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New Computer (and its woes)

May 26th, 2009

After a long time coming, I finally took the plunge and bought a new computer, mostly for the occasion of graduating from college. So after a bunch of looking around, I went and bought this computer. In any case, I received it after a couple of days of intense waiting, and now I’ve got it and am very pleased with it (and the 23″ monitor I got with it).

However, after spending a day on it, I felt the need to get started with Linux. However, Vista isn’t that bad when you have a quad-core processor and 8 gigs of RAM. My problem is as follows:

  • I need to be able to play games
  • I want my games to run well
  • I need a Linux environment
  • Ideally, I’d run Linux natively

This leaves me with the obvious option of dual-booting, but I’d really rather not. I find it so… traumatic, if you will, to have to reboot my computer every time I want to change what I’m doing. And since I tend to fire up Team Fortress 2 rather frequently, I’m afraid I’d sit in Vista most of the time because of it, and only go to Linux when I need to. And that’s exactly the opposite of what I’d want. So what to do?

I don’t know what I’m going to do. In addition, while I’ve always had fun with Gentoo, the new installation I started has been proving challenging. The basic system was easy, but the framebuffered console and a desktop (with Compiz-Fusion) has proven difficult. This is in large part, I believe, because of the now-scattered documentation due to the data loss of our beloved Gentoo Wiki. And then I pop in an… an… Ubuntu (sorry, it just feels dirty to me) CD, and everything works. But it’s not quite right. It’s not perfect, and I don’t have portage, and I can’t use my shiny new computer to compile things all the time! (that was part of the reason I wanted such power :) ).

So I’m left with a dilemma. And because of my tendency to get paralyzed by indecision, I’ll probably stick with Vista for a while, until I figure out my solution, which will still probably involve dual-booting, since Wine doesn’t seem to be up to the task. If anyone’s got a similar situation/setup/solution, I’d love to hear about it. I love my Linux, but I also love my games.

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