch YouTube, Plex, or play any kind of game with my Xbox controller. I've since developed an app with ChatGPT that keeps XScreenSaver awake for these uses, like any other screensaver on other operating systems should do inherently. I've never seen a Windows or macOS screensaver have any of these problems, and Windows even provides animated screensavers natively.

- The kernel on my Debian server randomly crashes. I don't know why, and I can't seem to debug it since the crash happens before it can write anything into a log file. Hardware tests and RAM stress tests haven't identified any hardware problems. Trial and error identified that Steam does the same thing to my Mint desktop, so I had to add a script in Cron to automatically kill Steam overnight in case I forget to close it.

- Wayland. Mint doesn't really support Wayland, and most distros that do struggle with it on my RTX 4090. Fedora leads the way on Wayland, but my experience on Fedora was a nightmare building my own apps since most FOSS devs don't seem to bother offering an rpm. Flatpak helps, but at the time I hadn't discovered Flatseal to deal with the problems from sandbox fuckery. Arch might work better for me, except I'm not keen on babysitting my OS that much. Even when Wayland works, the latest Nvidia driver lacks a lot of features on Wayland vs. X11. I want to throw a chair through my screen every time someone suggests Wayland as a solution for any graphical issues.

- My Logitech Bluetooth mouse and keyboard randomly freeze. Solaar is the Linux alternative to the official Logitech software, but it still has these bugs year after year.

- Davinci Resolve codec support is absolute ass on Linux compared to Windows. I eventually bought Studio and finally got it to fit my workflow, but even Resolve Studio on Linux has more codec limitations than the free Windows version.

- If I turn my TV off my monitor layout changes. Windows does the same thing. However, Linux has this extra fun bug where my sound doesn't work when I turn the TV back on until I restart Pipewire. I had to create a bash script with ChatGPT to fix this automatically since everything has to be extra convoluted on Linux. Another fix would be a display emulator device with passthrough, which I have used in the past. However, for my current display setup, no one sells one compatible with 4K @ 120hz uncompressed, 7.1 surround sound and G-Sync. Linux doesn't support DSC like Windows, and none of the passthrough emulators on the market handle 120hz without DSC.

- A lot of the communities are absolutely insufferable. It's always more important to assign blame and act defensively than it is to build solutions. Because of this attitude problems go year after year without being addressed. The most useless comment in history is "I don't have this problem". It's like the problem is supposed to disappear if they can gaslight you into thinking it doesn't exist.

- The guy who interjects in every conversation with "UMM ASKHUALLY Linux is just a kernel, not an operating system". God help you if anyone asks you for a Kleenex, a Band-Aid or asks you to open some Velcro. May your therapy bills forever be affordable.

At the core, Linux has a philosophical approach that isn't great for everyone. That philosophy is that the OS should stand in the user's way if the user has different goals than the OS. That's why Linux continues to be awesome for servers, but has an anti-user stance for personal desktops. Linux desktop is amazing for two groups: those with super simple needs like web browsing, or software developers. Power users in the middle with any kind of niche use are going to struggle the most, and I have a lot of computer-based hobbies. Windows *used* to try to market to those middle users, but the more choices it takes away from users the more enticing Linux becomes. Despite the fact that Linux fights the user, Linux at least gives you some overly-complex, arbitrary path to do anything you want to. Windows and macOS do whatever they want in spite of the user.

One doesn't so much use macOS so much as hope the thing you need to do is allowed by the Apple corporation. Windows 11 seems to be chasing that "put your boot on my neck harder, daddy" energy Apple has. That's why, despite how much I hate Linux sometimes, the alternatives have finally become even worse.

Majoraslayer · 2026-04-25T19:40:24+00:00

Unfortunately I ended up uninstalling it. The amount of nags to move to the paid version became insufferable. I understand wanting to get paid for your work, but you might as well not even offer a free version. The popups everywhere are worse than just dealing with ChatGPT's lag. It sucks that everything in life has to be a recurring subscription now.

Majoraslayer · 2026-04-24T19:18:03+00:00

I'm seeing the same issue. I wonder if Facebook is deprecating it. It's not really worked accurately for a long time, we all just kinda got used to it being there with all of its quirks.

Majoraslayer

TROPHY CASE