I have been keeping up with my dishes lately more than I ever have in my life. It came about in kind of a weird way for me. My dishwasher broke and I suddenly had to hand wash all my dishes. I knew it was going to be a major problem so I made a goal. I decided I was going to make sure I washed every dish every night before I went to bed so they would never stack up to be a nightmare. Eventually my apartment manager got around to replacing my dishwasher and now I have kept up with doing dishes every evening only it’s a lot easier with a dishwasher.

Now I run the dishwasher almost every night, unless it’s really empty then I just leave it. Every morning I unload it while my coffee is brewing.

To some people this might not seem like a big deal, and to others it might seem impossible to keep up this routine. To me it has been a big improvement to my quality of life. If I feel like cooking something I always have a kitchen that is in a state that will allow me to do that and it always feels so good.

When I was a kid in the 90s I had a PC that came with Windows 3.1 and it had QBasic. I messed around with it a lot. I spent a lot of time reading the built-in documentation.

I remember making a random password generator, a text-based blackjack game, and some “screensavers” that were basically just drawing a bunch of stuff on the screen and then scrolling it off the top by printing blank lines.

It took quite a bit of time to do that pretty basic stuff, so it’s really not a surprise to me that most people aren’t making computer programs today. Most of anything an average person could hope to program has already been done and made available for free.

I’m not really sure how the upsides of immutable distros work. I’ve been using linux for a long time and I’m not an expert but I’ve learned bits of things here and there.

I recently bought a steamdeck and it’s running an immutable distro. I don’t really know how to use software that’s installed via flatpak because it’s weird.

I have a game installed that runs badly (unplayable for me) through proton. I can launch it through q4wine if I switch the steamdeck into “desktop mode” and it runs much better.

If it wasn’t an immutable distro I could pretty easily make a shell script that launches the game through wine. Then I could add that shell script as a non steam game and it would (I think) run well, and I’d be able to launch it from the non desktop side of steam OS that is a lot more streamlined.

There is something comforting to me about immutable distros though.

I feel like I don’t remember half the shit I have installed on my computers. If I wanted to start cutting things out I don’t know where I’d start. But with flatpaks I get the sense I could probably just wipe anything I don’t use out of the flatpak directory and I probably wouldn’t break anything.