https://www.knorr.com/us/en/p/spanish-rice-side.html/00041000022685

Depending on your level of struggle, these rice packets cost about ~$1.25 USD and cook in 7 minutes, you just gotta stir 'em a bit.

To that I’ll add some protein, either some sausages I cooked on the George Foreman grill and sliced up or a packet of flavored tuna. This is mostly no effort or unattended.

For veggies, I’ll steam up something fresh or microwave some frozen mixed veggies. Either way this can be done in 3-5 minutes, unattended.

Some effort, but still very low. You can get everything started at once while you stand there and stir the rice packet on the stove, everything should wrap up in less than 10 minutes and you’ll have a relatively complete and filling mill for hopefully less than $5 USD but I don’t even fucking know anymore with inflation, tariffs, and out of control groceries. Should still be more cost effective than a lot of alternatives, though.

EDIT: The rice packet can honestly be quite a bit for a single person, depending. You may want to pad it out with a few more things like mushrooms and beans, then you can split the meal in two. Eat half now and save half to be microwaved later to stretch it out and for when you have no prep time at all.

Yes, thank you, I think this is exactly what I’ve been feeling but unable to articulate properly.

I do feel there’s a great loss of knowledge in IT, but I’m also aware that I’m motivated by my own opinions and fear of job stability here. There are absolutely times when the cloud makes sense, and those arguments about capex v. opex nail it. I’d love to blame it entirely on greedy execs, but that upfront cost is hard to swallow for a new business, whether you’re planning on super/hyper scaling or not. Cohosting in a datacenter is a great option, but even then, most people simply won’t be willing to invest the time, as you put it.

I’ve had the luck of working for stable institutions like banks and biotech in the past where they built out their infrastructure for security and reliability properly and it was wonderful. I’ve also had the misfortune of working for hyperscaling startups with zero trust architecture built in Azure. It was a nightmare and I hated every day of it.

Like most things, the path forward is going to require a delicate balance, but there’s absolutely no fucking trusting Microsoft. When Europe says, “Hey, we’re getting nervous about your influence here” the response isn’t:

“In a time of geopolitical volatility, we are committed to providing digital stability. That is why today Microsoft is announcing five digital commitments to Europe. These start with an expansion of our cloud and AI infrastructure in Europe, aimed at enabling every country to fully use these technologies to strengthen their economic competitiveness. And they include a promise to uphold Europe’s digital resilience regardless of geopolitical and trade volatility.”

I mean, of course that’s what they’d say, but still. Fuck 'em.

Y’all, I gotta admit I’m really starting to feel old. I still do not fully believe that cloud hosting is the answer for everyone. For businesses of certain sizes, I think running your own stuff and maintaining that IT knowledge within your org is invaluable, but I’m just an IT gremlin who can’t properly articulate his thoughts.

Anyone more knowledgeable care to weigh in?

I suppose I should’ve clarified in the post but I omitted for brevity; trying various versions of Proton(-GE) is always the first troubleshooting step for any problem, really. Certain games did not respond to any recent 9-X or 8-X versions, though may have worked if I had gone back far enough to earlier 6-X versions …

I’m unsure if this is related, but I’ve had some small issues with settings getting “stuck” in the Piper GUI and just not translating well to the actual device.

To fix this, use the underlying ratbagctl program in the terminal to clear out the DPI settings on the mouse itself. This only needs to be done once and the next time you open Piper it should read from the mouse and clear whatever GUI issue you were having,

ratbagctl list
ratbagctl screaming-chipmunk profile <PROFILE_NUMBER> dpi set <DPI_VALUE>

Replace screaming-chipmunk with whatever your device is listed as from ratbagctl list, it’ll be something similar. Hope that helps!

Arch gets a bad rep, but I think it’s a great first distro for anyone with moderate or above skills. The primary factor is that you have to actually be interested in learning it, not looking for something that “just works”.

I use Arch on my beefy gaming PC and I run updates every day because I’m a dork. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve had better stability doing this than with the monthly patches on Windows. That’s not to say there haven’t been issues, Windows sets a low bar. But here in this year 2025, the “innovation” of paid software is excessive and often not worth the cost of dealing with service subscriptions and whatnot. The software in FOSS land tends to be more conservative in its construction with a focus on doing the thing it’s supposed to and usability. People want their distros to work, it’s not like Arch maintainers are just breaking it all over the place because, “oopsy, gotta stay up to date!”

Anyways, here’s how I prioritize things:

1. pacman: This should be your PRIMARY source. Think of everything in the official Arch repos as part of the OS, just things you haven’t installed on your system yet because you don’t need it. The most care has been put into ensuring all these packages work together and I have the highest confidence that these will be maintained for the greatest duration into the future. One of the big benefits of using pacman is that especially with Arch, you upgrade your entire system at once with pacman -Syu. Conversely on Windows, you have to update all software yourself by either downloading a newer version and running the installer, having the program install a system tray icon to pester you, MAYBE the program implements a self/auto update? Or maybe it prompts you for an update and then just sends you to the website to download the latest version and install it yourself. Kind of a mess, really.
2. yay: If I want a piece of software that’s not part of the main distribution, I’ll turn to the Arch User Repository (AUR). If it helps, just think of this as the unofficial pacman. It downloads the files from the AUR and builds them directly on your system (all using scripts, using yay is as easy as using pacman). The downside is that because the AUR is unofficial, occasionally things can break when something in the official repository updates. It happens from time to time, but you can always check the AUR pages and see that people are on top of things for popular programs. It’s fine to place your trust in the AUR (IMHO) but if you have an absolutely critical app that cannot afford to break, maybe consider a flatpak or appimage instead.
3. flatpaks: again, this is another package manager that behaves much like pacman and yay do. The difference here is that flatpaks are contained. This makes a big difference especially with Arch since the whole system updates at once with Syu. The biggest downside (IMHO) is space, a package that might only take ~15MB from the official repo may instead be >300MB when packaged with all its dependencies in a flatpak. I think this is what the Discover Software Center actually hooks into but I’m not sure since I do all command line. You could, if you wanted, begin uninstalling applications you installed through pacman (obviously not system related ones) and install the flatpaks in their place. For reasons I still don’t understand myself, the OBS that you install through pacman doesn’t have browser sources available, but the one I installed from https://flathub.org/ does. I need the browser sources so I’ve made that decision, I’ll switch back to the official repo one if they ever get that sorted.
4. AppImages: AppImages are entirely self-contained. Download a .AppImage and you can place it almost anywhere on your system and it’ll run, no requirement for further dependencies. It doesn’t install, however it will still create files on the system required for its operation such as anything needed under ~/.config or wherever. To update these, you just need to download the newer file.

I hope that helps a little bit, let me know if you’d like further clarification on any of the points.

It seems like a lot when you’re first learning, but I keep all my notes in Obsidian and once you understand how you’re building the stack of software on your Arch installation I think it’ll click for you. To fully update my system I run:

• pacman -Syu
• yay -Sua
• flatpak update

You can update pacman packages with yay, and you can update flatpaks with Discover (I think) but I do it this way just because I’m meticulous and I like keeping my eye on things. Still, pretty easy I think?