My war with NVIDIA, and what I’m working on now

So, I have a new graphics card. But.

I made the perhaps questionable decision of a) getting a NVIDIA card, and b) getting a fairly new one. On a Linux system. My research had turned up the idea that this wouldn’t matter. Popular opinion, what are you doing letting me down like this?

Anyway. Six hours of trying to install proprietary drivers, disabling nouveau, getting black screens on startup, fiddling with the BIOS, and reinstalling the operating system, and going through exactly the same process later…

I remembered that my school provides Windows 10 licenses for free and I was planning to dual boot this system anyway because I need the Adobe suite for my graphic design class. (Which is expensive, but I’m sort of loving it. Adobe and I have a love-hate relationship and always have, but I’m learning all its weird quirks and overblown UIs and giving it a little more patience. It turns out I’m a really good graphic designer. I think I could get a job with this. Maybe it’s the fact that my teacher is really good, but I seem to pick this stuff up really quickly. Vector graphics are a lot of fun.)

[note from years-future Rebekah, editing old posts: ah, the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. By the way, I did eventually get my Linux partition sorted out.]

So. Windows is working for now. And apart from my nerd annoyance at its lack of a good command line, I’m ok with using it until I have the time to fight NVIDIA again and get Linux installed on the other half of my terabyte drive.

I’m actually working on some web design stuff right now. I’m running out of college money (and frankly kind of getting impatient with the educational system again… long time readers will know that school and I have never exactly agreed with each other). So in true LGL fashion, I went online to catch up on a bunch of web design stuff that’s developed since I last really studied it on my own. And hoo boy, there’s a lot. Responsive design is a big thing and that’s what I’m working on learning.

The web design is my personal portfolio site. My educational and work history is a little weird, so I figure if I want a job I should skip through the paper credentials and showcase the much more convincing argument that I can actually build and make stuff. It’s hard to hire programmers precisely because paper credentials aren’t that convincing. So I’m pulling together some of my better (read: finished) designs and code and artwork and showcasing ’em.

I’m building the site from the ground up. Of course I could use Drupal or WordPress, but anyone can use the basics of those systems. I want to show off.

I’m using the Brackets code editor, another anomaly for me. I started building the site in my usual bare-bones text editor… but I kept hearing about Brackets. It’s basically an IDE but simpler. It’s designed specifically for web development and it has a feature that shows you a live preview of your site as you code it. This makes it about 10x easier to design something when you’re still tinkering with it. It’s made by Adobe, but it looks a lot like Atom. It doesn’t have a whole load of crusty UI junk.

So, this is the post of “how the heck did I get here?”. Me, using Windows, using an IDE made by Adobe… well. Not usual.

On the other hand! Windows doesn’t have a problem with NVIDIA’s graphics card, so I finally got to play Slime Rancher. Which is a fun game, even if it gave me sim sickness until I messed with the view settings and finally got used to it. (Sort of.)

I’ll fight the driver issue later, when I have the time and energy to do so. I still really want Debian or at least Mint on this system. It’s just so much easier to program when you’ve got bash: installing tools and languages, using git, keeping projects organized… I’m sure I could program on Windows if I wanted to, but it’s just not the same. Web design doesn’t count, that’s basically all through the browser so it doesn’t matter.

I want to get back to the thing I’m working on, so I’ll keep this short. What are you guys busy making right now? I know you’re smarty-pantses, so have a brag in the comments below. I’d love to hear about it.

Happy hacking!

Rebekah