I'm starting to second-guess my switch to linux...

[InDarkestNight]

Got a new ssd drive, installed Ubuntu on it. Been trying to re-install all my software. I had to update and fix a few things before anything would install, but I finally got steam on my computer. Problem is, I haven't logged in manually in who knows how many years. I can't even really remember my login name. So I tried a recovery, but it keeps making do the stupid captcha thing. It keeps saying I failed them. Wtf? I did literally dozens of them, and not a single one was a success. Wtf? Even when i tried to sign in to this, THE VERIFY HUMAN THING FAILED ON THE FIRST TRY. Wtf?

I'm starting to think I'll never be able to recover my steam programs. So I just lost 90% of my game collection due to my sshd drive failing after only 4 or 5 years. Wtf? I've NEVER had a harddrive fail in less than 10 years!

This is so utterly stupid. Why can't i beat the stupid captcha thing on linux no matter how many times I do that stupid game? Does it just not accept output from linux? This is to beyond utterly stupid. If I can't do captchas, then how can I use any site on the internet????

Thinking I need to break down and go back to windows somehow. No idea how I can. Or maybe I could somehow copy my old sshd drive onto this one and continue on like nothing happened? I don't even know if I could do that from a drive that won't boot. Fml. What the f*#@ am I supposed to do? The only games I can access now are the handful of games FROM THE 80S I bought on gog and never played. Wtf? And no, I am NOT re-buying all my s#*!. I am NEVER giving bethesda in particular another penny after all they've put us through. f*#@ them to hell. I genuinely hope there is a hell so that everyone who has any ties to Skyrim burns forever for everything they've DESTROYED.

Anyway, after $150 spent, and literally 6 hours getting Ubuntu up and running, I still have a broken computer that barely functions. I can watch youtube on it, but that's pretty much all. I could already do that from my laptop, SO WHAT DID I GAIN???

edit: And now I'm beating my head against a wall figuring out why I can't install pygame. Worthless computer....

Edited December 12, 2023 by InDarkestNight

[InDarkestNight]

Well, decided to log into steam through the web. I beat the captcha first try, and got my account back. I was then able to log into steam without issue. Clearly it was glitched. Anyway, I have my account and password back. Still no luck getting pygame to install, but at least I can now do more with this machine other than watch youtube and play solitaire (its solitaire program btw has an impressive number of games in it).

[Guest deleted34304850]

9 hours ago, InDarkestNight said:

Got a new ssd drive, installed Ubuntu on it. Been trying to re-install all my software. I had to update and fix a few things before anything would install, but I finally got steam on my computer. Problem is, I haven't logged in manually in who knows how many years. I can't even really remember my login name. So I tried a recovery, but it keeps making do the stupid captcha thing. It keeps saying I failed them. Wtf? I did literally dozens of them, and not a single one was a success. Wtf? Even when i tried to sign in to this, THE VERIFY HUMAN THING FAILED ON THE FIRST TRY. Wtf?

I'm starting to think I'll never be able to recover my steam programs. So I just lost 90% of my game collection due to my sshd drive failing after only 4 or 5 years. Wtf? I've NEVER had a harddrive fail in less than 10 years!

This is so utterly stupid. Why can't i beat the stupid captcha thing on linux no matter how many times I do that stupid game? Does it just not accept output from linux? This is to beyond utterly stupid. If I can't do captchas, then how can I use any site on the internet????

Thinking I need to break down and go back to windows somehow. No idea how I can. Or maybe I could somehow copy my old sshd drive onto this one and continue on like nothing happened? I don't even know if I could do that from a drive that won't boot. Fml. What the f*#@ am I supposed to do? The only games I can access now are the handful of games FROM THE 80S I bought on gog and never played. Wtf? And no, I am NOT re-buying all my s#*!. I am NEVER giving bethesda in particular another penny after all they've put us through. f*#@ them to hell. I genuinely hope there is a hell so that everyone who has any ties to Skyrim burns forever for everything they've DESTROYED.

Anyway, after $150 spent, and literally 6 hours getting Ubuntu up and running, I still have a broken computer that barely functions. I can watch youtube on it, but that's pretty much all. I could already do that from my laptop, SO WHAT DID I GAIN???

edit: And now I'm beating my head against a wall figuring out why I can't install pygame. Worthless computer....

i don't think its the computer.

[InDarkestNight]

Well, turns out a lot of my problems are coming from the fact that I have installed Ubuntu 20 rather than new ones (I put this thing on a disc a few years ago, and I couldn't get my laptop to download a new version because it apparently won't finish downloading anything that takes more than a few minutes). Also, this whole thing was completely unplanned. I wasn't thinking I would get to install this anytime soon. I only started thinking about it when I realized I was going to have to replace the sshd. I realized that if I bought a loose one out of a box, it would have nothing on it, which meant NO WINDOWS, thus the thing wouldn't block the installation. Took me a bit to figure it out, but its up and running. Even got a game downloaded, though for some reason I can't get it to put its icon on my desktop. Oh well.

Probably would've gone far easier if I did a bit of research before hand, but as I said this wasn't something I've been planning for months or even days. Though I did figure there may be some growing pains since I've only ever used windows operating systems. I'm starting to feel like I'm going to miss windows honestly, but as I learn this new system its becoming increasingly obvious that this is more than I could have ever hoped for.

Right now all I need to do with this thing really is get codeblocks installed (or some equivalent c++ compiler), and start looking into emulators so I can run mod organizer. Thinking of doing a vanilla playthrough with LE just to see how steam's native emulation works out. I'm curious to see if it will now be more stable on my system? In particular, I wonder if the creation kit will actually work properly now? Oh how nice it would be if I could compile scripts finally. If so, I could start to make more substantial mods, such as a perk overhaul.

[Guest deleted34304850]

sudo apt update

sudo apt full upgrade

sudo apt autoclean

 

go make a cup of coffee and leave it to do its thing.

[zixi]

40 minutes ago, 1ae0bfb8 said:

go make a cup of coffee and leave it to do its thing.

This is really good advice when working with Linux! 

It isn't Windows. It'll take a bit of getting use to because it doesn't operate in the same way. You'll be able to run games via Steam (some work very well, others are flaky). If what you want to do is code then Linux is a good place to be. My husband is a software engineer and has been on Linux since forever. I'm the gamer. 

Skyrim runs very well via Steam. Steam will install everything it needs and you shouldn't have to fiddle with it. You can mod it via Steam workshops which will make it easier. Getting a mod organizer to work is a little tricky but not impossible. If Steam has done its bit properly, most of what you need will already be present.  But I'd go slowly for the time being... Linux is very powerful but it doesn't always hold your hand and it will let you do silly things if you really want to... It isn't the Mac OS.

I'm really glad you've got things sorted to your liking. I know how frustrating computers can be when they play up. Good luck!

[InDarkestNight]

I could just manually install stuff. Yeah, that could get messy, but only if you go too deep. I was thinking of maybe installing the unofficial patch for stability reasons. Was thinking though that if I installed skse, then wouldn't I need to then run it through a non-steam emulator?

And yeah, I was thinking of the steam workshop too. I don't like installing stuff through it; if I do, I just do it to get the files, so I can put them in a proper zip and install them via MO. I do already have a few mods like that, and fortunately they're all just a single .esp with a .bsa file, so removing them later won't be too big a pain (the biggest one will be figuring which of my mods match these criteria).

I did just start up factorio, which is supposed to support Ubuntu. It runs, though for some reason it feels a bit choppy. Haven't actually started a game yet, so no clue how it runs. Maybe that's just supposed to be what factorio looks like? I actually went without this thing so long I had forgotten how huge my monitor is. Also had to get used to my keyboard again.

Also, looking over my library, I'm surprised by the number of games I have with native linux support. Most of them are indie games, but one of them is SHADOW OF MORDOR. I would NOT have expected that. Sadly, a lot of my favorites aren't included, but maybe  proton could handle them?

edit: Nope, its not me; the game seems to be running slower than usual. That's worrying, though it does seem to have defaulted to the highest graphics settings.

edit2: I've also noticed that my graphics look different, mostly more colorful. Keep in mind, this is still my old computer but its running an SSD with Ubuntu 20 on it. Why would my graphics be affected like this? What, is this thing overclocking my computer?

Edited December 12, 2023 by InDarkestNight

[zixi]

27 minutes ago, InDarkestNight said:

but maybe  proton could handle them

The community keeps a record here:

https://www.protondb.com/

For many of the games you won't notice that you're running on Linux. I don't 'see' the OS here now unless I need to do something to it or if something goes wrong. Some of the games I play are more stable on Linux than they were on Windows. But I've been gaming for a long time and I learned to save frequently because the early systems were so unreliable. You might want to review your saving strategies...

Many of us gaming on Linux actually prefer getting the games stable to playing... You'll come across people who seem delighted when it's broken and they have to fix it... 

And yes, Ubuntu has one of the finest collections of solitaire out there... 

[InDarkestNight]

Checking Skyrim on that site, a lot of people are complaining about problems THAT EVEN WINDOWS HAS. Seriously. The game is inherently unstable, even on its native operating system. I was actually hoping switching OS may change that; I hear LE does run better on linux than SE does. This actually makes sense; computers tend to increase in complexity over time, so its easier to emulate older systems than newer ones. This thus means that LE should be easier to emulate than SE (of course, it still requires windows xp at least, so that's not TOO retro).

As for my performance problems, I seem to have largely fixed them by just turning down the graphics, though this does require a restart. I should also note I'm not sure if I meet the system requirements for the thing; systemrequirementslab used to say I did, but checking it myself it claims I need a 3ghz 2 core prcoessor. I have a 2.7ghz quad core. No idea what difference that would make, though it did run perfectly fine before. Sadly, systemrequirements lab doesn't work for me anymore; it refuses to even download its detection program. Guess it doesn't work on linux. I have noticed I straight can't download things that won't work on this machine.

As for myself, I'm both a gamer and a programmer. I admit though I'm not employed as one, and I only have a 2 year degree. I have however for years shown interest in the transparency of 80s machines. In a way, Ubuntu gives you a lot of that but on a modern machine. Coincidentally, the system started with several programs I already used before, such as firefox and python. In a way, guess I was using my windows OS like it was linux. Still can't figure out how to pull up the python prompt though. I can still run the python idle of course, which I guess works fine. I was using the python prompt as my main calculator for years. Guess now its python's idle, oh well. I did try to see if I could use Ubuntu's terminal like the python prompt. It gave me weird results. Some python commands threw error messages, while others did not. No idea what they could've done. Oh well. Maybe best I don't fiddle with that; I may be changing things I don't know about.

[HeyYou]

Linux/Unix IS user-friendly, it is just VERY picky about who its friends are. (and I ain't one of 'em.)