Making the linux jump.

[IkeaGnome]

I've thought about going to Linux for a while. I'm considering it very hard right now. I need to free up space on my drives, and am going to be wiping them in the next couple of days anyways. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to try to go all in with it. I'll start this with I've never personally messed with Linux before. This would be going on Project Hotbox. All AMD build, so I'm not worried about Nvidia drivers. I don't do any video recording or workstation tasks on Hot Box. It's purely for games. Usually, Discord, Spotify, Youtube etc. Most of what I play is through Steam. It looks like either Pop Os with Gnome, or KDE with Majaro are my best bets. 

Personally, I'm partial to anything with Gnome in the name, but if KDE is just a much better environment, I'll use that. 

Is there anything big I need to watch out for? What's a good way to go about learning about the terminal? I know for my use case W10 makes more sense, but I want to at least try Linux and now seems like a great time for it.

[IkeaGnome]

4 minutes ago, 8tg said:

Proton fixes and patches from users for a lot of games.

Correct me if I'm wrong. Let's say I went with Manjaro. I'd install Proton, and for a lack of better terms, it acts like a VM that games run better on? Then if there is an issue with say voice audio in Skyrim, I'd be looking at diagnosing how the specific updates of Manjaro and Proton and Skyrim are interacting and causing issues? 

A lot of my problem with thinking this is probably much harder than it is, is that I need to do to learn. 

[Alexeygridnev1993]

12 minutes ago, IkeaGnome said:

Correct me if I'm wrong. Let's say I went with Manjaro. I'd install Proton, and for a lack of better terms, it acts like a VM that games run better on? Then if there is an issue with say voice audio in Skyrim, I'd be looking at diagnosing how the specific updates of Manjaro and Proton and Skyrim are interacting and causing issues? 

A lot of my problem with thinking this is probably much harder than it is, is that I need to do to learn. 

Proton is based on Wine, and it is not a WM. It's a compatibility layer which translates calls to Windows API or DirectX to Unix-compatible commands and Vulkan. That's why the performance penalty is minimal. But, of course, the translation is not ideal as it is made possible by basically reverse engineering the proprietary and poorly documented Windows API.

 

In practical terms, whenever your game has some weird issues or does not work at all, you go to protondb.com , search for your game and see the status / comments from the people which hopefully contain solutions to some of your issues (which is either changing the version of Proton or modifying some config files).

[IkeaGnome]

4 minutes ago, 8tg said:

99% of the time youre just googling the problem and youd end up at some discussion where a bunch of other people already worked out the issue and now have a solution

thats honestly 99% of all linux problems in general as well

you name it, someone on ubuntu forums has probably already figured it out

That doesn't sound all that bad. 

4 minutes ago, 8tg said:

Proton isnt like a VM, its a bit complicated to explain in the same way that Wine means "wine is not an emulator", it sort of takes the windows application and gives it the direction needed to recognise linux file systems and different API's

Skyrim as an example again, was never designed with linux in mind. It expects the game to be on a windows named storage drive, in windows file systems, with a windows registry and using common windows file types 

On linux all those things are different, what compatibility layers like proton do is translate linux stuff to windows stuff for the game, it lets the game understand a linux file system structure, creates a sort of artificial registry, allows the game and linux to read different file formats, etc

Drawing conclusions from what I know, it's sort of like an OBD scanner. Mechanics aren't supposed to understand the 1's and 0's behind the error codes, but the scanner will act as the compatibility layer and put it into letters and numbers we can understand.

 

Pardon all the questions, I'm just wanting to make sure I've got things correctly. Let's say I went with Manjaro and KDE and then Proton. Manjaro would be the distribution of Linux, KDE would be the desktop environment and Proton is the compatibility layer. 

Are there any recommended distributions? Ones that might be a little bit more learner friendly, or work better for what I want it to do?

[Alexeygridnev1993]

1 minute ago, IkeaGnome said:

Manjaro would be the distribution of Linux, KDE would be the desktop environment and Proton is the compatibility layer. 

Yes, you got it all correctly

 

1 minute ago, IkeaGnome said:

Are there any recommended distributions?

Every distro has its fans and haters, so, none of the advice you get will be "true" or "objective". My personal favorite is Kubuntu (based on Ubuntu but with KDE as a desktop environment), as 1) Ubuntu was developed to be user-friendly from the very beginning, and it remained that way, 2) I strongly prefer KDE to any other desktop environment, 3) Ubuntu community is one of the biggest in Linux, and its forums have a lot of "noob" questions answered.

[IkeaGnome]

41 minutes ago, Alexeygridnev1993 said:

3) Ubuntu community is one of the biggest in Linux, and its forums have a lot of "noob" questions answered.

How well does that translate into Pop? I really like the desktop environment, I know I could run Gnome with other distros, but some of the Pop specifics (I always have many windows open over 3 monitors) make it look really appealing. 

 

41 minutes ago, 8tg said:

yes, and proton is just built into steam, its a setting you enable in your library and you install games and proton just takes over and makes sure they work

most of the time without any issue, its a rare few games that have big problems that cant be fixed easily

I think Linux might end up being a lot easier than I have envisioned. 

 

43 minutes ago, 8tg said:

PopOS is the recent very popular choice as its good with keeping up on cutting edge current gen hardware support

I'm pretty sure this is what I'm going to go with. It looks simple where I think I'd want it, but still has room for me to learn the terminal and more Linux based things.

 

Thanks for all the help you two!

[Alexeygridnev1993]

5 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

How well does that translate into Pop?

If you have a question and cannot find anything for PopOS specifically, you can just google "Ubuntu <your question>" and, in 99% of cases, it will work for PopOS or any other Ubuntu-based distro too.

[patemathic]

I'm not sure whether you've already installed Pop!_OS as you replied 12 hours ago. Pop!_OS is not a bad option, but I'll post this anyway in case you get something useful out of this as well.

 

 

WHICH DISTRO TO CHOOSE?

I'd suggest you begin with Kubuntu. GNOME is very different compared to Windows' desktop environment, and is what many distros ship with. For those who've used Windows, I'll almost always suggest to go KDE. Kubuntu is a pretty good distribution to begin with, as it's Ubuntu, but with KDE. As a result, you get the vast userbase with the software and support of Ubuntu, with the familiarity and customisability of KDE.

 

Kubuntu, Ubuntu (and other Ubuntu flavours, collectively referred to as *buntu from now on) also are pretty forgiving for new users in that you can install .deb software onto it, like you're likely used to as a Windows user. You'll eventually learn to add PPAs and install from repositories as you find better and better replacements for your current software collection.

 

While many people say that Manjaro is good for beginners, I politely disagree. *buntu is better because it's the most likely distro to have a specific piece of software available for it. Once you've got familiar with the concept of repositories and PPAs, you can stop running .exe files in Wine and downloading .deb files and gradually start using stuff available right from the repository. Manjaro expects you to dive head first in the deep end, and start using AURs, tarballs and compiling from source straight away.

 

 

WHAT TO WATCH OUT FOR

Linux is very different to Windows. Here's a list of many things that could cause confusion to a new user:

• Linux does not have a C: drive. Linux begins its filesystem from / (known as the root directory). External drives are mounted into a directory. In fact, /dev, /proc and /boot for example are all mounted directories.
• Everything is a file. In /dev, you can see device files. Those are not actual files on your hard disk, but it's actually a mounted "file system" which shows your devices as files, which can be read from and written to. For example, /dev/sda is the first SATA device connected to your system. You can read the raw bytes of the hard disk, given that you've sufficient permissions of course.
• Executables are different. On Linux, if you download an executable, it usually can't be executed by default. This also counts .jar, .sh files. You usually have to run something like "chmod +x [FILE]" to give it execute permissions.
• Executables are even more different. With the notable exception of non-ELF binaries, executables almost never have a file extension (example: instead of program.exe the program's filename is program). In fact, file extensions shouldn't ever be required. They're there just so you know which file is which.
• Downloading programs off a website is usually a last resort. Linux distros almost always come with a package manager. On *buntu for example, you install software off the official Ubuntu repository by 'sudo apt install (packages separated by spaces)'.
• Programs usually come with man pages. While you're almost certainly going to be googling a lot of stuff, I'd suggest you also try to read manuals (known as man pages). As an example, if you're unsure how to use the ssh command, just run 'man ssh'. You'll see references to ssh_config(5), and to open the page 5 of manual ssh_config, you run 'man 5 ssh_config'.
• The root user can do literally anything. And you need root privileges to do anything that could cause damage outside your user. This includes installing software. Your user is part of the wheel group, which gives you permission to switch to the root user. Only grant root access when you know what it's used for!

 

I didn't go over everything here, but it should get you somewhat started. Remember to google when in doubt! I hope you'll find this at least somewhat helpful.

 

After you get more familiar with Linux, I encourage you to explore other distros! After having used Kubuntu for 2 years, I moved to openSUSE Tumbleweed, and am very happy with it.

[IkeaGnome]

1 hour ago, patemathic said:

I'm not sure whether you've already installed Pop!_OS as you replied 12 hours ago. Pop!_OS is not a bad option, but I'll post this anyway in case you get something useful out of this as well.

I've not installed it yet. I've still got a 10 hour work day, bus ride, boat ride, bus ride, plane, then a 90 minute drive till I get home. Or about 18 hours.

I do like that Kubuntu is a little bit more user friendly and similar to Windows, but I want the change if that makes sense. I want to learn a new OS and I think if it feels too much like Windows, I might end up installing a task manager or sorts, as an example, and not really learning any Linux. I like that Kubuntu has options to make it simple, but I'm lazy. If it's got too many easy options, I'll use them. 

The C: drive is going to mess with me I think. The Linux file system looks a lot like Mac OS, which I've never messed with either. I've always used Windows and Android.

 

All of you have been a huge help. I think with Steamdeck, there's going to be a lot more people looking to switch to Linux that are in shoes similar to me. I don't want to make this thread 10 pages long, but I'd like to update this with my trials, tribulations, and victories. Maybe it'll actually end up helping people here before too long. 

 

A big reason I went all AMD is consoles. They're all AMD, they're 8c16t, like my 5800x and now that console is coming to computer more and more, Steam Deck, cross play, I think all AMD and Linux is actually going to end up working best for people who cross play with console gamers or play cross platform games. Project Hot Box has taught me a lot. You can go too small in an air cooled ITX case for example. It's going to keep teaching me more, and hopefully it can help others down the line. 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

A big reason I went all AMD is consoles. They're all AMD, they're 8c16t, like my 5800x and now that console is coming to computer more and more, Steam Deck, cross play, I think all AMD and Linux is actually going to end up working best for people who cross play with console gamers or play cross platform games. Project Hot Box has taught me a lot. You can go too small in an air cooled ITX case for example. It's going to keep teaching me more, and hopefully it can help others down the line. 

AMD, Graphics Cards, should be more appealing since it's open-source and the community as well as Valve make contributions upstream to it.

Meanwhile NVIDIA keeps everything locked behind closed doors.

 

For things like DXVK this is actually a rather big deal. Lets say Game A needs Feature B to be playable. It turns out we need to add in a extensions to the Graphics Driver to make it usable. So we Add it into the Mesa Stack, perfect.

Now there is just one problem, NVIDIA doesn't use the Mesa stack, ok so we make NVIDIA aware. They are going to add it, now two questions remain. When will this happen and how will NVIDIA add it? It could be next week or it could be a year later. It also may not be a directly compatible addition, so now we might have to modify DXVK to accommodate this.

And this isn't just true in the Gaming Space with DXVK, its a common problem across all of Linux.

 

AMD does however suffer a problem in the Distro Space and why I personally think SteamOS is going with an Arch Base. You only get these improvements when your Distro decides to update that package, typically it's at the start of the release cycle. Luckily for most everyday tasks, these upstream improvements rarely have a major impact on a Distro that's say 6 months out of date, but you might miss out on some improvements in the meantime. So if you wanted a Reason to consider say Manjaro, this would be a good reason as it's built on Arch, with a 2 week package hold back, which is a upstream rolling release distro.

I will however note that repo's do exists for various Distros such as Ubuntu/PopOS to combat this issue.

 

Valve actually showed this when DXVK was updated to support the Release of Cyberpunk. The statement stated that only AMD Graphics Cards on Upstream Mesa would be supported. I imagine all of that has worked itself out by now and everyone can enjoy it just fine, but its a good example.

 

Another Good example is Wayland, where NVIDIA laggs way behind with their own proprietary implementation. Something NVIDIA needs to sort out soon as Wayland is starting to become the default display server.

 

Thanks to this problem, I as well as many other developers, don't go out of our way to try to support NVIDIA. If it works then great, if it doesn't, I am not fixing it. If someone else wants to then great add a merge request and I will merge it, if it however breaks in the future then I drop it unless another merge request is created by a community member.

 

Now I am not trying to talk trash about NVIDIA, I am just stating a real problem that only applies to NVIDIA in the GPU Space that many people don't realize exists.

[IkeaGnome]

5 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

AMD, Graphics Cards, should be more appealing since it's open-source and the community as well as Valve make contributions upstream to it.

Meanwhile NVIDIA keeps everything locked behind closed doors.

I was hard core Intel and Nvidia for the longest time. Yes AMD has driver and USB issues, but the positives of going AMD highly out weigh the cons. I've had Hot Box running a 5800x and 6800xt since December. I haven't personally had any USB cut out issues or graphics driver issues.

8 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

Thanks to this problem, I as well as many other developers, don't go out of our way to try to support NVIDIA. If it works then great, if it doesn't, I am not fixing it. If someone else wants to then great add a merge request and I will merge it, if it however breaks in the future then I drop it unless another merge request is created by a community member.

I have to do some reading on DXVK and Wayland. Honestly, that part of your reply went completely above my head. Typically, I'm the "install parts, install programs and don't worry about why or how they work" type, which is part of why I'm going to Linux. I like to learn.

I understand NVIDIA is the vast market share and will continue to for a while with some of their niche software. However, a big reason I switched from NVIDIA GPUs for my daily driver. I had a 2070. Used it from a month or so after it came out until the 6800 xt came out. I never once used any of their streaming software, RTX or DLSS. I'm part of the group that prefers the rasterization performance. NVIDIA, at least to someone who kind of pays attention seems like they're harder to work with or around. More like Windows. Yes, they are the market share, but they seem to add more hoops almost because they can. 

I'm also curious about your thoughts on my reasoning for an all AMD build. What are your thoughts on having an AMD cpu and gpu making future cross platform, and game playability better in the future. From my thinking, as far as game playability goes, game developers are going to be spending a lot more time optimizing for RDNA 2 and 8c/16t CPUs in PS5/Series X, which (in my head) means the PC port will indirectly have more time spent on it and run better. Otherwise they're having to spend how much time making it as playable, hopefully, on Nvidia/Intel and training for DLSS. FSR seems like it's much easier and less time consuming to implement. To be clear, I'm not saying AMD>Intel/Nvidia in all cases. I think if a studio spends the time on Nvidia implementation, it CAN run better, for RTX and DLSS/FSR at least. 

My thoughts for Linux closely resembles that. W10 seems to be getting locked down pretty hard, and W11 seems to be even more locked down. 

[Alexeygridnev1993]

5 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

I have to do some reading on DXVK and Wayland.

That's good, but you might feel really overwhelmed if you try to learn absolutely everything about Linux before starting. Just start using it, and you'll figure out the details later (that's how I learnt both Linux and programming in Python ).

 

8 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

I do like that Kubuntu is a little bit more user friendly and similar to Windows, but I want the change if that makes sense.

KDE is extremely customizable. It looks like Windows bu default but you can easily make it look like MacOS, GNOME or something else entirely. Meanwhile, the GNOME developers' mindset is to offer users "sensible defaults" (from their point of view anyway) and to really discourage theming/customization. That's what I don't like about GNOME the most (apart from the fact that it looks like a touch-based environment on a touchless device). But pick your poison here

 

As for AMD vs Intel/Nvidia, if you're going Linux, you'll save yourself tons of trouble going with AMD because Nvidia will never release open source drivers to their precious cards (at least as long as Jensen Huang is around anyway). Moreover, AMD drivers are part of any default kernel, so, you won't even have to look for drivers after the installation (more out-of-the-box experience than Windows in this regard). And yes, the fact that Steam Deck is based on RDNA2 will help tremendously in terms of performance later on.

[Guest]

7 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

I'm also curious about your thoughts on my reasoning for an all AMD build. What are your thoughts on having an AMD cpu and gpu making future cross platform, and game playability better in the future. From my thinking, as far as game playability goes, game developers are going to be spending a lot more time optimizing for RDNA 2 and 8c/16t CPUs in PS5/Series X, which (in my head) means the PC port will indirectly have more time spent on it and run better.

Just because a Console uses AMD with AMD Specific Optimizations, doesn't necessarily mean those will be directly compatible or have the same benefits on the PC side of things.

Consoles tend to strip away functionality and implement console specific things, not to mention the different API's. Even in the console space we are targeting 2 different systems even if they are identical in specs.

So long as NVIDIA holds it's market share, most ports will probably continue to primarily target it. It's fueled even more by the fact that NVIDIA likes to insert itself into helping development on major titles. Something AMD rarely does.

In terms of the CPU, it will also just come down to market share, if they even optimization for a specific CPU. Many games and projects just use a generic known compatible target.

 

Of course I could be wrong.

 

7 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

NVIDIA, at least to someone who kind of pays attention seems like they're harder to work with or around. More like Windows. Yes, they are the market share, but they seem to add more hoops almost because they can.

The real problem is that NVIDIA always thinks they can do something better and they usually want it to be specifically tied to their hardware.

 

7 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

W10 seems to be getting locked down pretty hard, and W11 seems to be even more locked down. 

If you don't like how Windows locks things away

On 8/10/2021 at 5:27 PM, IkeaGnome said:

How well does that translate into Pop? I really like the desktop environment, I know I could run Gnome with other distros, but some of the Pop specifics (I always have many windows open over 3 monitors) make it look really appealing.

You may not like Gnome then. The idea behind Gnome is to keep it simple and lock as much as possible behind a registry. Sound Familiar?

Sure Gnome has extensions, which are more of an afterthought and something the Gnome team goes back and forth whether they should continue to allow or not. Of course the community will always find a way regardless even if it involves forking off part of Gnome, something Distros already tend to do.

Theme support doesn't actually exist. Gnome revolves around a single Stylesheet, any modifications to it are considered a hacky unsupported workaround.

Gnome3/40 was never designed around the idea that you should have a choice. It was designed for the workstation and to be hard to break. A similar idea Microsoft Follows, just not quite as restrictive.

 

I personally have a love hate relationship with Gnome. I love it for single monitor workstation usage, that's where it really shines, for anything else I always fall back to KDE.

If you want a feel of how Gnome is intended to work, boot a live environment of Fedora Workstation.

[ZFSinmylungs]

User @patemathic did a great job explaining some of the main differences.
Yes, Discord spyware works perfectly with Linux, Spotify spyware not so sure - it worked, but last time I used it was either broken or they stripped some of the main core features unless you pay them money.
You'll notice that I use spyware for anything that does not have the license GPL or MIT, because the chances that it's a spyware unless it has those licenses - it's huge, as you, in most cases cannot even read the source code, and build your own thing, to check and prove if it has spyware and malware. This is what a lot of GNU+Linux users who care about privacy and rights in general - will talk about.

But yeah - some games work. CS:GO works with Steam out of the gate I believe(no Proton/Wine needed)? you can check if your games work on these websites:
https://www.protondb.com/
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/
and on protondb I believe, people give quick summary in commend on what they have done to get it working, if it was not working, if... it's even possible to get it working. Beware - most games that have an anti-cheat will not work - because they rely on Windows' proprietary spyware user-land in which the user has to be something like a super-professional reverse-engineering programmer to be able to find out what the f**** is going on under the hood lol.

I had good experience with Debian (on which Ubuntu and other *buntus have been based off), and even better experience with Manjaro (based on Arch Linux, which is one of cutting-edge distributions aka latest updates, and latest bugs. Though Manjaro uses some other Arch kernel I believe, to avoid those bugs.).

[Guest]

2 hours ago, ZFSinmylungs said:

Yes, Discord spyware works perfectly with Linux, Spotify spyware not so sure - it worked, but last time I used it was either broken or they stripped some of the main core features unless you pay them money.

Spotify still works fine and nothing about it has changed in the past year or two.

 

2 hours ago, ZFSinmylungs said:

You'll notice that I use spyware for anything that does not have the license GPL or MIT, because the chances that it's a spyware unless it has those licenses - it's huge, as you, in most cases cannot even read the source code, and build your own thing, to check and prove if it has spyware and malware. This is what a lot of GNU+Linux users who care about privacy and rights in general - will talk about.

1. There is plenty of GPL licensed software that is spyware.
2. Most people don't care if they can read the source code. Most people can't even begin to understand a lot of it, and for the rest we are not reading every piece of code for every piece of software we install.
3. Linux is full of non open-source code, you probably wouldn't be able to use your system in any useful way without it. Just look at linux-firmware for it's most basic inclusion.
4. I have seen network routers that are more malicious than your average Windows Spyware, not to mention other devices usually on a network.

[ZFSinmylungs]

@Nayr438
" Spotify still works fine and nothing about it has changed in the past year or two."
Hmmm I do not know, perhaps it was a distribution issue.. :/ I cannot correctly recall what the problem was, but I think it was that I could not open the settings or search for songs.. I forgot.

"1. There is plenty of GPL licensed software that is spyware."
"plenty" - sure, mostly those that were originally Windows and/or MacOS only. I cannot deny that stuff such as telemetry cannot be added, even if it's seen, one example is the Audacity project, which has recently been bought by some company who's name I forgot, and they changed their privacy policy basically going against the GPL license that it has(or had). And many distributions seem to have either stop updating it or just forked the source code before it was telemetry-zed or just remove the telemetry and keep all the features that might or might not be added by that company.

"2. Most people don't care if they can read the source code. Most people can't even begin to understand a lot of it, and for the rest we are not reading every piece of code for every piece of software we install."
Of course not, I didn't even think so. Although it's not just about reading the code, most people don't have to understand it. Please watch some of TEDx talks that Richard Stallman made, they are on YouTube.. I believe links to other websites are disallowed here.
But imagine it like this: imagine someone murdering people and they knowingly let you see them - there is a chance that you'll keep quiet, perhaps out of fear. But perhaps there's a chance you'll catch the bad guy and report it to someone.. Same idea can be applied here - if someone, even one programmer finds telemetry/spyware and malware code in some software - chances are that they will talk about it on some forums, maybe tell their friends, and perhaps even make blogs and videos about it - like I said - Audacity is a big example here, as someone discovered their policies and their intentions of putting telemetry, so, thanks to this, it was spread by people and now myself and yourself included know about it. If we do not believe it - we can simply just check the source code itself. We do not have to be developers - someone can make a video/text explaining what each line of code does and if the majority of other programmers disagree and comment "that's not true" - that'd be a red warning. Also when it comes to stuff like malware - you could just replicate the code in your own program, programming is not difficult to learn, and take this from a retard, myself, which learns some stuff slowly.

"3. Linux is full of non open-source code, you probably wouldn't be able to use your system in any useful way without it. Just look at linux-firmware for it's most basic inclusion."
I got 3 arguments against this:
1. Software CAN be reverse-engineered, but it's so difficult that in most cases it is not being done, but in important parts such as in the kernel - I believe they might have done just that, and if not - well, there's 2 other arguments:
2. Just use a 100% GPL freedom software distribution such as Parabola, and others, listed on the GNU website, if your hardware is compatible with it.
3. "Linux is full of non open-source code" - full? Not really. Sure, there might be some blobs aka little parts that's might contain some non-free source code in it, but that's mainly because some hardware companies do not want to share their code with the Linux developers, so it's not Linux's fault really.
And even so - Linux is so much better when it comes to being spyware/malware-free that it's the best thing around, Windows 10/11 and MacOS are exponentially worse so yeah.

"4. I have seen network routers that are more malicious than your average Windows Spyware, not to mention other devices usually on a network."
So? Protect yourself, harden you OS, use firewalls, fail2ban, etc. Or just you know.. lol.. get a better network router.

You got anything else to embarrass yourself with? :'D

[IkeaGnome]

Made it through day 1 with no issues. I am using Pop OS with their default Cosmic/Gnome desktop. I'm going to give it a few days to see how I actually end up liking that desktop. @Nayr438was correct. Gnome feels a little too locked down for what I want. 

I did loose a little performance in what gave I've tried so far, but for the most part it's negligible. 

Trying to get used to the terminal for doing as much as I can is going to take some time to get used to. As well as the other Linux "there's an easier way to do that now" things. 

So far, no regrets.