This was… a lot easier than I expected…? It was obviously a good idea to back up all my files, make sure I had access to all my most important accounts on my phone, and make sure that I had the latest version of Mint Xfce on the bootable USB, but I was so worried about doing something slightly wrong and breaking my computer that I just feel kinda silly now that I know everything just kinda works.

Well, everything except two things: firstly, it’s gonna be a pain to set up my custom Russian keyboard; secondly, RVC seems like a pain in the ass to install, but we’ll see if it’s the type of pain in the ass I can deal with in the span of six days, and it’s no huge deal if it isn’t.

Edit: I had some trouble getting it to connect to my TV via HDMI. The solution turned out to be to switch back to the open source display driver instead of Nvidia’s proprietary one LMFAO

Edit 2: Tumblerd kept me from safely ejecting my external hard drive; I ended up just terminating Tumblerd through the task manager, and that fixed the problem. Tumblerd is evidently just a thingy that generates thumbnails for files and it got stubck because it was a big hard drive with hundreds of video files.

Edit 3: I’ve got trackpad gestures working more or less like they did on Windows. Hooray.

Edit 4: I’ve got the Japanese IME (Mozc) set up and added em dash and interrobang among a few other special characters to the custom dictionary.

  • somerandomperson@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    25 days ago

    The worst case scenario is metadata corrupting.

    This is the same as force-powering off a pc. Can things go wrong? Yeah. Will it? No unless you’re the unluckiest person in the universe, espically if you’re on linux; because linux filesystems have journaling, which logs every read/write. If you force-poweroff, the incomplete writes can be undoed at boot time.

    If you use BTRFS, you’re even luckier because you can take snapshots in BTRFS, ensuring even if you somehow make things go wrong, you can undo.

    TL;DR: Mint wants you to play it safe. But you don’t have to. This is linux. You can do whatever the hell you want, and nobody will say something.

    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      25 days ago

      If you force-poweroff, the incomplete writes can be undoed at boot time.

      This is still data loss. It is better than fucking up the whole filesystem and losing everything, but it shouldn’t be turned into a habit. If you are using an application which operates on multiple files and only some of those files get committed to the disk, you can still end up in an inconsistent state where some of the files are new and some of them are old. This is especially exacerbated if you are working with large files on slow media (i.e. writing pirated movies to a USB stick). It may take several minutes for the files to write completely. The OS might even indicate the operation is finished early due to the way Linux filesystem caching works, but if you try to unmount the filesystem it will delay (potentially for minutes) while the cache flushes.

      In @Erika3sis@hexbear.net’s situation though, it’s most likely the file indexer had open file descriptors on the filesystem, preventing it from being unmounted.

      From man 8 umount:

        Note that a filesystem cannot be unmounted when it is 'busy' - for  
  example, when there are open files on it, or when some process has its  
  working directory there, or when a swap file on it is in use. The  
  offending process could even be umount itself - it opens libc, and libc  
  in its turn may open for example locale files. A lazy unmount avoids  
  this problem, but it may introduce other issues. See --lazy description  
  below.