My dad called me up at 11:30 PM telling me that his computer wasn't booting. I drive over to see what was going on. I notice immediately that the motherboard light is a solid amber light.

Me: "The motherboard is amber, that means it's failing to POST".

Dad: "How soon can we fix it? I need to run my Ebay business."

Me: "A week probably. You have a laptop that works can you use that?"

Dad: "It doesn't work great with Windows, it's not a very powerful compu"

Me: "You're going to use Linux dad. Welcome to Linux."

Storytime!

This customer comes in and practically throws a computer on the counter.

Customer: This computer isn't working. I've ran the diagnostics and it says it's software. *places a dvd case with a 32 bit Windows 7 disk in it on the counter* It had Windows 10 on it, but I want Windows 7 on it.

Me: Well, you may have issues with the drivers if you put Windows 7 on it--

Customer: I don't care, I just want Windows 7.

Me: You SHOULD care. That means no wifi, no display, no mouse... Windows 7 doesn't like Windows 10 hardware.

Customer: Then... check to see Windows 7 compatibility!

Me: Alright.... *makes notes to check for Windows 7 compatibility*

Me: So has this Windows 7 been used before?

Customer: Yes, it has.

Me: On how many computers?

Customer: I've installed it on two computers and it works just fine.

Me: That's weird because Windows license keys are for one computer only. Are both of them connected to the internet?

Customer: Yes.

Me: Well, okay then... *finishes up ticket*

Customer: I work in this field and I just don't understand why they don't come with the disks anymore. How much is a Windows 10 disk?

Me: *gives price*

Customer: And do you have any?

Me: Let me check *I go to where they are, find some and come back out*

Me: Unfortunately we're out at the moment and would have to special order some back in.

Customer: OK. So then how much to fix this computer?

Me: *price of installing Windows and backing up data*

Customer: That's halfway to the price of a new one of these!

Me: Well yes, an HP at Walmart... But you do have that option if you want to take it.

Customer: Well, why does it cost that much?

Me: Well, it's $labor1 to install Windows, $labor2 to do some basic setup and drivers, and $labor3 to backup and restore data.

Customer: Oh, well I don't want data.

Me: Okay, well then it would be $total - $labor3

Customer: ...Okay, fine

Me: *updates the ticket*

When she finally left I put it on the bench and the first message said "SMART ERROR." I then did 4 different tests that said "lol, the hard drive is failing."

If you "worked in this field," you would know that a SMART error is hard drive related.

If you worked in this field, you would know that Windows is only a 1PC license, so why are you lying about installing it with no issues on other computers?

If you worked in this field, you would know you would want a 64bit Windows on your computer.

If you worked in this field, you would know how to find a Windows 10 installation media online.

If you worked in this field, you would know that HPs are not good computers to get.

IF YOU FUCKING WORKED IN THIS FIELD YOU WOULDN'T BE SUCH A FUCKING CUNT.

At my previous job, the person in charge of the Phabricator server didn't have a backup system in place. I yelled at him until he implemented one.

He had the server perform backups to the same drive. I yelled at him again, to no avail.

Well, after awhile the hard drive started failing, and it would only boot intermittently. After a lot of effort, he was able to salvage part of the backup data, but no more, meaning we lost a lot of bug reports and feedback, and developer tickets. We were able recover all of the older lost tickets from a previous server, so overall the loss was pretty small.

But I think he learned his lesson.
He definitely learned to listen.

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

!code

I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.

I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.

I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.

Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.

After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.

So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.

what the crap? why?

So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.

Windows greets me.
Again.

What the hell?

At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.

But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.

If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.

Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

I had security reopen our test-user last week. I could run the tests once, then they started failing with "blocked user due to too many attempts at logging in". Huh, that's weird. I go through everything, every script, every scheduled task, every nook and cranny of every drive on every machine I could reach, and make sure the password is updated everywhere. Reopen account. Same shit.

I email around to some people, they don't use it, one guy asks if I checked x, y and z, I did. Then he's sure we don't use it anywhere else.

It's one of our fucking contractors that took one of our scripts (that they're supposed to have duplicate copies of) and forgot to change to their own credentials. That's literally the agreement, take our scripts and change the user and run them on your machines.

Afhfjdkdhdjdbd stop locking me out of everything with your incompetence. I email them, some cunt gets back to me asking for the new password. NO. USE. YOUR. OWN. CREDENTIALS. I KNOW YOU HAVE THEM, THEY'RE HERE IN THE LIST AND BEING USED IN ALL OTHER SCRIPTS AAAAAAAAAHHH

Some old couple screaming I was a liar and a thief because I told them their HDD needed to be exchanged because I wasn't able to install any OS on it... It kept failing on every CD / pen drive I used but it worked with the other store... I left them screaming alone outside the store after telling them to have a good day with a poker face...

I'm the only one working on this anymore and every toolchain supporting the system (remember, we're using an ARM9 [initial strap CPU] AND an ARM11 (give or take an ARM7 slaved to the ARM9 that we don't have support for yet), all in tandem, and the only toolchain that remotely works is for ARM6 for some reason) hates the Linux kernel. Current goals: SD R/W support (currently RO), X, GNUTools, maybe a better fucking softkey driver (i'll have to find whoever made this one and fucking beat him), and a working joy2mouse/touch2mouse driver. Oh, and figure out if Swap would work either with the New 2DS/3DS' Bonus Drive (unused 64MB partition on NAND) without killing the NAND as the SD access is max. 1.2 MB/s read/write speed or so, which isn't fast enough for swap AND other things.

Currently working:
Busybox
Read-only SD support
Weston (term only, can't click)
Standard 3DS/Standard 2DS/New 3DS (Models before 2017, the non-foldables, rebranded standard 2DSes) features only, not yet New 3DS/New 2DS-enhanced

Currently failing final compile because toolchain:
Preliminary custom R/W SD support

So, here I am at a guided internship programme, hosted by Indian Railways.

They told us to report at the Personnel Office by 10:00 AM. When I reached there, they told us the venue has been changed (to a place 1km away, with no transportation) and the official "forgot" to inform the 500+ candidates.

Yet, we moved to the said Hall, and am waiting for 1 hour (10:59 AM here), watching :
1. The stupid technician trying to align the projector
2. The stupid presenter trying to copy something and failing, as his pen drive gets disconnected halfway the process.
3. The VIPs having snacks and coffee on-stage while we the students wait here looking at those dumb assholes.

How am I supposed to respect them tomorrow at work?

Sorry, need to vent.

In my current project I'm using two main libraries [slack client and k8s client], both official. And they both suck!

Okay, okay, their code doesn't really suck [apart from k8s severely violating Liskov's principle!]. The sucky part is not really their fault. It's the commonly used 3rd-party library that's fucked up.

Okhttp3

yeah yeah, here come all the booos. Let them all out.

1. In websockets it hard-caps frame size to 16mb w/o an ability to change it. So.. Forget about unchunked file transfers there... What's even worse - they close the websocket if the frame size exceeds that limit. Yep, instead of failing to send it kills the conn.

2. In websockets they are writing data completely async. Without any control handles.. No clue when the write starts, completes or fails. No callbacks, no promises, no nothing other feedback
3. In http requests they are splitting my request into multiple buffers. This fucks up the slack cluent, as I cannot post messages over 4050 chars in size . Thanks to the okhttp these long texts get split into multiple messages. Which effectively fucks up formatting [bold, italic, codeblocks, links,...], as the formatted blocks get torn apart. [didn't investigate this deeper: it's friday evening and it's kotlin, not java, so I saved myself from the trouble of parsing yet unknown syntax]

yes, okhttp is probably a good library for the most of it. Yes, people like it, but hell, these corner cases and weird design decisions drive me mad!

And it's not like I could swap it with anynother lib.. I don't depend on it -- other libs I need do!

TL;DR: I'm stressed out over choosing a side project because of the commitment and fear of failure :(

I'm a student and summer vacation starts in 3 days (and actually has already started for me, thanks to a "smartly planned" hospital stay), so I'm currently looking for a cool project to start. This will be my third summer vacation during which I want to make complete a project, and I never actually did it. The first year, I couldn't think of any reasonable, doable project which would be interesting and fitting for the time scope (I was quite new to programming back then, so I probably couldn't have done things that would be interesting to me, an any project that I could've done would just take 20 minutes, cause I wouldn't understand anything more complex). The second time, I chose a project too big with too much new things I had to learn on the go. I actually pushed through for nearly a week, but then I realized that I only completed like 25% in that time, so I lost my motivation, thinking I could never finish it, while not wanting to start a complete new project, because that would've felt like wasting the time I put into my first project. It was still a valuable project and I learned a lot by doing it, but this year I want to actually finish a project; so I'm really stressed out right now trying to come up with a good project.
Usually I have millions of vague ideas in my head, but as soon as it comes to choosing, every single one seems to be the wrong one, or I forget about all of them. Everything that kinda interests me seems way to big and complicated to me, but I sometimes feel like I'm just underestimating my abilities, but on the other hand I have ~25 projects on my hard drive, of which 4 or 5 are finished and most will never be finished. :/
And it's just so overwhelming to choose something like that, because on one hand I really want to do a bigger project that I actually finish, and summer vacation is the only time I have so much time to code, and I love coding, but on the other hand choosing such a project that I will work 2-3 weeks on is too much commitment and also I'm anxious about failing it and never finish it, just abandon a buggy mess. Am I the only one to feel that way, or are you too having problems choosing side problems?

And, I guess if you have any ideas for a suitable project (literally anything, so that I might be exposed to some new ideas), just comment it.

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

I knew this might be an issue, but really Linux just sucks balls. It may not be Linux's fault, but the user experience could be a fuck ton better.

Spent 1.5 hours trying to get mint installed on second drive. It works fine if you don't want to do anything with it.

As you can probably surmise I died on getting the gpu driver installed. Just starts to a black screen. No amount of juggling is helping. It just refuses to show the screen with an nvidia driver installed. What is worse is that settings that might help are not set. Like nomodeset in grub. If you know some drivers fuck up the grub interface then add nomodeset and not leave it up to the user to "figure this shit out". Because users are tired of figuring this shit out.

Really really fucking disappointed. I thought to myself: lets install steam and see how it does. The reality: fucking stuck for 1.5 hours on trying to boot into x with graphics acceleration and failing.

Many of you hate on windows, but one thing it has going for it. It doesn't do fucked up shit like this. It has failsafes that try and account for this.

Fuck you linux. You need to fucking grow up and stop relying on users to fix every damn thing in the command line. Go back to server where you belong.

I know I will get the "I told you so" messages, but guess what? The computer I got doesn't come preinstalled with windows. You have to pay to get it. At this point windows is the only fucking viable solution to make my shit work.

Nvidia, go die in a fire bitch. Fix your fucking Linux support you worthless shit heads.

This has been a rant brought to you by "the pain of others". I hope you enjoyed the experience.

PS, I love you all. Even the "I told you so" bitches.

I was copying data from a failing zfs drive with rsync and I noticed that it spent a long time on the file ~/.local/share/Baloo/index

du -h index showed a 500ish MB file which didn't seem large enough to take this long.

I recalled that du shows disk usage, not file size and since I was using zfs compression they could be quite different.

so I added -A for apparent size:

du -hA index and it comes back with 1.7E

The file was 1.7 exabytes...

Week 1 Day 1

It's a little late to do a whole big list of things I want to change going into 2018 so I'll just keep this focused on one thing: I do NOT want to work a minimum wage job by the end of 2018, preferably by the end of May.

So I'm gonna change that; starting now. I got accepted to the Grow with Google Challenge scholarship I may or may not have applied to while blackout drunk and I realize that drunk me was watching out for sober me. He set up a good start to getting me away from unloading trucks at 2AM and into a nice comfy chair where I can replace physical pain with mental anguish. But all kidding aside I'm really excited to start this course but I have no drive and motivation is a little hard to come by around here (The Fairy Godmother is MIA) so I'm going to be posting these rants daily in the hopes that it keeps me obligated to not waste the opportunity given to me. So without further ado, day 1 everybody.

I started today really simple. I signed up for a slack account, got Udacity set up so I was officially enrolled and everything, then moved on to setting up my laptop for android development. I wanted a fresh start so I when ahead and wiped my hard drive and looked at a few different OSes to see what fit my needs. After trying to mess around with Arch Linux and failing, I moved to Debian, I liked Debian a lot but I'm not completely comfortable with it just yet and I don't want to waste a lot of time having to familiarize with a new OS when I just want to dig in. So eventually I ended up with Windows 10, for the convenience and ease of use, but decided to put a spin on it and download the Ubuntu subsystem for W10 so I could still practice on something similar to a GNU/Linux OS. So far everything is set up, I have the only 4 applications I will need: chrome, android studio, google play Music, and devrant of course, and I intend to keep all other distractions off of this machine. Overall I'm feeling really good and I'll follow up tomorrow with some actual coding and whatnot and we'll go for there.

Let me tell you about my wonderful weekend. It all started with a game that doesn't run in wine and it ended up in the biggest nightmare of Windows Update and EFI configuration.
1 - let's boot on my Windows partition to play trackmania 2.
2 - Windows Update interrupts me while driving a track.
3 - Update keep failing over and over again.
4 - I keep trying things to fix Windows Update, but with no success.
5 - Let's try system restore, failed
6 - Let's try to do a reset. "You don't have a recovery drive". Oh, right...
7 - Let's try to upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 10, just because. Nope, "we could not determine if your pc can run Windows 10". Wait what....
8 - I guess I'll be reinstalling this trash. "Nope, can't. Don't like that partition I just formatted". Of course you can't...
9 - Had to delete the partition and let it create new ones. It created a new EFI partition. Just why???
10 - Okay that worked. Let's fix grub now.
11 - Maybe not, let's try rEFInd, because it looks fancy.
12 - After rebooting on the live USB for about 50 times and reconfiguring rEFInd without any luck, I realised the install script didn't install fs drivers for ext4. Oh, right... That's why you didn't find any Linux kernel...
13 - It can't boot windows, they're using a different EFI partition. Let's move rEFInd to the new EFI partition windows created for me.
14 - Finally everything works again. So much effort to play a freaking game without being bothered by windows update. And rEFInd abience theme looks beautiful.

I've got to say though, I learned a lot and the Arch wiki is awesome!

So on my computer I have 3 drives. I had two m.2 ssds and one sata ssd. I thought I had misc data on my sata. Turns out I had it on the second m.2. So I have been running my game installs off of the slower sata... I found out because I am updating my m.2 drives to 2TB from 1TB. What is funny is the data on the second m.2 is just temp storage. So I pulled it and put my new second m.2 2T drive to clone from the sata. It was failing to clone over usb for some reason. Not sure if software or something with drive. Cloning in process so will find out soon. The funny part is this makes it easier to update because I was using drives wrong. DOH!

It will be nice going from 3TB to 5TB. Woot!

What is everyone's opinion on companies/organisations 'too big to fail'...?

I was just pondering on how 'just Google it' has become so 'natural' as a way of saying search the Internet. The more I think about it, the less I like it.

I know the chances of them failing/crumbling are neary zero (hence the name) but if an org, Ie Alphabet, made some shit decisions and bankrupted their company, what would happen then? Any ideas? I don't mean in terms of social fallout, economic etc.

I mean in terms of network infrastructure, them being such a central part of 'the web', all their Dns services, their backbone links, Google drive, Google fiber etc. What would happen to all user data? Just be destroyed?

I've never 'seen' a large tech company collapse, but just wander as to how that process would work for such a huge organisation, and the literal mountains of data they have which will need destroying or relocating.

Inb4 watch Mr robot hurrr