Dual-boot systems fail after Microsoft update

I appreciate your perspective. But let's be real here: I just drag the DXVK d3d9.dll for Linux into my Windows game folder. Suddenly, my DirectX 9 games are in the Vulkan future. Exclusive fullscreen taking 30 seconds to alt-tab? No more. Scaling issues? It's better. At least it's an alternative. Truly an exciting time to be alive.

Linux isn't all roses. It's a shitshow of its own:

- Bluetooth drivers (thanks, Microsoft)

- Graphics (Wayland vs. eglstream, thanks Nvidia)

- WiFi drivers (clusterfuck)

- The never-ending "free as in free beer I stole from my employer who doesn't exist anymore" featuring the ZFS red herring or trojan horse depending on whose side you're on.

- epoll < kqueue < iocp, but I hear io_uring has caught up decades later

- Wayland in 2030: Finally running GLX gears over SSH!

I try to be kind to BSD. If you're going into that space, you should already expect nothing to work. Then, it will surpass expectations if anything runs. Wayland should just hang with the BSD crowd because then you'd get kicked in the balls (joking) or told to stay in school for even asking a question like, "why doesn't my Nvidia card drivers work with this". In 2030, Netflix might contribute network optimization code back to BSD. Nvidia at best might throw out a few steaks into the crowd by then (same timeline). It's hard to say whether they'll throw them closer to Linux or BSD because the target has been changing.

2030: Year of the Linux Desktop™. Also the year support begins to expire on my edition of Windows 10 and I'll have to re-evaluate the time I spend inside vs the time it will take to unfuck Windows 12. I probably won't need to upgrade my router hardware before then either, but it oscillates between a BSD and Linux install every year. I choose the right tool for the job, you could say. I've been planning to dig into iPXE and friends to make reformatting a breeze because I don't like absolute choices when there are advantages on both sides.

If you want tragic, have the neckbeards/graybeards gone extinct? I wonder if a lot of them gave up and ended up working at Microsoft.

If you want hell, go check out the world of printer drivers. You'll end up back in WordPerfect for DOS, which lets you import the fonts and print them to Postscript. How hard can it be to print a social media webpage to a piece of paper and have it look good? Between needing Chrome to render JavaScript to a canvas and then trying to get that information into a structured PDF that looks good when printed is hell. Generally, when dealing with PDFs, everyone works backward by trying to unfuck the PDF that was dumped on them by converting it to another PDF and sending it on its way because nobody likes to be in hell for longer than mandatory. But for me, who knows what fonts Chrome shoved into that PDF? How do I select a font? Well, my Chrome browser is still fucked from trying to switch the fonts in the one place you can choose. But that still left out the header (page title, page number) and footer fonts (URL). They require a font too. The closest I could get to choosing fonts is using Puppeteer providing custom CSS to import the font file for the header and footer that's passed to PDFium somehow. I would not trust my life that the CSS imported the font. Even then, the files were an unstructured nightmare, Chrome would override the fonts anyway for several Kanji dialects and their own ugly-ass emojis, and Adobe was still mangling my fonts during linking. How hard can it be to use ABC font with XYZ emoji style? I don't want Google's ugly-ass emojis.

Side note: Acrobat shares a trait with stock exchange trading applications: it charges enterprise rates if you don't use the GUI.

Anyways, after using port monitors to spit the printer job out to a file, I could not get Chrome to send the PDF directly to my own program without using a for-loop to monitor when the file is closed, which, at which point you must assume the file is done printing. Not happy with that loose of a guarantee, I ended up back trying to intercept the fucking SPOOL file in SYSTEM32 to generate a PDF. Or pretending that my Python script is a network printer. Because I was going that far without success, I started reading the documentation to develop a printer driver, which had gotten more hostile since the "PrintNightmare" vulnerability. I relate to this news article because Windows wants me to be a Windows developer by adding security in the area I need to access. Being Printer Driver for Windows Developer seemed like a lot of work, so at that point, I wondered if Chrome's PDFium was giving me garbage in the first place. I tried compiling Chrome to get to the root of PDFium. However, apparently, compiling Chrome requires a fucking mainframe war computer, and my feeble destop computer stood no chance and BSODed. Also if you suggest Ghostscript (Ubuntu for PDFs), I will scream because I need Adobe's demon branding and the fonts I want on my documents. I ended up printing Chromium's PDF clusterfuck to Adobe's PDF clusterfuck using Acrobat to get it to import the right fonts, excluding the emojis which could either go black-and-white or Google's Ugly-ass Color Emoji. That didn't solve the structuring issue either, and I had to do the print process manually opening up Acrobat and hitting control-P enter every time, or deal with undocumented command line features. I concluded that nobody uses physical printers anymore. Until now. 2030 is the year of the DOS printer.

On the upside, .NET Core compiling to a Windows or Linux executable web server written in C# is neat. I'm curious if many Linux guys ended up at Microsoft to survive during the Greybeard extinction. How much pull does Microsoft have with the Linux board? It's hard to truly escape.

But hey, at least we can agree on one thing: Electron is awful and makes me think about how much battery % will be drained per line of text I write. The end result: the Windows Phone. I have to exit this thread quickly now.