Try F1 instead of F12. It should be under Setup -> Boot, and then just make your USB the first entry, save, and exit. And just so we’re covering all bases, the usb should be plugged in before you reboot into the bios settings and it may be under a name that doesn’t say “usb” anywhere (for example, the name of my usb in the bios settings contains the manufacturer and size in GB in addition to some other nonsense that i think is a model number).

COVID really killed my faith in humanity, and it blindsided me. I truly believed people in general would come together in such a situation, but it just… didn’t happen. Giving people shit for wearing a mask? Or, heaven forbid, having the audacity to request someone wear a mask around you? Let’s not forget the people hoarding toilet paper like that’s an appropriate response. I know it sounds small in the grand scheme of things, but it requires a certain level of “fuck you, i got mine” to buy three-dozen rolls of TP when the shelves are already bare.

i dunno why you gotta call me out like that…

I will keep it there for future historians.

great, now i have spit coffee all over the place. thanks for the laugh!

Hmm. So far, i’ve only been considering tiling-is-the-default solutions, but maybe you’re on to something. If I can get my fancy keyboard combos to do tiling stuff just how i like it, there’s no reason why that has to be the default mode of operation…

This is what i use on my work computer! Could it be that the answer was right under my nose this whole time? Still needs some work to get it mouse-friendly enough for him. I guess i could throw gnome-panel and some other niceties on there, though…

As long as i can make my keybinding changes in a text file that i can throw in my dotfiles repo, i’m ok with a bit of tinkering. i like configuring stuff, but only once lol. Openbox sounds like it ticks a lot of my boxes.

If I do go with a DE+alternative WM instead, i’m leaning towards xfce rather than kde, since (as i understand it) xfce is a bit more lightweight. The laptop is getting old, and the hardware wasn’t anything to write home about even when it was new, so any extra performance i can squeeze out of the thing is a plus.

This sounds promising. I think he’d appreciate having the out-of-the-box niceties of a DE, too.

One number to track them all,

One number to find them,

One number to sell for spam,

And in the metadata bind them.

I used to hold it in the pencil position, but now i use the knife position example photo here. The pencil position requires you to use more thumb/wrist muscles, but the knife position helps me keep my wrist straight and use my forearm muscles more.

I’ve never had an issue, outside of bios updates (see last paragraph). I’ve even booted into windows after hibernating in linux (but not the other way around, since I don’t let windows hibernate; not saying you can’t, just that I don’t), and everything was fine when i got back. I use a swap partition for hibernating, in case you’re curious.

I do try to make sure I’m watching when it reboots after a windows update (because linux is my default, so i have to select windows from the boot loader) just in case, but i’ve also fucked that up a time or two with no ill effects.

My one piece of advice is: once you get it working, take a picture of your bios settings. You may have to fix some settinga after bios updates, as they can get set back to the default values. I did not do this, and while it led to a very confusing afternoon due to my inexperience, it would have been a non-issue if I’d have taken some pictures and known to look at them.

Sleeping with wrist guards really does make a world of difference. And maybe there is some way to do the repetitive tasks in a more ergonomoc way? For example, I crocheted a couple of pieces for friends’ weddings in quick succession out of very tiny yarn, and it destroyed my wrists for several weeks after. Turns out, I’d been holding my crochet hook in a really stress-inducing way; I had just never had a reason to question my form until it started causing a repetitive stress injury. By just changing the way I held the hook, I started to see improvement almost immediately.

As an American, I would just like to say that “aluminium” is better than “aluminum” because it matches the -ium suffix of most other elements.

But I am gonna have to disagree with you on the sulfur/sulphur debate. We already got shit like naphthalene and phenolphthalein to worry about spelling, i don’t need any more spurrious "ph"s when a nice simple “f” will do just fine.

You mean Cannibal! The Musical, the Trey Parker / Matt Stone classic?