It's been a boring time for me the last 2 weeks. While 'grinding' Empire reputation I stumbled upon 5 tourist missions that would bring me to 2 locations in the Colonia region. The combined reward of these missions would come down to 115M credits and a medium reputation increase per mission (read: about 2.5% each). While both the monetary reward and reputaion increase were not that high, I had to pick them up, because from previous missions I had a 1 week bounty of 13k credits on me for the Aditi Empire League.

And there a maximum of 4 boring weeks started. Me, my Beluga Liner and 22k Ly to fly. The distance is even *THAT* big, that regular exploration is out of the question. If I'd scan each and every star, planet and moon I'd encounter than I'd not even reach halfway to Colonia within the set time limit for the missions. So I decided to only look for the 3 most important items in a solar system: Water Worlds, Ammonia Worlds and Earth-like Worlds, and I have found a couple of dozen of those along the way.

Since it was my 1st time to Colonia, I had to get to the system's nav beacon, which is always  a tricky thing with long-range passengers. Most of the time (close to always!) they are secretive about their mission and don't want your ship to be scanned by anyone (3-strikes and out on scans BTW). Also, these long-range missions, when you've reached the objective there is a chance that they will give a small (5-10%) bonus if you make it back to the point of origin without being scanned. And for that reason I decided to go to Colonia first and then head for the 2nd objective (Grey Sector, about 2k Ly 'west' of Colonia).

The way back was as boring as the way to Colonia. Once again, me, my Beluga Liner and 22k Ly to cover and it all went once again without a problem. Yet, arriving at Aditi, my paint was quite messed up. I've seen pictures of other commanders that have flown over 45k Ly and their paint looked as if they just departed from the station, but somehow my paint isn't quite as UV and heat resistant as those commanders have on their ships

As said, everything went well, but back in Aditi I almost messed up. While docking I somehow misclicked the arrow button to enable landing gear and I ended up pressing the circle button alone (circle and arrow down combined toggles landing gear on the PS4). So instead of entering slowly and with my rail wings down because my landing gear was out, I boosted through the mailslot of the station

All in all, everything went well and yes, it was a boring 2 weeks, but the pay was good. In total I recieved around 250M credits and the bounty on my head was gone (which is why I picked those missions up in the first place). Sadly though, the reputation gain wasn't as good though - I only gained about 20%. On the positive side (for me then), the Aditi system is in civil war now, so with the 250M I earned I could donate a lot to help the controlling faction's efforts to surpress the war and that gave me enough rep to get the Naval mission and receive the Achenar system permit.

I've been experimenting with Linux for about a year and a half by now, and on my main PC for close to 5 months by now. In those 5 months I've learned a lot about Ubuntu and Linux in general and am finally ready to say my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 install goodbye - well, sort off...

First things first though...

The reason to shift from Windows to Linux were numerous and I'll recap them quickly:
  - Windows 7 is on it's 'end of life' cycle
  - Windows 10 (I can upgrade) violates my privacy BIG TIME
  - Since owning my PS4 Pro I'm no longer gaming on my PC
  - SECURITY in general (virus protection and hacking are close to non-existant on Linux)
  - Coming from OS/2, I never really liked Windows in the first place

The main problem with switching to Linux was my programming efforts though. With the Unity3D engine already being in beta for about a year (and still is in beta BTW), I figured that hopping to Linux would be easy.
     How wrong I was! 
Yes, the switch itself was easy - just import the projects in the new (Linux) version of Unity3D and it works. It's all those 3rd party tools that I've been using for the last 4 years causing problems. A lot of them are available for Mac OSX (and not even all of them ), while only a handfull are available for Linux

For the tools that don't have a Linux port (yet) I tried WINE, but that was a big no-no because of the nature of most of these tools. Yes, most did run, but all with a big BUT. Almost all had problems with loading and saving the projects (most likely from the different Linux file systems), and a couple had odd quirks where graphics would not load correctly, while even one (the flowchart tool I use) ended up with totally different results.

So WINE was not an option, and I searched for alternatives and ended with virtual machines. There are half a dozen available for Linux and I tried two of them (VirtualBox by Oracle and VMware Player by VMware) to check for the differences, and they are HUGE.
  VirtualBox is completely free, and as usual, you get what you pay for meaning that it WILL run virtual machines, but the support for DX11 is just bad. The same thing goes with a lot of other hardware calls that are handled oddly. Big PLUS for VirtualBox is that it doesn't run so heavy on my machine compared to VMware Player.
  VMware Player is my main choice right now. Reason being the perfect integration of (virtual) hardware calls and handling - I was even able to install the Elgato HD Game Capture device with it (though streaming handling sucked for it). VMware Player also runs 95% of the applications flawlessly, and those that it doesn't run mostly use direct hardware calls. There are 2 problems though with VMware Player:
  - It runs extremely heavy on my machine, at times using 100% CPU power - even when only 1 core is assigned.
  - It's commercial software with a free license for non-commercial use (allowing 1 box) and purchase of a full license is €275

Sadly though, even with VMware Player there is still 1 tool that's not running under Linux/VM. And while it's not a tool I use a lot, I still have my Windows install (set to a minimum) on my system just in case I need it. I only hope that this last tool will be ported to Linux though...

Yeah, what to say..? I've been diagnosed with a B12 difficiency since October 2014 and things don't seem to improve by a lot...

Normally when someone is diagnosed with a B12 difficency, they will recieve 2 suppleting injections a week for 5 to 6 weeks (I've had those)/ After that the injections will become less regular, and normally will be monthly for half a year, and after that once every 2 or 3 months (in most cases the rest of the patients life).

As usual, with me things go quite an other way than 'normal'. For the last 3 years I've had my B12 shots every other week, until late July this year. My doctor went on holiday, I've been busy painting my house and that's when I first had my B12 shot after 3 1/2 weeks. I felt still good at the time and decided to give it a shot (yes, pun intended) to get my B12 once every 3 weeks.

Sadly though, the last 2 shots I've had on my 3rd week I suffered from severe fatigue again and the cluster-alike headaches I used to have came up again  It's clear that my tripple psychological 'handicap' uses up a lot of B12 in only 2 weeks and I'm back on a B12 shot every other week again...

I know I haven't posted for a while, but I've been quite busy with 3 missions I picked up. I thought I had all the time of the world for them, but next time I take a (tourist) mission that pays 28M credits, I *REALLY* need to look at the distance the tourist wants to go to (over 22.000 Ly ). The same goes for anything above 5M, because an other mission paid 9.5M and for that one I had to fly roughly 19.000Ly. The only positive thing of this all is that those 2 far away missions were relatively close to eachother...
Those two missions brought me around Colonia, which in turn is "close" to Saggitarius A*, and while in the neighborhood I figured to make a 'small' detour to get that trophy associated with it.

And well, Saggitarius A*. I expected a lot, but it was a huge let down to be honest, but what would you expect from a black hole The only thing interesting in that 'system' is the tourist point there as well as that pretty big class B blue-white star, which was quite a nice sight to fly toward to.

Now back in the Bubble again, I decided to participate in the current Community Goal, and make the Anaconda ready for real deep space exploration. I'm looking at my setup for it and I hope that I have all important things ready, but I will ask on reddit for opinions. Best thing of the Anaconda is that she can now jump a maximum of 30Ly, which was 25Ly before I returned.

July 26th I headed out for Sagittarius A*. I did that with my standard Asp Explorer (I didn't know I could upgrade core internal components ) with some engeneering boosts and figured to explore a bit along the way. What I didn't know was that the flight would be a lot longer than I expected...

Starting *THE* @EliteDangerous journey of a lifetime #PS4sharepic.twitter.com/WnDBaO89EG
— Alex Erné (@DemiGoth) July 27, 2017

Yes I knew that I'd have to fly 25kLy to get there, but I did not realize that when exploring along the way the trip would take forever. Aside from the pretty small jump range from my AspX (12Ly max), the exploration of the star systems I encountered took a lot of time as well. It's been a good thing though that the further out of the 'Bubble' you go, the more chance you have to encounter previously undiscovered systems, and that's where I made quite some money.

During one of my streams of the exploration flight I also had some good hints on how to upgrade my AspX to get a bigger jump range (about 50Ly max), along with some other very nice tweaks. When I hit the asteroid base in the Omega Sector (which was my 3rd asteroid base, but the first one with an outfitting station), I figured to add those customizations to my ship. Money was no problem, because I made almost 300M credits from selling the maps of the unexplored systems along the way. Too bad, the Omega Sector base only has E-class (standard) equipment, and I still had a 20kLy to go to Sagittarius A*.
At that point I had 2 choices, either keep going, or fly the 5kLy back and get the upgrades in the 'Bubble'.

Obviously I picked the latter option, but only partly. I headed back, bought myself an Anaconda and upgraded it as far as the money would allow. I also hopped into the current Community Goal and started to trade with the 352 ton cargo bay I had available for it (I ended up in the 50% tier in only 1 1/2 days).

Now I'm back on making money, running missions in the 'Bubble' so I can get a few more upgraded coponents (a Power Plant 7A costs as much as the Anaconda herself...) and also go for the Sol permit (amongst others). When I have the feeling that I've done almost everything that I'll head back to Saggitarius A* and beyond...

Today a year ago I was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder and while i already suspected having it for about 3 years, I was glad to have the diagnosis. Though the cause of what made the confirmation was a bit less. Lets recap a bit for that last year (and a bit longer back)...

Somewhere in 2012 I talkes with a cousin of me who's been diagmosed with bipolar for quite a while. I visited her in the period after I had my diagnosis for Asperger's syndrome and ADD. We talked a bit about our psychological problems and after her story I suspected I might have a bipolar disorder as well, while she thought the might have Asperger's syndrome (which is also quite possible - she is REAL smart and pretty analytic in her thoughts, yet she is also very social...).

The thought of me possebly being bipolar kept nagging, but I didn't give it too much attention. Late 2015 I went back into therapy for my Asperger's syndrome and ADD. While the therapy didn't really teach me anything new (there's still no cure for autism, either therapy or medication), the depressions that I had from time to time kept coming.

On july 12th 2016 I spoke with my psych about my regular depressions (without mentioning bipolar!) and he came with the thought himself. He asked me to keep a mood log for the coming month and if it was possible for me to get my general moods from the last 3 years back (thank God for this blog, my Steam purchases and programming activities). The mood curve from the last 3 years showed a 'nice' sinus curve. This curve started with a 7-month period from depression to depression (with hypo-manic in between) and ended with about 4 to 5 months.In the mean time I was still recording the current month's mood, untill August 8th happened.

My therapist more or less confirmed that I'd have a bipolar disorder. But she's only a therapysts and not a psych, so it was not official (yet). My psych was at that moment on his holiday break, and I had intensive contact with my therapist in the mean time. When my psych came back I was immediately scheduled for an appointment and that was today a year ago. He immediately (after having read the reports from my therapyst) confirmed that I have a bipolar disorder.

At that moment the road for medication started. And while I'm not a fan of (chemical) medication, I figured that i'd have to give in to it. But with my history of allergic to extreme allergic reactions to different kind of medication, my psych didn't want to take any chance and ordered for a gen examination first (CYP1A2 and CYP2C9 enzimes) first, which showed later that I'm 'low metabolic' for the requested medication types (anti-depressives and anti-psychotics), meaning I need to start with a very low dosage and probably will keep side effects as long as I'm using it.
An other problem with medication is that my cholesterol is fairly high (always between 6.9 and 7.2, where normally 6.0 is the maximum), but that's a family related thing and ever since I know of it (20 years already) it's been around those values, whatever my weight is. This cholesterol problem also limits the 'choise' of medication for my psych.
So I ended up with Depakine, taking only 600mg a day (for my weight I should have around 3000mg a day ;;)), and after the first tests I already was pretty close to the therapeutical values in my blood...

Then December came and I had yet an other pretty deep depression period. This time knowing the cause, my psych proscribed Cipramil (1 drop a day, where 16 is normal), and that totally backfired. That one drop made me so fatigued that I slept through most of the day At least it did get me out of the worst part of the depression...
March was up next and my psych gave me Depakine up front as a 'just in case'. Mut that March depression was shallow. I was tired (not overly fatigues), and down, so I didn touch the anti-depressives...
And then June/July this year. This time the 'missing' depression from March joined up and I had a long and deep one. This time I also took the Depakine (30mg a day) after about 5 weeks when it went too deep, and yes it helped me through it! I even asked for an other month's ration of Depakine for the next depression period I'll get...

In general I'm more than happy with my diagnosis. I know where I stand now when I'm both hypo-manic and depressed, and more importantly I GET HELP for it. It's no longer a 'Oh, depression periods  comes with autism and ADD combined' remark (which I had a lot in the past), but I'm actual suffering from a bipolar disorder. That also means my wife can keep a better eye on me moods as well so she can see an episode (either depression or hypo-manic) coming and perhaps even before I see it myself.
...perhaps it is an annaversary after all...

I've had CE-34878-0 issues before with a PS Vita game. Googleing the issue I found out that it was related to corrupted data and it could be resolved in 3 days:
  1. Reinstall the game
  2. Remove the game save data (or upload to cloud and then download again)
  3. Reinitialize the device
Needless to say that option 3 is always a last resort, and certainly in this case for my PS4 with a 2Tb HDD that'll take ma hours to reinstall all games I have on it.

Instead I started with option 1 first, but sadly to no avail. Then option 2, and still the problem remained. As said, option 3 is a no-go for me, so Google once more is (NOT) my friend. There I learned that more PS4 Pro owners had this problem and that is might be caused by a memory leak. I was 100% that it's not a memory leak because I've played that Witch Doctor for days already without any problems so far.

So it became time to look at my skills and I figured that my somewhat high survivability (I've topped 3.5M survivability with my 30 pets out) in combination with the Zombie Dogs' Leeching Beasts rune since every time the game crahes I had full life. That theory was valid until I noticed a crash when I was at 10% health.

That was one viable theory down the drain. That'd mean I had to get back to my original character setup and start a trail & error course to find out what was causing the crashes. Pretty soon I found out that it was a combination of the The Grin Reaper's passive skill Chance when attacking to summon horrific Mimics that cast some of your equipped skills (remove the chance - I have them almost constantly around ) with the Acid Cloud skill using the Lob Blob Bomb rune. That combination was my best DPS setup I had at the time but crashed the PS4 constantly.
So I removed the The Grin Reaper and all went well, untill I bumped into my brother's Nemesis (I played on Torment 11 at the time). I'm still not sure if at that moment I had an other elite left to battle (I had a blue group and a yellow one right before he popped, and I think I killed them all, but not entirely sure). That Nemesis game me a hard time and I started spamming the Acid Cloud with the Lob Blob Bombs. In answer he spammed his freeze area's (I saw at least 5 on the ground) and his ground acid skill (hald the walkeble ground was greenish already). This all resultd in yet an other crash of my PS4
Next up I decided to reequip the The Grin Reaper and remove the Lob Blob Bomb from the Acid Cloud and it's been a smooth ride ever since. My brother and I have played for hours with my new setup already and have managed to play Torment 12 with no problems at all (though it goes slow....).

Needless to say that only one rune is pretty bugged. I'm not sure if it's one that'll pop up on lower levels, but during end-game batteling elite monsters that do a lot of skills it'll be bound to happen sooner than later. While I'm still not sure on the WHY of this bug, I think that the movement of the Lob Blob Bombs created either a memory leak or triggers too many timers (certainly when the Mimics spam Acid Cloud as well). Needless to say that when playing a Witch Doctor I can't use the best DPS setup I could find

Some choises are very easy, and this one is a no-brainer... I noticed earlier this year that photobucket is no longer allowing me to share images from their site on my blog. They give me the option to share if I upgrade my account. I figured to take a peek and well... $399/year for the upgrade to share the images on my site. Even my ISP is 99% cheaper than that and gives me enough bandwith. But I'm pretty lazy and don't want to chance that I get over my bandwith, so I decided to hop to Imgur instead...

The only problem is that I have to do some more work. Where Photopucked gave me some nice copy/paste links to implement in the blog directly, Imgur comes with a link to share a whole album. If I want just one image from the album (which is what I mostly need for the blog), I need to insert the image first, and then add a link to the image on Imgur. Oh well, I think I can live with that

I've been meaning to write this review a month ago already, but sadly the mild depression that I already was in hit mye quite hard - I even had to start taking anti-depressives. On the other hand, because I've been in that depression, I could play Elite Dangerous a lot and because of the nature of the game (I played mainly as trader and explorer) the game eased my mind quite well. It also allowed me to get to know the game better than I already did from the time I played it on the PC and it allowed me to get used to the Thrustrmaster T.Flight HOTAS 4 as well...

As said, I've already played ED on the PC before, but that was about 55 hours only. While I liked the game, I didn't like the controls that it provided. The mouse/keyboard combination was already a big no-no for me, while controller/keyboard was kinda the same but a bit better. Like most PC ED players, I bought a voice control program (VoiceAttack for me) to talk to the PC and avoid using they keyboard completely so I could focus on playing with the controller. Yet that still felt somewhat off, not to mention that the voice program had some difficulties with my microphone at times and responded (too) late from time to time. Of course, when I decided to hop to Linux, ED became totally out of the picture because it's a Windows only game
That means that when I bought the game (Legendary edition on disc), I knew what to expect and I figured I have to use controller/keyboard on my PS4, but I was wrong about that. On the PS4 ED doesn't use the keyboard at all (aside from optionally chat, but you can do that with the virtual keyboard as well), and the controller use has been extremely well implemented. After having run the tutorial and added a few missing functions (heatsink is not configured to name prolly the most important one) and changing only a couple to what I think was more convenient, I found that the controls felt quite natural and was ready to fly into the voids of space.

But still I found that the controls didn't cut it for me at all... In the past I've bought the Thrustmaster T.Flight HOTAS 4 to play No Man's Sky, but the game was not compatible with them, even while it was stated in ste sales ad. I returned them and said that I'd most likely get them again when ED would come to the PS4 (there was no release date set then) and 2 days after I bought the ED disc, I bought the HOTAS again (actually the same ones I returned 3 months ago ).
Much as with the controller, I ran the tutorials to see how the HOTAS would fly and I was immediately in love with them - using them it felt a 100% natural flying and controlling my ship. Of course, I once again had to make a few minor adjustments to the pre-set controls (gotta say that for both the HOTAS and controller, the PS4 controls have been done very well for ED - there is little to no need to remap the default controls at all), including adding the heatsink.

Ever since that I've been flying with the HOTAS and enjoying ED even more than I could imagine! There's are a few bad things about the HOTAS though...
  1. For me the stick is a bit too small. I have pretty big hands (glove size XL is a tight fit), and the stick itself might have been 5mm higher for my hand to make it more comfortable to play with. I can still use the stick normally, but I do have to adjust my hand from time to time and straighten my indexfinger to avoid strain from that bit-too-short stick.
  2. Being summer here (Europe) now, the plastic stick makes my hand sweat a lot. I have a PS3 controlled which has added silicone for a better grip, and that's also less likely to make my hands steat. I'd love to have seen that added to the HOTAS as well, but it's a minor issue though.
  3. Having used the HOTAS for a month now, the internal mechanism has 'loosened' a bit and the deadzones have to be set. While I think this is only natural because the springs (well, I guess they use springs) come tight woven from the factory and using them will strech them somewhat. Once more a minor thing, setting deadzones fixes it most of the time, but my ship does tend to fly up a bit from time to time because of this. Pushing the stick inward a bit fixes it most of the time. Of course, I could set the spring strength with the knob at the bottom, but I think that might strech the springs even more over time...
  4. Last but not least, there are only 2 PS4 games that support the HOTAS right now: Elite Dangerous and War Thunder (a 'Free2Play' game).

Enough about the HOTAS, lets spend some time on Elite Dangerous right now...
For those unfamiliar with the game, it's actually a 4X sandbox game. This means that the game has no pre-set goal like most games have (reach level X, or kill boss Y), but you determine your own goals in the game. Of course, the game does have missions that you can optionally pick up, but those are more a means to gain money and learn the ropes of the game (both are certainly true at the early stages of the game), but other than that, YOU decide what you do in the sandbox of our universe. You could decided to become a space trucker, get the biggest freighter money can buy and then buy/sell stuff from various stations or do the FedEx missions those stations provide. Youc an also become a combat pilot and play the kill missions, get faction (Federation and Empire) ranks to unlock better combat ships and get special permits to enter certain systems (Sol is a Federation permit locked system) or planets, become a bounty hunter or even a pirate (and be hunted by other bounty hunters ). You can also decided to head to Sagittarius A* (the center of our galaxy over 25K lightyears from start) for that (PS4) trophy and explore everything you encounter along the way (exploration does pay off quite well BTW).

But that's not all ED has to offer. The game also gives a good insight into astrophysics and I gotta say that Frontier (ED's developer) has done a good job at that. I wasn't the brightest light at physics at school (I have a problem learning formulas just because they are true - I need to know why thanks to my Asperger's syndrome), but playing ED has learned me a lot about physics in general. So far, almost all I've seen in the game makes sense according to the laws of physics. The only thing that I think is bugged is when you're decending to a planet at low speed, and the planet's gravity is not pulling hard enough on your ship, while at landing it is...

Graphicsally I think ED is decent enough. While space itself is a black void, the stars and planets so have some variation, but it might have been bigger. When you look on the star system map, you can pick out most of the systems immediately, making a scout for earth-like worlds and terraform canditates very easy (too easy?), while on your ship's HUD you can already see what kind of planet you're dealing with. Landing on a planet is something that might provide more variation as well. So far I've seen the same landscapes over and over again with an occasional rare flora and scattered rocks and mining nodes.
On the other hand, when flying and using the in-game's photo mode you can make some real nice shots of the game. The ED subreddit has quite a lot of them (not as much as the NMS subreddid has though).

The soundtrack of ED pretty a good. It gives you a real space flight feeling, but when flying for hour after hour it might become pretty dull. It's not like most games where you have 100s of musical scenes that change from situation to situation but instead your randomly get one of the tracks ED offers. I mostly mute the game's soundtrack and instead play some of my own music.

It's also worth to mention that ED has an online gaming mode in either open play or closed group play (as usual, PS+ required) that allows you to fly in a wing-party if you and your friend are close enough to meet - space if infinate and it might take some time to meet up. If you and your friend are 1000s of lightyears apart, there's also an option to hop into your friend's ship and take a seat there (if the ship allows it). On that seat you can take the role of gunner while flying, but if the ship has a hangar, you can also from down in a smaller fighter and fight from there (these small fighters can also be used by NPCs you can hire). Alternatively, you can also add a 2nd (or bigger) vehicle bay and the 2 of you can ride the survaces of planets and moons.

It's not all positive though. There is no cross-platform play (most likely because SONY and MicroSoft could not agree on the server sharing as usual), but the game does use one main database for all 3 platforms (PC, PS4 and XBOX 1). With the PS4 version of the game having been released 2 years after the PC version, finding new systems/planets is kinda hard. More importantly for me is that because of it, I had to start all over again - I could not transfer my old PC data to the PS4. While not a biggie (I wasn't realy far on the PC after that 50 hours ), it might have given me an extra boost

Personally, I think Elite Dangerous is one of the best games available for the PS4 right now. Last month I've spent over 100 hours flying through space (I am on my way to Sagittarius A* right now with some massive detours) and I'm pretty sure that I'll be playing ED for months (if not years) to come. And while I'm still in a pretty nooby ship (Asp Explorer with little to no modifications), exploration goes pretty well as well as fending off pirates (though I'd advice against battle when so far off from 'civilization' - there are very few ports out there and a repair unit needs quite some materials to work). In general, if you're a SF lover and enjoy sandbox games, I really can recommend to get it!

I consider myself to be quite the computer veteran. Having started with PCs in 1989 (after 5 years of using home computers) and used a couple of different operating systems (started with DOS with later added QEMM/Desqview for 'multi-tasking' (or rather time-slicing on a 386DX machine), then OS/2 (versions 2.11, Warp 3 and Warp 4) to hop to Windows XP in 2002 and Windows 7 in 2007). But Linux is something completely different though. While the GUI is much like OS/2 and Windows had, the system that runs thingsin the background is completely different.

Like my programming activities where I learn the system begind the language, Iḿ taking a similar approach for Linux as well. And while it sounds like 'pun intended' with Linux being a system already, DOS, OS/2 and Windows all have in common that they more or less had the same 'grand mother', being DOS itself. It was not too hard to work on the command line of those opeating systems at all. From the earliest DOS version I used (which was 2.x iirc) up to the latest (version 6 of which I still have the 3.5"discs) as well as OS/2-DOS (which actually was caller that way) and the Windows DOS prompts, they all used the same commands, both native to the COMMAND.EXE (or CMD.EXE for Windows) as well as the external 'tools' that came with the DOS versions.
Linux is completely different. While the native commands are quite similar (dis, ls, rd and such), the administrative commands are totally different. The SUDO command allowing me to get into the administrative tools (which are equal to the external tools for DOS) are quite differently though. For that I'm reading some ebooks I've bought as well as using Google a lot to see how things work. Good thing though that there are also quite a lot of GUI tools (Synaptics being the most important one) to make things easier, but as said, I much rather learn how to use the system itself than let (3rd party) tools do things for me.

Then there's the thing about my programming tools. I wanted to be 'free' of Windows, and while knowing that not every tool I need is available for Linux (yet), I also didn't want to install WINE (Windows Is Not Emulated). Sadly though, that didn't seem to be an option for me. Certain Windows tools that I've been using while programming are too important not to use again, OR the data I've already created take too much time to convert them to a Linux equivalent (like my flowchard for the Modern System Reference Document - this image is already an old version). For these old tools, as well as some of my Steam applications that I'm missing I've decided to get WINE anyway...

Gaming under Linux is something important to mention as well. While I'm gaming more and more on my PS4 for the last haf year, there are still some games that I want to play. It's a good thing thatthose games are available for Linux and I have installed those. It's also fun to point out that a game like Borderlands 2 runs a lot smoother under Linux with all settings maxed out than it does under Windows
The only thing I need to figure out is how to get nVidia PhysiX to work under Linux. While not being overly important, I think it'll be one of those fun things to get to work. I've already seen that the nVidia drivers did install Vulkan (now figure out how to use it when programming ), but using both PhysX for my games (Borderlands 2 uses it) would be AWESOME. And for programming using them both at the same time would be great as well, though I think Vulkan might be stong enough already to ditch PhysX completely...

Last but not least, the Ubuntu community. I've subscribed to the /r/Ubuntu subreddit and I gotta say that the community is great. Asking questions doesn't result in downvotes and negative comments, it's quite the opposite (and something to get used to). When I ask a question, I get a lot of upvotes, even if people don't comment on it. And those people who comment come with real good answers. If you want to switch to Linux, I'd say get over there as well for some real good help and general information!