Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Diving to the world of Linux

I have fed up with windows. When I bought a new pc several years back, I got myself an SSD. It was a huge improvement switching from the hard disk drive. Everything was super fast. Windows loaded faster than I could take a piss. At the time, 80gb storage was best bang for the buck and so I bought it. I installed windows 7 and battlefield 3 and still had quite a lot of space left.

Time passed, I got myself a new SSD with more space. My C: drive started getting low on space so I moved battlefield 3, which was about 40gb, half of the drive basically. And for the time it was good. I did not pay much attention since I never used C: for anything. Even my program files I have always installed to another drive, a habit I kept since the old days. System C: drive was kept purely for.. err.. system files, together with some pain in the ass software like EVE online, that can't fucking use settings folder where the game is installed. Nope, it must be in $user/AppData, unless you are willing to do some workarounds. Anyway, EVE online was only a small part of that 80gb drive.

One day I play EVE and it starts lagging like shit. "What the fuck is that?", - I thought. At first I did not pay much attention, as I written it off to a "computer fart" if such thing exists. But time to time it happened again and again. I started doing some research and found out that my SSD has less than 1GB free space. Recommended free space is 15% and I was operating under 5% which apparently makes your SSD shit and shortens it's lifespan.

Now here's the BIG question: where the fuck did all that space go? I have moved out all my games, made sure no big software are installed and no unnecessary big caches are present. I even went as far as disabling hibernation to remove system file and free up additional 5gb, but somehow free space would disappear into the void. Little by little, but eventually it would all be gone.

I desperately went through all the system files, hoping to find a cancer, that used up all this space. Maybe some shitty program or some temp files that did not get removed. But checking folder after folder I could not find an obvious culprit. Windows and all system file folders seemed oversized. I couldn't exactly tell what, but I know for a fact that I had a battlefield 3 installed in this bloody drive a few years ago and everything fit. I have not installed much else since I moved it. It was kept purely as a system drive, but it didn't help much.

Fed up and realized I'm fighting a losing battle, I ordered yet another SSD. Only throwing more gigabytes was not the ultimate solution though. I decided that enough is enough and downloaded Ubuntu. I would use my old 80gb drive for linux and I'd put windows 10 in a new one. It's been a long time I wanted to do the switch, and being angry at Microsoft might be as good reason as any.

I did not do full switch, because windows is still a monopoly and as sad truth may be, a lot of games are simply not possible to play on linux or at least are note very optimized. Besides, I always wanted to put more effort in learning the Python to develop market analysis tools. I tried to use it in windows, but every time I needed to make some shit work, I had to cross a hell by doing various workarounds which made me stay way from it. Meanwhile, in linux I wrote one command line and got same stuff what took me three hours in windows.

I also installed windows 10. First order of business was to set all privacy settings to "NO". I have spent half an hour doing that. Seriously. What the fuck. Why don't they just go straight to the point and ask if I like pussy or dick, rice or potatoes. Anyway, I turned all that shit off ,but also read on them internets that Cortana still collects and sends various data, unless I physically delete some files. All more reason to use Linux.

I like Linux so far. Having to put my sudo password every time I need to write important stuffz makes feel like important h4xorz. In my triple screen setup I have terminal open in full on my right. Too bad I don't know the fuck is going on when I just copy command from the internet to do shit. I hope I will learn, but for the time being my linux experience consists of following steps:

1. Google problem
2. Copy command line
3. ????
4. Profit.

There are few things that pulls down my quality of life. Like being unable to write to NTFS format because Microsoft hates open source like I hate raisins. So now in linux I am utilizing 80gb of total 4TB available. My hax level is not high enough to configure my plex.tv server to detect ntfs drives which means I can't watch my downloaded shows on TV. EVE online takes a loooooong time to start. I thought something was wrong with me, but turns out it's normal for EULA to take it's fucking time to load. But at least I got ipython notebook installed in a few steps, so i got that going for me, which is nice.

5 comments :

  1. Have you purged the Eve cache? Afaik the game saves a shitton of info during each session and if you play with several toons you will fill up your space in no time.

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  2. Aw, saw a new Cloaky Bastard post in my RSS reader and was hoping for another epic tale of space murder!

    To see where your disk space is going, google WinDirStat. It gives a really nice visualization of the usage. I have no affiliation, just have had the same issue with mysterious Windows buildup of crap and this tool worked well for tracking down the offenders.

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  3. @Anom1: I have. I think I had 5gb at the time, but it was temporary solution as you say, since I use 7 chars.

    @Anome2: I ended up googling for the same solution after manual checks did not bring results. If I recall correctly, I had over 60gb in windows 7 folder alone.

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  4. My solution was to use a single big drive for windows and everything else instead of oldfashioned multiple drives/partitions in the hope of keeping a clean and lean system.

    My first guess about your missing free space would be on the C:\Windows\winsxs folder.
    Easy way out: Disk cleanup tool > clean up system files > and then among others you need to check 'windows update cleanup'.
    Might be to late for you but maybe someone else will find this useful.

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    Replies
    1. Yea I did all that. In the end I did free up 10gb space, but ordered new SSD anyway. I don't use partitions as I have 4 drives in my pc it's quite enough. But It is interesting to learn new things and I am trying to use it as much as I can. I can make it run EVE, but it's not so good to multibox in pvp with my current setup.

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