Indeed there is - which also doubled as a climbing wall for this kitty when he was younger!

He is well aware of this and uses it to his advantage!

My basement… definitely has vibes!

This is the unfinished basement of a house whose main selling feature was the colour beige.

I always thought I was his employee.

A cat’s life is very, very busy! Lots of important business - eating, asking to be fed again, getting treats, grooming, judging watching through the windows, so much work!

We’ve been planning to drywall the basement soon (for the past 25 years).

Yay, I get to join!

He does that too. If he’s just doing the nighttime watch, he’ll sit in the doorway, but if he sits around the corner, that’s him hoping for us to also hide around the corner, and make scurrying noises so he can bat at it!

And he knows it!

No, no… this cat is gumdrop shaped.

My cat’s name is Spooky, since black cats are a common theme on Halloween (hey, that’s today!). We don’t call him Spooky very often, though. We often call him Spucky or Sporky, both originally mispronunciations of his name that someone said that we found funny. We also call him Scoopy, Kitty, Catster, and Mr. Cat.

This is him after I opened a tube treat for him.

(And no, my floor is not dirty. It’s old and damaged linoleum that looked like hell even when it was new.)

This cat’s shape: ⚪️ round

Damn, I really wish I could offer more help beyond ensuring drivers are set up correctly for NVIDIA. I mean, you could also check the power profile too, using something like cpupower-gui to see if it’s in power saving mode. I suppose you could also close other applications to see if one of them is interfering, since you said Firefox may have something to do with it. I suppose it’s possible Snap has something to do with it too.

You said this happens during Elder Scrolls Online, right? Maybe have her close the game’s launcher while the game is running. In my case, I noticed jittery performance in everything, including moving the cursor, until I closed the launcher. May or may not be the issue, but it does sound similar to what happens to me when I leave that game’s launcher open.

If a cat can fit their head into it, they can get into it.

I see two kitties that require pets.

What? Don’t look at me like that! I totally need 70 computers! Yes they’re useful! They all have their purpose! That one? Its job is to be force-fed whatever weird obscure Linux distribution I just heard of! Oh, that one? That’s for testing Arch Linux configs on 25 year old hardware!

I’ve been using Linux and macOS since 2020. I shifted my main PC from Windows 10 back in April of 2020 right as lockdowns were hitting my locale, when I discovered how much Linux gaming had improved. I was curious to see if I could make it work for myself.

At that time, I had been interested in using Linux more frequently than on random old computers that I had lying around, but my opinions on Microsoft’s and Windows’ “quirks” were… less advanced. At that time I was unconcerned about Windows telemetry and advertising, but it also wasn’t as bad then.

It took me about a week to get everything set up and ready to go and to get settled. At first, I didn’t know if it’d end up sticking. Well, it did. I started with Ubuntu, and quickly went after Pop!_OS. I used that for a while, and eventually shifted to Garuda where I still am today.

Windows 10 end of life has almost no impact on me. My mindset has shifted dramatically since I first started using Linux on my main PC. When I used to not be bothered by Windows’ telemetry I find myself strongly off-put by it. Even macOS, which some say isn’t as bad as Windows puts me off and I’d rather not use it. Having had to set up Windows 10 for someone about a year back, I saw how much worse it got. It was insufferable.

Right now, my brother and sister in law still use Windows 10. They don’t see the problem with that. My brother specifically says he’ll just keep using Windows 10, because he “doesn’t have anything important” on it (I mentioned his Steam account has linked payment info). He’s also told me that he’d rather use Windows 11 (which he hates) than give Linux a try, a stance I don’t understand. It’s clear he doesn’t really understand the situation, and he doesn’t realize that Linux is not necessarily the difficult and unfriendly OS he thinks it is.

I’d rather him use Windows 11 than Windows 10, despite how awful I know it to be. At least there’s somewhat lower risk of nasty compromise there. I also know that he does play at least a couple games with anti-cheat that explicitly block Linux, so that introduces some complexity. But, I’m done preaching. I know how it makes me look, and I’ve tried in the past to change his mind but he’s unwilling to do so, so at this point the only way he’s going to learn is for something really bad to happen. Maybe his computer gets hit by ransomeware that took advantage of an unpatched vulnerability. That might be what it takes to finally make him do something.

I hate that it’s like this. I’ve tried to tell him about the risks. He doesn’t understand the full scale of it, and he dismisses me when I try to explain it to him. But at this point, what can I do besides say “I warned you” when something goes wrong?