hainab stole my pants!

Tags:

my art

my writing

my smutty art & writing tag

music recs

Fic Archive:

ESO:

To the Horrors I've Known and Loved (2023 - Ongoing)

Like Winter (2022 - Ongoing)

A Variation of the Truth (Completed; 2022)

Oblivion:

The Blood of the Coven (Completed; 2016)

Destiny 2:

Destiny Oneshots Collection (2018 - 2021)

My ESO OCs:

Dralvayn "Drals" Arano (he/him)

Dunmer // Arcanist

My cranky old wizard. To the Horrors I've Known and Loved is his story, where he gets put through the horrors and learns the power of friendship.

He's gay/demisexual but he doesn't discover that until partway through the fic, and even then he has a ways to go before he allows himself nice things. He becomes hopelessly in love with Azandar, and later on has a bit of a thing with Zerith-var. He starts out kind of an asshole but he will get better. Probably. He's my little chew toy :)

(tag)

Asha-ammu Kaushad (they/them)

Dunmer (Ashlander) // Nightblade // Vampire

Asha is my precious little princess who I would die for. Like Winter is sort of a character study, following the progression of their relationship with Donobhan, and told from his point of view.

They're nonbinary & transfem, and very shy and a little awkward. They love fungi & dwemer architecture.

(tag)

Donobhan Ravenfriend (he/him)

Reachman // Warden

Don is my sweet boy. He was originally of the Spiritblood clan but left when he couldn't go through with the Vateshran's Rites. He loves nature and has a lot of wisdom about the ways of the world & life & death but is also kind of an orange cat and sometimes his head is empty. His best friend is his guardian wolf, Calahan.

(tag)

Sadryn Favel (he/him?)

Dunmer // Warden // Werewolf

Sadryn is a hot bisexual mess whose favourite pastime is being a public nuisance. He's like 22 and will never die. He has a twin sister, Serysi, who belongs to @tilliphont. She's a grumpy butch and the two of them would die for each other but will probably kill each other first before that happens. The two of them were born to a Telvanni family that expected a lot from them and they ran away from that bad situation at some point. They also have a pet bear named Sujamma.

If he stopped for longer than 2 seconds to look inwards he would probably have a weird gender but alas he is going 5000mph and has a substance abuse problem so we may never know. He's got a big ol crush on Ember but she thinks he's stinky.

(tag)

Auredil (he/him)

Altmer // Templar // Vestige

Auredil is my canon Vestige and gay disaster. A Variation of the Truth is sort of a tragedy that alternates between his point of view (past) and Lindir's point of view (present). Auredil was once a captain in Queen Ayrenn's navy (First Auridon Marines) where he fell in love with Prince Naemon and he and Kinlady Estre became good friends. After the events of Auridon, Naemon shuts Auredil out which drives him to make a pact with Meridia while in a bad mental state, thus being granted his Templar abilities and the rest of the main quest being set in motion.

(tag)

Lilanwe (she/her)

Altmer // Necromancer

Lily is trans & bisexual and could be a villain if she was just like 12% more evil. But instead she chose to be niceys and is just kind of a little morally dubious sometimes.

She was once a promising mage and scholar who, after her brother Auredil's disappearance, fell in with the wrong crowd and turned to necromancy and the Worm Cult. They meet again on opposite sides of the conflict, and Auredil convinces her to leave the cult behind and help him fix everything. She has a penchant for being headstrong and righteous, and after the Planemeld and Auredil's (supposed) death, she goes on a revenge quest to eradicate the remains of the Worm Cult. As a treat.

(tag)

Coralantar (he/they)

Maormer // Sorcerer

Coral was a powerful storm witch who joined up with the Sea Vipers when he was young and wanted to get away from Pyandonea, but quickly recognised the atrocities the raiders were committing. After meeting Auredil in Khenarthi's Roost, he turns on the Vipers from the shadows and eventually works with the Eyes of the Queen as a spy. The Desert is a Memory of the Ocean is sort of an unfinished sequel/spinoff of Auredil's fic, in which Coralantar and @tilliphont's Galen find themselves lost in Elsweyr in the aftermath of defeating Molag Bal and have to work together to piece together what happened.

Installation

Ok, now that I've sold you on it, let's talk about what you'll need. I won't go into too much detail here as I feel like the documentation below is adequate. Take this more as me holding your hand for moral support. I believe in you!

A USB flash drive or blank CD

An external hard drive/spare drive/a way to back up your files (recommended but optional if you don't care about wiping your drive.)

Follow this guide from Mint's website

Please back up any data you care about before you begin.

What I will say is that while it may sound complicated if you've never done it before, creating the bootable media is actually pretty low stakes as far as this process goes. Definitely go through the whole process of verifying the ISO, as this is a good thing to learn how to do, but as long as you follow the guide you should be good. Once you have the bootable media, you can follow the guide to boot it from your BIOS screen, which will then boot into a live session. This is basically a live test area that you can play around in, and crucially, it is not permanent! If you decide you hate it (or if something goes wrong), you can restart your computer and go back to the OS you actually have installed. Some things to note is that because it's booting from a USB/CD it will run a bit slower in this environment, and some programs and features might not work correctly.

Note that overwriting your hard drive with Windows on it will erase Windows. If you ever need to use it again, you will have to reinstall it, or use a virtual machine which is a more advanced step.

I've read mixed things about installing Mint alongside Windows on the same hard drive, so if you're not confident you can troubleshoot, I would advise against it. If you want to dual boot, it might be a better idea to install Mint on a secondary hard drive (in which case, choose the "erase disk and install" option on that hard drive, which will leave your primary OS alone).

Let's talk about file systems.

Every form of data storage (SSDs, flash drives, everything) is formatted with a file system. On Windows, the default and most common file system is NTFS. This is not supported by Linux, meaning it can usually still read and write files from these drives, but might have issues. It is highly recommended to reformat an NTFS drive if you'll be using Linux on it. During installation, the "erase disk and install" option will do this automatically so you don't have to worry about it, but if you have additional hard drives you'll have to go reformat them manually. Luckily this isn't too complicated and there's plenty of step-by-step guides online, but it is an extra step you should know about.

The most common file system you'll likely be using on Linux is EXT4. Another one becoming increasingly more common is BTRFS, which is a bit faster and has some additional features, though you really only gain the full benefit of it on an SSD. When in doubt, just go for the reliable EXT4.

As for the file manager itself, you might notice that it's organized a little differently from Windows. Instead of having a "Program Files" directory, everything is sorted into libraries under File System. This is actually a really smart way of doing things, as multiple programs can share the same core libraries rather than having their own individual directories, which is more efficient on disk space in the long run. However, this is another reason you'll want to be using the Software Manager to install things, as it will automatically sort files into these libraries so you don't have to.

(ID1: File manager showing the file system directory. ID2: File manager showing the Home directory.)

The Terminal

On Windows, opening the command line can be a scary thing. Half the time, it means you done fucked up. However, on Linux systems, it's a super useful tool that's easily accessible and makes no effort to hide the inner workings of your system from you.

Mint makes it really easy to never have to open the terminal. For the vast majority of cases, everything you need will be in the GUI somewhere. That said, I encourage everyone to learn some basic commands! It's a good thing to familiarize yourself with if you ever do need to use it. A good easy thing to try is updating your system this way:

Open the terminal through the GUI, or with ctrl+alt+T. Type this command:

sudo apt update

"sudo" is short for "super user"; this is kind of like administrator in Windows. "apt" (Advanced Package Tool) is used when packages are concerned; this means installing, removing, and updating anything on your system. "update" is exactly what it says. What this command line is essentially saying is "retrieve updates"

It will then prompt you for your password. After you enter it, it will retrieve updates. After that, you can type this in to view what it will upgrade:

apt list --upgradable

"list" will do what it implies, which is list everything with the following flag, which is "--upgradable"

Then type this in:

sudo apt upgrade

"upgrade" will then start the installation. You'll be prompted once more for a simple "y/n" command, in which case just type "y" for "yes" and hit enter. It will then install all the updates it previously listed, which may take a minute, so just let it run.

Again, this is by no means something you need to do, as the update manager works just fine; but if you have a fear of the terminal, it's a good way to start to familiarize yourself with it.

Gaming

I do want to just take a second to talk about gaming on Linux, as I know that will affect the majority of my followers. While Mint is not a distro that focuses on gaming, in my experience, it works just fine. If you do decide you want to try a distro more optimized for gaming, there's a few such as Bazzite or CachyOS (which is what I personally use!).

I highly recommend using Steam for games. This is due to it having a built-in compatibility layer by way of Proton. If you have games that were not acquired via Steam, it's much easier to manually add them to your Steam library than to tinker with something like Wine or Bottles as a beginner.

Luckily, many games these days do have native Linux support. But for those that don't, 9/10 times you can still get them to run just fine with the compatibility tools. You can set the default tool in Steam settings>compatibility, but some games might require a little "proton roulette" of switching between different tools to get it working. You can force the use of a specific tool on a game-by-game basis by clicking on that game in your library and going to manage>properties>compatibility.

(ID: A screenshot of Steam's settings menu, showing where to find compatibility options)

Some games might have quirks; in the case of ESO, I have to always close the launcher after the game proper is running otherwise the framerate is really bad, but other than that it runs great.

Certain games that will not work on Linux are multiplayer games that have certain anti-cheat software. I don't really play those games so I don't know too much about that, but look online if you're not sure. I've heard that LOTRO and Fortnite are among a few that will not work.

Another thing to note is that Nvidia GPUs are known to occasionally cause problems. I have an older Nvidia GPU in my PC and haven't run into anything installing new drivers didn't fix, but there always seems to be someone on the forums with Nvidia-related issues so your mileage may vary.

My last caveat is about modding games; this can be a little more complicated than Windows due to the different file systems, but it depends on the game, so if that's something that's important to you maybe look into it first. Mods from the Steam workshop will work as they normally do.

In Conclusion

I want to finish this off with something a bit more philosophical. Early last year, if you had asked me what NTFS meant I would've looked at you and went "huh?" The first time I installed Mint, I had no idea what a file system was and had to search online to figure out how to reformat my spare hard drives. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing!

But it was an easy decision to install Linux on that machine with older hardware I was only really using for playing music and games. My Windows 10 copy was questionable at best, and it wouldn't be able to run Windows 11, so it was really the only way I could go. On the other hand, I held off on installing Mint on my main laptop for several months, knowing I wouldn't be able to run the software I had been using for almost 8 years (Clip Studio). At that point, it really became a question of, was I willing to make a change in how I worked? Or was I willing to put up with the constant barrage of bullshit from Microsoft? In the end, I decided that I was willing to make that sacrifice to align myself with what I valued more. That's not a sacrifice everyone is willing (or able, in the case of some jobs) to make, and that's perfectly fine. But I do encourage everyone to at least think about it.

Anyways, I did end up moving my laptop to Mint, and now I'm using Krita. I'm of a mindset where I really like learning new things, and I feel like Linux has really reignited my love for computers in a way I wasn't expecting. I think it's important to have that mindset when approaching Linux for the first time. There are things you're going to have to learn - and unlearn - but luckily you're not going to be doing it alone as there's lots of great documentation and forums and youtube channels if that's your thing.

If you've read this far, thank you! As always, I'm happy to answer any questions to the best of my ability. Best of luck on your journey. :)

Documentation & Resources

Download Linux Mint

Linux Mint Forums

Linux Mint Installation Guide

ProtonDB

r/LinuxMint

Videos

Youtube: Explaining Computers (this video is especially good if you'd like a visual guide of the flashing process. He highlights ZorinOS but the process is basically the same for Mint)