KD^3C^3 - 20260516 Bask in the mystery

Programming note: I’m at the beach this week, so don’t expect much from me next week. 

I’m a linux user, but I try pretty hard to not be a Linux Guy. The kind of guy who espouses how great linux is at every opportunity. The guy that looks down on people who use other operating systems. The kind of Guy who says “I use linux” in the same way some people used to say “I don’t have a TV.” But I do use linux. I’ve been using it in some form or fashion most days for going on four years (maybe, I could probably check my newsletter archives and see if I talked about it there). But this week I had a linux problem. I have a KVM switch that i use to switch my monitor, mouse and keyboard (among a couple other periferials) between my work laptop (which runs windows) to my home computer that runs linux. For the whole time I’ve used linus I’ve used the Pop!_OS distribution, which was designed to be very gaming friendly. and it was! But in a recent update System76, who make Pop!_OS decided to launch their new desktop environment on the world. It’s called COSMIC (I don’t know if the all caps is necessary, but System 76 is weird about punctuation and capitalization) and its… not very good. Technically it’s still in open beta, which is sometimes code for “It doesn’t work very well” but it’s also the default when you install or upgrade. So I upgraded and gave it a shot.

To be clear, A Desktop Environment is the thing you see on you computer screen, it’s not quite the same thing as the operation system, which is the software running in the background to make everything else work. Linux is the Kernel, or core of the operating system, the distribution, or distro, is the particular flavor of the software onto of the kernel, that defines how things work and the desktop environment is how it displays everything. Since one of the core concepts behind open source tools in general, and linux in particular, is customization, you aren’t limited to the default desktop environment that comes with your distribution. Lots of people like to try out different ones trying to find the specific environment that they like. And if they’re turbo dorks, to go a step further and customize the desktop environment even further. 

So I updated to COSMIC on Pop!_OS, even if I had some reservations. and what I found wasn’t great. Things mostly worked, but that “mostly” was actually less than it was previously. The real kicker came when I was using my KVM switch to jump between my work computer and my gaming computer at the end of my work day. I pushed the button and… nothing. Previously it was a quick change, I could log into my computer and get a quick round of Splay the Spire 2 in after work. But now, the computer really struggled. It showed me a blank screen, and in my troubleshooting, I was able to get it to start working again by power cycling my monitors. Not an ideal solution, but at least it was something. 

But then even that stopped working after a week or so. I finally had to force power cycle the whole computer but when I did that something went wrong (no idea what specifically) and my boot drive stopped working. I could boot the computer, but the encryption tool couldn’t see the hard drive to decrypt and load the OS and my stuff. I did a fair amount of searching for answers on reddit and the System76 support page, but none of the solutions provided cleared the issue. I eventually managed to boot into the computer through a live flash drive, where I could identify and temporarily decrypt the boot drive, but that still didn’t let me boot from that drive when I needed to.

this took place over a few days, and eventually I had resigned myself to losing the data on the computer. Thankfully there wasn’t much of value. My games are all re-downloadable and most of them store save information in the cloud so after redownloading I can jump right back in. And by booting in with the flash drive, I could copy anything irreplaceable onto another computer over the network. This mostly consisted of cat pictures and recordings of my podcast. 

I had also decided at this point, that since I had to start over, I might as well do so with a new operation system. Pop!_os had lost my trust and I had been thinking about switching anyway. This was as good an opportunity as I was going to get. I weighed my options, watched some youtube videos and eventually settled on Bazzite, because like Pop!_OS, it was designed to be easy for me, and despite being a linux user, I actually do like when things are easy sometimes. 

So I installed Bazzite and, at least 3 days in, things are pretty good! I got lucky in that my second drive was still fully accessible (guess that wasn’t encrypted) and so roughly half of my library was already waiting for me when I booted up. Still had to download a few things, mostly the games that are up for the Best Game Hugo Award, because I want to put a little time into each one before voting.