Generally speaking, idle unpaid accounts like this are either sold by the creditors to a third party debt collector, resetting the clock, or they will sue you for the non-payment to get a judgment or lien, resetting the clock.

The only sure bet is bankruptcy, which will drop off your report after a period of time that varies from state to state in the U.S. (generally from 7 to 10 years). Not sure is this applies outside the U.S.

Regarding the heating/cooling, if you’re home is decently insulated look into supercooling in the summer months. At higher temperatures your heat pump has to work harder to cool down the home. By running cooling overnight when temperatures are lower, it uses less power to the same result.

I cool my home to 68f from 2 am until 8 am on a schedule, and then the heat pump stays off until the indoor temps reach 74f. It’s provided a good amount of energy savings and helped me exceed the quoted power offset on my solar setup.

Use credit cards as cash, and pay off the balance weekly. This protects your bank account from fraud, as chargebacks and fraud are more easily dealt with on credit, and they tend to have better account monitoring and security than banks and credit unions. Even better if you have a cash-back/points card, that’s basically free money.

This also makes it easy to track spending if you have specific purpose credit cards. E.g, one card for groceries and gas, another for recurring bills or service payments, another for frivolous stuff, etc.

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Even if you have no other investments, open a high yield savings account and keep the bulk of your funds there, other than what you need for a general emergency fund and monthly bills. Current yields are over 4%, generally better than inflation, without any risk.

It’s not a picnic, and doesn’t have to be. Without the bad we wouldn’t always appreciate the good things in life. I’ve been fortunate, I’m living well these days, happily married, and haven’t suffered from depression in probably over a decade now (though anxiety is an ever present low buzz in the background. I’m used to it).

But that phrase is irksome. What doesn’t kill you doesn’t always make you stronger. Sometimes it fucks up your life. Sometimes it’s a roadblock, other times it’s life altering in unforeseen ways, and occasionally the consequences of what doesn’t kill is a tragic fate worse than death.

Tripping and falling might not kill me, might just lead to embarrassment. Or it could lead to CTE or irreversible brain damage from head trauma. Certainly not stronger for that sort of thing.

I’m a fan of “what doesn’t kill you only serves to postpone the inevitable.” But maybe that’s a bit fatalistic.

Give me more of this and less of the politics. This is what I come to Lemmy for.

Too little too late. They lost what goodwill they might have had with me. I dealt with that for months until I decided to flip it. I won’t be using Ubuntu in the future unless for some awful reason I specifically need an Ubuntu server (and in that case I’d still push for Almalinux or another alternative).

That delay happens on first launch every boot. Also the automatic updates happening basically whenever is nonsense. It should tell me an update is needed, not just kick it off whenever it feels like. That kind of crap is why I use Linux and not Windows, and now why I don’t use Ubuntu.

Well. in the modern day, there’s Ubuntu 22.04 and up with their insistence on snaps for many otherwise native apps. For example, Firefox as a snap and taking anywhere from 30 seconds to up to 2 minutes to launch when you first open it.

I used Ubuntu for years, pretty much from 16.04 all the way up to 22.04 but that was a line for me and I ditched it for Manjaro. The experience has been much better overall.

Snaps should be for applications that may not receive updates on current systems or have a hard dependency on old libraries for some reason. Things like Spek come to mind. To use if for something like Firefox, and not only use it, but insist on it to the point you can’t install the native version without ridiculous workarounds… it’s absurd. And on top of this, it’s especially dumb because flatpak already existed prior to snap, but as usual Canonical had to be special instead of working with community standards.

Amazon based search results integrated in the Unity dash beg to differ. Canonical has a history of being shitty.

These are things for any OS though. I mean, on XFCE I spend time setting up my preferred shortcuts, software, tools, etc.

On Mac, install rectangle, shortcuts, debloat. There’s no perfect default for everyone.

The Steam deck is a special case because it’s literally a gaming handheld (though the term handheld for that thing is admittedly loose).

And there’s still some things even with the deck. Did you set up emudeck? Heroic launcher? Configure it for desktop mode?

I don’t see any of that. Cortana is disabled via settings toggle, no AI stuff, start menu web search is disabled. Updates are set to automatic download only and are only run upon shutdown if I choose “update and shutdown” instead of just doing shutdown.

I dunno, there are legitimate things to complain about with Windows, but none of this really fits.

In my case I power on, Steam launches, and I run a game. When done, I press the power button and it shuts down. That’s it.

I don’t need a push, a Linux machine is my daily driver (and has been for something like 8+ years now), and I’ve worked in IT doing virtualization/automation/data management and compliance for several years. I spend a lot of time in the terminal.

To me the Windows gaming PC is essentially a console, no different than a PS5 or a Switch is to someone else. It’s been up and running as such since before Proton was fully viable and for its use case I don’t see a need to change it until it’s due for a rebuild/replacement/upgrade.

That was just one example. And I’d you review that page you linked, they don’t all disagree, there were more than a few reporting issues with it. It’s gold rated, but not platinum.

I’m glad you’re enjoying the experience, but either way the point I was making is that my gaming PC is just an appliance. It works and I have enough other things to do that I don’t feel like reinstalling the OS and a butt-ton of games.

When I need to do a rebuild/upgrade in the future I’ll likely revisit Linux with it, but until then I don’t see the point. I only turn it on a few hours a week to game and otherwise it’s off. And when it is on, I just want to game, not potentially spend time fiddling or troubleshooting if something isn’t as expected.

I have some games I play that do not play nice with Proton. In particular, my wife and I are pretty obsessed with Solasta: Crown of the Magister (over 500 hours and counting), which has poor compatibility in wine and proton to my understanding.

Besides, for now I don’t need the hassle. I boot up gaming PC, Steam launches, I play, then I shut down. I don’t need an excuse to leave the gaming rig powered on when I’m not using it. Maybe if and when I end up rebuilding it.

Same. I main a Manjaro mini-PC but have a separate Windows gaming rig. No ads. I did use a reg key to disable start menu web search a while back but otherwise haven’t made any system changes.

You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.

For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.

I’m still working in tech (remotely), but otherwise living the “hermit in a cabin” lifestyle. It’s nice.

Manjaro has a pretty great out of the box experience, everything just works via the GUI, including software management (and even pulling packages from the Arch AUR repos).

I use the terminal out of preference, and because it’s where I’m comfortable, but I can’t think of any situation it’s actually needed for general desktop use.

XFCE 4 Life.