it happened with etcher, and then continued to happen with rufus. i didn’t even try dd flash mode at first.

what’s crazy is, it WORKED ONCE. ONCE!

I almost wonder if windows somehow detected that another OS ran on the silicon and said “ohhhh no you fucking don’t, FUCK YOU ONLY I GET TO BE YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM!!!”

… okay so uh

i’m probably gonna have to go somewhere more help-focused and immediate than this but

something weird happened.

i bought a brand new USB drive to act as my linux mint boot media and flashed the iso onto it.

it booted into the temporary instance easily! instantly! I started to install thinking i could just set up dual boot with the extant windows instance.

well… it got to the point where it said “hey wait you have to disable secureboot or you have to reformat your entire windows installation”

okay maybe i want to check ONE MORE TIME to see if there’s anything in this windows instance that I still want.

so i halt the linux mint installation process and go back into windows. I take one last catalogue of stuff i’d want to reference later, and then try to boot back into the linux mint live session straight from the usb stick

… nope.

it says ‘something has gone terribly wrong’ and ‘failed to load UEFI’ or something

but that’s not the thing that really spooked me because I thought I could go back into windows, reformat the USB key, and just re-flash the linux mint iso and start over from scratch

that’s all background stuff, here’s the important crazy thing:

the USB key is now reading that it only has a size of FIVE. MEGABYTES. FIVE.

EVEN IF I TRY TO REFORMAT IT, IT STILL IS CONVINCED IT’S ONLY FIVE MEGABYTES

the linux mint iso can’t even FIT on it now

i can’t even reflash it

i … but … how do i even …

WAT

yeah that ancient Sony Vaio is loooong gone. it was manufactured in 2008 or something and was a hand me down from my aunt. we haven’t had it since like 2021

but i do have a laptop outside my main rig and I’m gonna try booting mint off an external drive just to try it out and see how i like the feel again!

i appreciate the encouragement ^_ you know, maybe. I’m haunted by this fear (I try to tell myself it’s an irrational one) that attempting to get into linux now would mess things up for me and that i’d end up stranded and unable to get back but … mint is admittedly VERY APPROACHABLE… hm. Maybe I can drop by staples and buy a spare thumbdrive, put a mint boot image on it, and try it on my battlestation today.

i tried mint on an old laptop for a little while and it was nice. i’m thinking of adopting linux for daily-driving when windows 10 stops being supported entirely. But i’m considering going with Bazzite when that time comes, maybe…

Yup.

“they can’t do that, that’s illegal!”

Shame the law doesn’t mean Jack Fucking Shit now.

The law is whatever they want it to be at any moment.

The coordinated enshittification is rather disheartening.

I’m still daily driving a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 because all the phones thereafter felt like a downgrade, and the problems like the one referenced in this article have only convinced me further…

I miss 2014, when the note 4 was the flagship. Note 4 kicked ass.