I think something I’ve learned over the years from several harsh breakups and big time abandonment issues, is that the pain you’re feeling is an actual physiological response to the loss of someone you are chemically bonded to. This is old biology at play, older than civilization, older than our species, because apes and various other animals exhibit grief.

There is no easy way out of it. Your brain has to unravel connections that once provided positive happy chemicals from your proximity to that person. It makes sense, oxytocin and other hormones reinforcing pair and family bonding, as they were once critical to survival. You just have to let it hurt, until it doesn’t anymore. It could take a long time, but one day you’ll be at peace with it.

Thanks for this, I’ll definitely dig in further

My solution? Run Linux. If the game won’t run on Linux because of kernel level anticheat bullshit, DRM, or lack of proton support, refund that shit and never purchase a game from that developer again. If they do data collection, and it still runs on Linux, it is my understanding that all they can gather is what the proton compatibility layer feeds them, which is basically fiction. Proton is already tricking the software into thinking it’s running on windows, and is sandboxed from your bare metal system. Correct me if I’m wrong.

The games I already owned before my time with Linux? Whatever. I’ll take the loss. I’ll probably never play PUBG again and I’m fine with that.

I really agree with you about immutables. Not only are they awkward to use as far as managing and installing software, I feel like they prevent people from learning how a traditional Linux system works by keeping them in the padded cell of read only root.

As far as arch, it only really took me a year of fiddling and learning on Fedora and mint before I managed to get arch running. Yes there were hurdles and growing pain, but it made me a better user.

For me? It was consequences. Having friends and lovers give up on me because I was a trainwreck. Losing jobs. My life kept getting worse, and I knew I had to stop eventually.

One day I just said enough is enough. I was tired of being mentally and emotionally weak and decided to fight for a better life for myself. I’ve done therapy, but therapy is just supplemental. If you haven’t made the decision to take action and responsibility for your own life, therapy is useless.

The part about preferring mania? Super accurate. During the year or so of dialing in the meds, my wife alternated between numbness and depression, and eventually climbed her way up to “Normal”

She hated normal. I had to explain that this is how life is for everyone else. Sure there’s highs and lows, but not every day is an explosive rollercoaster of emotions, and that’s a good thing. Stay here with me a while and see if you can learn to love it. Well, she did. And life is good. But there really has to be a lightbulb moment where it clicks that life without the meds is chaotic, destructive, and unsustainable.

My wife of 3 years, together 6, I could basically copy and paste your explanation here and it would be 100% true.

We work together making sure the meds are on track, therapy and psych appointments are regular, and she’s a lovely, bustling, fun individual and our relationship couldn’t be better. We have contingency plans in case things go off the rails. I have phone numbers to her care providers for worst case scenarios.

My greatest fear is economic or political turmoil limiting access to meds, because the meds are key.

As someone who lived through depression and abused drugs, in the same way you have been, in the past, I have an important message for you.

The drugs compound and reinforce your depression. The pit gets deeper and darker the longer you languish in it. You won’t have the tools to climb out until you put down the intoxicants.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel. It took me until my mid 30s to stop drinking and drugging myself to death. Plenty of mornings where I probably shouldn’t have woken up from the cocktail I consumed the night before. Six years of sobriety later, and I have a wonderful partner, friends that actually care about me. A career that is stable because I am stable.

I’m not going to beg you not to hurt yourself, it’s your life and you can do what you want with it. But you can choose to be better than this. it is equal parts self-determination, and relying on supportive communities that will help you. If you would like help finding a narcotics anonymous or alcoholics anonymous chapter near you, DM me and I’ll do what I can.

Big 2nd for Fedora. Fedora isn’t Debian stable but isn’t exactly unstable either, and I think having fresher packages in your main repo is worth it.

Is it 2006? I had no idea Abercrombie & Fitch was even remotely relevant anymore.

It’s not like you purchased one, I don’t think you need to feel guilty for taking for it for a spin.

My brother in law took me for a spin in his AWD top spec Nissan Ariya. It has a listed 0-60 time of 5 seconds in that configuration. My base model F-150 gets up to 60 in a little over 6 seconds, and his Ariya definitely tested the seat bolstering when he floored it around a slight bend.

The model Y does 3.5. That’s like super car specs of yesteryear. For reference, a 2008 Dodge Viper SRT-10 lists at 3.5. The venerable Ferrari F-50 of 1997 lists at 3.5. A 2005 Ford GT lists 3.5.

So yeah, pretty nuts, and significantly faster acceleration than most people experience in their lifetime. I’ve been looking for a cheap, athletic car for weekend thrills and occasional track days, and 5 seconds is right around the spec I’m looking for, maybe a used Cayman S, plenty of speed to make me feel like I’m breaking the law without being too tail happy. 3.5 is probably a tad more juice than anyone should play with unseasoned.

K

For me, it was always just a good excuse to distro hop and find something new to explore. There have been plenty of problems that I’ve fixed, but when I failed to find the culprit a reinstall only takes about 20 minutes.

This is the level of error that would usually lead to me, backing up my important files on a removable media of some kind and reinstalling my operating system

Maybe I’ve been hitting the hopium pipe too hard….

Yeah. But for a kid who’s not going to give a shit about the difference between snaps and flatpak, just install mint or Ubuntu and call it a day. Unless you’re popping the hood and rifling around breaking things, they basically install and administrate themselves.

Maybe I’m on one about it because the last time I was on this subject someone was suggesting Debian for a young kids first computer to play Minecraft on. Debian is good for a lot of things, but not that, and when someone says any Linux distro is “easy” I think “someone who knows nothing about Linux can run it just fine” easy.

So they’re all just going to spring for new machines when Microsoft pulls the plug on win10?

I have a 5 year old niece and 73 year old father in law running Ubuntu. Everything is relative right? To me they’re Linux illiterate, if not computer illiterate. It’s not meant to be an insult, and I’m regularly amazed by some folks inability to get what they’re looking for out of a search engine.

All I’m getting at, is that Debian isn’t “easy” to everyone.

Setting engine timing when replacing a timing belt is easy to my brother in law who’s a car guy, but if I watched a YouTube video on it I’d probably still botch the job and blow my motor. It’s easy to him. Not to me.

To us it’s easy, but not to the computer illiterate. Debian is at least as difficult to a Linux illiterate newcomer as Fedora is. You want functional multimedia codecs? Thumbnails for video files? Drivers for your Nvidia card? Drivers for peripherals that aren’t directly supported by the kernel? Distributions that people like us avoid, mint, Ubuntu, etc, make all of that happen for you, or at least guide your hand. A newbie installing Debian for the first time isn’t even going to know what they don’t have and need to find.

I see this attitude a lot, and it does nothing for the Linux community. We’re about to be flooded with ex windows users in a few short months, and they arent RTFM certified Linux users like we are. Repeating the mantra of “read the documentation” and “it’s easy already, duh” is just going to leave those people begrudgingly buying new hardware that they don’t need when they hit those early Linux speed bumps and see comments like yours making them feel like idiots.