I had this thought-process back in December before ordering a Retroid Pocket 5, which was evidently the right call. At this point things are so turbulent that it might be too late. I mean you probably could order right now and the price probably won’t suddenly go up - but more important is that everything is so up in the air that you might need that money in the near future for other necessities.

That was me for a while, then I decided I was done learning computer. 💩

I remember around 15 years ago I was excited to get my first computer with a dedicated graphics card, a laptop with Nvidia Optimus. It was also around the time I was just beginning to get into Linux. I found an Ubuntu forum post with detailed instructions on installing Ubuntu and setting it up properly on that exact laptop, so I tried to follow that.

It didn’t help that I was unfamiliar with using the terminal at the time. But even so, this was before tools like Bumblebee were in a usable state (is Bumblebee still the preferred way to use Optimus?). I remember getting to the part about graphics switching and seeing some messy confusing hack for it. I don’t remember the specifics, but I think it involved importing a script and using diff to patch something. And I think all it did was just disable the very gpu I was looking forward to trying out.

I jumped back and forth between distros and Windows 7 a lot at that time. But it was such a shitty experience all because of Nvidia that I have never purchased any of their products since then. I’ve owned a lot of computers in that time, and I’m just one customer lost. I hope Nvidia looks at AMD sales and wonders how many of them are users that Nvidia lost because things like that.

Strange, I was also on a thread about ending support, and I found (and upvoted) tons of comments about switching to Linux. Must have been from different communities.