Category: Summer 2026 (Page 3 of 3)

#3 – “Da Funk”

06/28/2026 / Evan / 0 Comments

Hello again! My previous post was a very brief test on how it was to write blog posts on my phone. While I did make a post, I’m back on my computer for this one, so it couldn’t have been that great. This post will be a story on how Windows pissed me off, and that’s it.

Now, Windows is terrible, as almost anybody interested in tech will tell you. But unfortunately, because Windows is 40 or so years of technology mashed together into a big glob of an always breaking operating system, software is designed for it, and nothing else, because it shouldn’t break between versions. It usually does! That’s not my point, though. Software is also only designed for Windows because sometimes developers fear the penguin! I’m not quite sure what it is with Linux, but developers clearly must have something. One such developer is Bungie. Because I dare to like Destiny 2, I have to keep a Windows partition around on my PC because they instaban you if you even think about loading the game up on Linux.

So I was using Windows for Destiny, and it made me think: I had a few other games stuck in Windows jail. For example, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Battlefield 1, and Fortnite. As an aside, Battlefield 1 once even worked on Linux; EA is just evil, so they added a garbage anticheat which just eliminated the Linux players. Anticheat is kinda like DRM in that way. It doesn’t make cheaters or pirates go away, but instead it just kinda screws over your average consumer, for no reason. But because of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, as we’ll call them, I said, “OK let’s give solely Windows a shot. It can’t be that bad, can it?”

Yeah, if it wasn’t obvious by me stating it two or three times so far, Windows was that bad. In fact, it was bad twice over: I first tried Microsoft’s latest “gift” to the PC world in Windows 11, before going back to Windows 10 and having more problems. Now I’m back on Debian, with Windows just a thing taking up 300GB for Destiny 2 (where I started).

For a little context on why I was trying Windows 11, I hadn’t tried it in sometimes. I used it on a PC in 2021 when it came out, it was a miserable experience (partially the computer, partially Windows 11), and went back to Windows 10 by 2022. I had used 10 since then, and later switched to Linux as my main OS in 2025, so outside of school computers, I haven’t given the OS a new look in four, going-on five, years. Maybe they fixed what I didn’t like about it? Microsoft is really good at giving me opportunities to turn my thoughts into It’s Always Sunny titlecard jokes.

So, what was so bad at 11 then and now? Here’s a little list:

The UI – Every Windows version comes with some fun UI upgrades. Windows Vista’s Aero theme is a great example. 11 comes with a nice UI with a focus on rounded corners, and making everything big as hell for no reason! Not only that, it messes with your workflow!
- The Taskbar: When Windows 7? (I don’t know, I think it was 7) added icon buttons with no label, they gave you the option to keep the labels, as it was in Windows 95. 11, on the other hand removed this! On top of removing features, setting the taskbar to the left, right, or top? Gone! I will credit Microsoft here, labels got added back in 25H2, so I could have them again; taskbar placement is coming in 26H2, along with a way to decrease the size of the taskbar finally, so it’s reign of it being bigger than it ever was can end. Not bad. Then again, they created this problem in the first place.
- The Start Menu: Jesus. Where do I start? Not only is it bigger for no reason, you yet again removed features. Plus, this introduces my other “favorite” aspect of Windows 11: messing with your workflow by making what there is even slower. To get to the list of your apps (yet again, Windows 95), it now takes an extra click.
- The Right Click Menu: bigger, and again Microsoft doesn’t realize something is less functional when I have to take extra clicks to get stuff done. Who was this for?
Performance: Turns out, this “beautiful” new UI comes at a performance cost. So did Aero, to be fair. But you know what came at performance gains? Windows 7, 8, and 10. The last three major versions of Windows gave gains, so not gaining one here kinda sucks. But I could even forgive that, if the new features were good, or the performance tax wasn’t that significant. Unfortunately, the performance tax is that significant. On my PC with a Ryzen 5 5600 and RX 6600, I consistently get around 10% slower performance on 11 compared to 10, which is already down vs. Linux. For what?
The New Features: The big features of Windows 11 are UI improvements and integration of Microsoft services, especially Copilot. The UI improvements I mostly spoke on, but I would also like to add how the UI improvements have made Windows settings a further confusing experience, as while the app has improved, the legacy Control Panel is still here. Could they not just go all in? But the integration of Microsoft services
The Removal of Features: I will credit Microsoft on this. They’ve fixed it. The little annoyances of “why is this gone” like right-clicking the taskbar for task manager, or the aforementioned window labels, are back. But my question is as follows: Windows has always been focused on legacy support. Why, and how, did these get the axe in the first place?
The Bugs: Oh lord the bugs. Let’s just say there’s a reason I ran off to a stable Linux distribution. It does give me a laugh every week when I read tech news and see a new Windows 11 issue, though.
Adding Insult to Injury: Sometimes, Microsoft will manage to do multiple of these at once. The best example is the “Widgets” screen, a new feature, replacing the “News and Interest” feature from Windows 10 and the Live Tiles from 8-10. Not only can you do less than the live tiles, for years, because it also replaced “News,” you had to deal with it, whether you wanted it or not. I will credit yet again that they removed it, but why was it an idea to combine these features?

So, 11 wasn’t gonna work out. So later that day, I went back to Windows 10. I didn’t consider 11, or my experience with it, much the fault of Microsoft, as it was really my curiosity that took over. But now that I was back on 10, nothing could happen to ruin it and I could just play my games, right?

I was on Windows 10 for a few more days, but it is the shorter part of this story. I set up Windows how I liked it, and installed my games. However, a few more things went wrong, which is why I went back to Linux. First, I dared to play a game. Oddly enough, when I opened Black Ops Cold War, my screen started to flicker, and the taskbar kept popping up. Annoying, certainly, and I tried to fix it, but found nothing. Maybe because I can play that game on Xbox easily, but I didn’t mind too hard, and just uninstalled. A day or two later, I joined a Discord call with my friends, and the same thing happened. That one, that’s a dealbreaking bug. I troubleshooted everything, and eventually realized that it was a Windows issue, after going as far as to reinstall my GPU drivers after 9000 steps relating to the app to make it work.

So, I had to reinstall. But seeing as I still found 11 unusable and 10 managed to break on me in a day, why bother? I went back to Linux, and that’s where the story ends. Rather anticlimactic, I know, but that’s how life is.

I hope you enjoyed that rather pointless story, at least much more than I “enjoyed” Windows. Thank you for reading today’s post, I hope you enjoy them as much as I like writing them. Have a good rest of your day.

#2 – “Nightvision”

06/26/2026 / Evan / 0 Comments

This is the first post I’ve written on my phone, so it’ll likely be about 3 sentences long. I’ve proved I can do that!

Anyways on what I did today: I installed LineageOS on an old (2016) Samsung tablet. I think that Lineage is quite an interesting project, breathing new life into older devices. I’ll comment more on usability in the near future, as I may try it on a phone or use said tablet to learn about its quirks vs Android.

I know it was three paragraphs, but that’s all for this one. Give me a break, because I wrote it on a phone! Have a good rest of your day, and thank you for reading.

#1 – “Eternal Summer”

06/25/2026 / Evan / 0 Comments

Hello again! In my previous post, I said I’d like to keep these blog posts as a daily thing. That was three weeks ago. So, I failed. But in between then and now, some things have changed that make this a lot easier of a task. First off, the Knicks won the finals; this means that my last post aged well. Second, and much more important to why daily blog posts are easier to do, is that my summer vacation has begun, meaning I should have the time for 69 or 70 daily posts. That’s why I’ve numbered them, so I can keep track.

The goal is to post these “daily,” with daily in quotes because my sleep schedule will be all kinds of messed up. I’m counting this post for Wednesday, June 24th, but as I’m writing this it’s really 1:50 the following Thursday. In other words, daily with days quantified as the span I am awake, rather than a specific 24 hour period. That could mean a day can have one or possibly two posts, or perhaps if my sleep schedule gets extra screwed, some “days” will have two posts while being in different days (this assumes I pull an all-nighter and know I’ll be lazy enough to write a post the next morning).

Anyways, enough about the technicalities of my blog posts made so I can yap to a guy without a guy to yap to, on to the contents. I’d like my posts over the summer really to be something of a time capsule of it. So I may just yap on what I did that day, or current thoughts on a show I’m watching, or review of an album I’ve listened to or movie I watched. For example…

Stuff I’ve Done

or: doing exactly what I said a sentence ago

Note: These sections are collapsible. If you just so happen to be interested in anything here and want to remain unspoiled, don’t read it!

The Sopranos (Last Watched: S6E7)

I like this one. Not a thing I have to justify in the slightest, as I think most people will easily tell you this is one of the greatest shows of all time. What I’ll focus on today is the show up to this point, which is the vast majority of it, but I think that’s OK.

The dynamic of Tony balancing his life as the mob boss and life with his family, especially in the early seasons with his mother, is fantastic. It’s all brought together with what I think is the pivotal aspect to the show, the therapy scenes. The therapy scenes are, in some way, the most difficult scenes for the show to balance.

I think one of the biggest strengths of any show is a great first season. This show has a phenomenal one. So far through the show, it is my personal favorite, although season five is very close. Maybe it’s because they didn’t know where the series would go, but that season is the only one with a complete arc. And I think the dynamic of Tony and his mom, and his reaction to it through therapy while having to hide it from the mob to keep up his “tough guy” image is fantastic.

Another great aspect of the show is how it balances dark comedy with the dramatic elements. The show can manage having some of the most dramatic moments on television, with the line “He was gay, Gary Cooper?”

I also like how the show is not afraid to show its characters in terrible light. This may seem like a point where it’s like “OK, so what?” now that we have shows like Breaking Bad, but I think The Sopranos is better at it too. For every moment where you side with Tony, there’s at least two to remind you that the characters in this show are almost all horrible people.

To wrap this section up as opposed to yapping worse than six barbers, I’ll talk more on where I think the show is going. Predictions are fun. First of, I think Vito is going to die. The show always gives you those moments of hope that maybe something will work out, especially with Tony B trying to be legitimate and Adrianna’s whole character arc, before ripping it all away. I just don’t think Tony can get over Vito’s homosexuality. Second, I think something will happen that will get Tony at war with New York. I don’t know exactly why I think that one, or how it can happen, but I think it will.

That’s really all I have to say this post. I really wanted this to be a shorter post to get back into writing as a fun little hobby. I expect these will get longer as I go on. Have a good rest of your day, and thanks for reading.