geno

I found an article about it: https://www.macsmotorcitygarage.com/a-cool-idea-at-the-time-the-hurst-lightning-rods-shifter

Hurst Lightning Rods, an aftermarket performance shifter marketed in the 1980s

The Lightning Rods system was set up to work like any ordinary automatic gear selector, more or less, with a conventional PRND shift pattern (as shown in the top photo). The difference was in the two additional levers: the far right lever and release button performed the 1-2 upshift, while the middle lever and button performed the 2-3 upshift. Or the driver could simply leave the lever in D for Drive or OD for Overdrive and drive normally. In that regard, the Lightning Rods setup was not unlike the Hurst Dual Gate aka “His ‘n Her” shifters of previous years.

I have to say that I'm having issues understanding what this means in practice. :D

I'm using Windows as my daily driver due to prioritising gaming over everything else. But I also have a 8-year old laptop which is stuck with Win 7, and I've been wondering if I should just install Linux on it to try things out. In the past, I've only ever tried Linux for short times, never used Linux as my main OS or longer than a week.

With this context, I've had the "which distro should I choose?" on my mind a few times. There's some obvious and some non-obvious issues with this questionnaire. I'll just go over my thoughts step by step:

• "I want anonymous web browsing" and "distro which is supported by game publishers" can't be selected at the same time. Is this really true? I'm doubting my understanding of what "anonymous web browsing" actually means.

• "I often need help from others" and "I have already used Linux for some purposes" can't both be selected. Why? The logic behind this is "You have used Linux at some point, so you can clearly solve some problems without asking anyone". Makes no sense, and/or the questionnaire's creator thinks that Linux is impossible for newcomers. I have used Linux in the past and I'm generally good in troubleshooting, but anyway.

• "I want to use the default preset values in the installation assistant" is impossible to answer if I don't know which values are given as the default. My general answer would be "give me a default value for everything, but also let me change the things which I have an opinion about". An answer equal to this doesn't exist.

• Pre-installed programs: this does feel like it lacks the answer of "let me choose what to install during installation of OS", but I guess I can just skip this question without answering since I don't care.

• "There are many way to administrate a linux distribution" -> "I want to avoid systemd". I've never heard about systemd, and the explanation give on the page doesn't really help. For what reasons would I want to avoid it? My actual answer for this is "I really don't care", so I just skipped it.

About the result of the questionnaire: I did answer that "I'm fine with paying something", but it's not really something I aim for. The suggestions seem to tag "There is a non-free version available" as a plus for the distros, which really isn't what I answered - there's a difference between "I'm fine with something" and "I want something".

I also marked "supported by game publishers" with a star, because gaming is what I'm aiming to do on it. I have no idea if this even matters in practice, but it made sense as an answer when asked about. The smoothness of gaming experience will always be the primary reason for any choice of OS I'll make.

The first EIGHT answers on the list have either "Programs versions may not be up-to-date enough for gaming" or "May require additional configuration for gaming" as a downside/warning. The game publisher question is the only answer which I marked as important.

The first distro from the suggestions that included "supported by game publishers" is Linux Mint - which does match what I already had in mind, but I really feel like the ordering of the suggested distros feel off.

Short "review" about this: it really didn't help much. The list of suggestions is practically full of equally good distros, and I'm still stuck with the question "which one of these should I choose?". I only learned about more distros that I had never heard about before.

As for actually choosing the distro at some point later: I think that I'll just find out the top 5 most popular distros, and select from those. My reasoning for this is that it's much easier to find answers if/when I run into issues. Using a niche distro wouldn't really work for me - Linux isn't my hobby, I think OS is just a tool to run whatever programs/games I want to.

But this questionnaire doesn't have any data about popularity, so for my usecase, it lacks some information. I feel like it could use an additional question about "Are you fine with using a niche distro, or do you want to use a popular one?" - this question does have the issue of not being objective though, as there's no clear answer of what can be counted as "popular".

TL;DR good idea, but execution could be better.

Game of life?

Vast majority of it is active playing - I've thought about this earlier too, and I really rarely just afk or stand around while in game. Even if I'm just waiting for eg. raid to start, I usually just go do some gathering, pet battles, dailies, something.

Yup, that's what I used to get the number - along with an addon that saves all the data from different characters and sums up the played time of all of them. Last time I checked it showed over 1200 days (=28 800 hours) for me - but it's been a while since I checked the total, and it doesn't include characters in Classic (or deleted characters). So I just rounded it to 30k hours, close enough.

My most played character is my shaman, with 450 days (~11k hours) played - it was my main character from TBC to WoD (from 2007 to early 2015). Current main is Druid with 240 days (~6k hours). So these two characters alone are more than half of my total played time. :D

Roughly 30 000 hours in WoW. I've been playing it since 2005 - mostly active, only a couple of 1-6 month breaks.

Quick approximation - let's just ignore the exact dates:

• 18 years * 365 = 6570 days
• 30000 hours / 6570 days = ~4.57 hours/day

During the last 18 years, I've played an average of 4h 34min of WoW every day.

In other words: if I sleep 8 hours a day, during the last 18 years, I've spent about 28% of my waking hours playing WoW.

While I'm at it: I'm 34 years old. I have spent roughly 10% of my life playing WoW.

jfc lmao

Other MMOs: Guild Wars 1 & 2, FFXIV, are all between 1000-1500 hours each.

Outside of MMOs, the #1 is probably Trackmania (2020) at ~600 hours.

...what

...I guess it was indeed a disaster because I can't remember even hearing that name before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo

originally operated from 2005 until its bankruptcy in 2013

It was announced in January 2021 that it would be returning as a new social media site the month after. By May 2022, it had once again been shut down, without having ever left beta testing.

What are you talking about? I used it like 2 days ago last time, no plugins. Not sure if there's a hotkey for reopening a closed window (ctrl shift T?), but you can find it from the menu in upper right corner of the browser.

The song is also 23 years old at this point. :D

I'm specifically talking about the experience of installing and playing games, not installing the OS. I haven't had any issues with installing Windows either, but apparently we have a different experience with that part - but even then, installation/configuration of OS happens like once per 5 years so I don't really care if it takes 15 or 90 minutes. I do agree that Linux is quite easy to set up too, no issues there either.

I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "constantly having to un-fuck Windows". I just open my PC and open whatever program/game that I was planning to?

But: if installing a new game requires more than pressing install from the service I bought it from due to the choice of my OS, that is the issue that I'm trying to minimize. If one OS is more likely to give me a smoother purchase-to-gameplay experience, I'll prefer that one.

Basically if 90% of games work equally well on both platforms but 10% require extra tweaking (or literally don't work) on Linux, I'll just stick to Windows. Proton is great, but not a perfect answer for everything - but I'm not sure what you mean by "easier than Windows" since I don't know what could be easier than pressing install.

I guess I've just been lucky with my experience overall.

I obviously do use the PC for other stuff too (video editing, browser, music, the usual), but those would work equally fine on Linux - it's just the gaming part that's keeping me on Windows, and it's also the main thing I do on a daily basis.