Sometimes you have to make a tradeoff and focus on the golden path, which means comprehensive testing has to be skipped or bugs have to be explicitly left in.
Yes it's bad. Yes it sucks. But it's that or nothing gets released at all.
(I wish it wasn't that way. I try hard to make sure it isn't that way at my job, but for now that's how it is)
+1.
You'll get better stories from someone's deathbed than from someone's suicide note. At the end of their life what do they regret, what are they happy they did, what advice do they have to give.
I don't expect suicide notes to be filled with "if only I studied harder, then I wouldn't have to end it all".
even though i might indulge in activities that are pleasurable for me now, they add up to nothing
I know this isnt what you're asking for, but I have to wholeheartedly disagree with this (unless you're talking about drugs, wanking all day long, or something like that). Creating joy in your life isnt a bad thing and has long term benefits. It helps to overcome burnout and extreme fatigue, it gives you something to live for, it allows you a place to find what matters to you. It can help you be MORE productive tomorrow by letting yourself rest today.
Taking some time away from a problem, from studying, or from work lets your brain work through problems subconsciously that you can't grasp consciously.
It's like sleep. Sure, you can't be productive during sleep, but you still need it to survive and to take on the next day stronger.
Enjoying yourself isn't wasteful.
Regularly. There are three potential routes I can take to work and which one is best depends highly on the traffic that hour.
I usually only need to glance at the map for the first turn to see which route it picked for me and after that I really only glance at the arrival time.
You're completely right. Though depending on your area it may be possible to sit in a cafe (even a Starbucks or equivalent) occasionally to pass the time. Often without needing to purchase anything (or, if you have to, purchasing a simple black coffee for cheap).
But yes, unfortunately that isnt always possible. I hope you can find something to make your days more varied OP. something to break the routine of sitting at home waiting for time to pass.
Go outside. Not in a "go touch grass" way. Explore new places and fill your days with variety and sunlight if you can. If you can't make the time pass quickly you can at least make it more interesting. And sitting depressed in a park is a lot nicer than sitting depressed at home.
If you're already running, vary your route a bit, or spend some time in the middle of your run sitting outside for a bit.
I don't expect it to fix anything, I've heard enough of the "just try this and you'll feel better" bullshit. But I hope it would at least help mix up your days a little.
Many guides will suggest setting up separate partitions for a bunch of different Linux directories. It's not strictly necessary to make things work properly. You can totally do it all on one partition (in addition to your windows one I mean). If you want to try something more fancy then keep a separate home partition, but honestly don't worry about it much unless a guide or installer is suggesting it.
Nah. One big Linux partition isnt a bad thing and is a lot easier to grasp when starting out. (Though for dual boot you'll need the windows partition somewhere still)
Backups are the main thing. Maybe a list of useful Windows software you have installed, just in case you accidentally break your install and can't boot in to check what you had installed.
Make Windows recovery media and a windows install disk if you don't have one. Just in case you need to go back and reinstall it can help avoid trying to do that without a working machine.
Test with a live usb first too. That way you can at least boot into the live Usb if things fail. And you will already have it prepared.
I think you could mount your windows partition as read only if that's a concern. I don't expect any Linux distros to mess with anything though unless you're reckless about running install scripts.
Linux guides vary between "here's a hack to just make it work" all the way to "here's a perfect Torvalds-Approved perfect bomb proof 100page configuration guide". Make sure you know what you're looking for first and don't get too caught up on making everything perfect. Focus on keeping good backups so you can restart from scratch if you ever need to. You'll probably end up trying a few Linux distros over the next few years anyway.
Nope it all just worked, it really surprised me honestly. I expected to need to do some weird tethering to a raspi or something to make it work but I didn't need any of that. (Well, I had issues because it turned out lightning borked my router, but that was a different issue entirely.)
That's true, but with the Ethernet connection you can tether to a router directly. When my Internet was down I was able to tether my entire home for the time I needed to get some updates finished to get my docker environment back up and running. I had no idea that was possible before that.
Sorry I don't have any suggestions, but I'm very curious about your use case. What led you to needing this?
Are you doing web dev with just a phone? Impressive
I have no desire to change.
I'm sure an iPhone would be a completely acceptable phone for me but I have no problems with android that iOS would solve. My phone already does everything I want it to do and more.
And I don't want to re-learn what all the best apps are. I already found great ones for what I need and I know many of them would be different on iOS. No need for me to go through that relearning.
More than that though, I love that my android can do USB OTG and allow me to plug in flash drives, SD cards, game controllers, and Ethernet adapters. I love that i can change the home screen app to entirely change the interface. I like that I can root it when it's getting slow to debloat it a bunch, or do thorough backups, or fuck around with app files. I love that the dev ecosystem doesn't require a yearly subscription.