SkillBridge. Retirement. Thailand. Linux Tomfoolery. An Update.

 Two or three things happened this week/weekend.

1. My SkillBridge application was approved...which should allow me to spend about 4 months next year focusing on some certifications (Google Cloud, AWS), working on my VA claim, and transitioning from overseas assignment (no small feat...we'll be trying to sell off most of our stuff and only move with the bare minimum).

2. I messed around with another Linux distribution and learned painfully that I should've just stuck with Pop!_OS from System76. After a few beers on a Saturday night, I got an itch and decided to install Nobara again...I really shouldn't have, because I'd recently gotten pretty settled in with Pop (word documents, some gaming, media creation). I f'd around and found out. It didn't go smoothly at all and I re-installed Pop this morning. I'm a Pop dude...no plans on jumping ship again (do all hoppers say the same?).

I'd tried dual-booting ages ago and ended up just getting back to Windows each time. More recently, however, I picked up a second M.2 SSD and after installing it, installed Pop!_OS on one of them while keeping Windows on the other, originally-installed SSD. This separation made it more clean and I didn't have to deal with chopping up partitions. I played around with Kdenlive a bit before getting what I'd call decent/comfortable at lining up video and editing for the YT channel (Free Lance Travels)...more of a learning curve involved here than on other software that I used on Windows (Filmora). At the end of the day, I feel fairly comfortable using Kdenlive now, and thankfully, there are a ton of videos out there showing how to work all of the features. With video editing down enough, I tried out Steam on Pop...and finally finished Detroit: Become Human. I bought this game years ago on PS4 and just never got around to 'beating' it. It was hard seeing ol' Hank go. 

Why'd I ditch Windows? I found that OneDrive was being fairly intrusive. Just opening it up to see what was in there made it automatically start syncing all of my files again. Not a fan...and while there are probably ways to configure this/get around it, I just deleted it. Yes, Windows. I got rid of it since a Linux distribution was doing all that I needed and more. 

3. I applied for using an alternate separation site. By default, Marines that are separating from overseas have to use either Camp Pendleton, CA or Camp Lejeune, NC, whichever is closer to home of record. Neither of those are really close/convenient to where we have family/friends at stateside, so I routed a request to not use either of those. No guarantee that it'll get approved...we'll see. Regardless of how it shakes out, we'll be on "Thai Time" after a brief stay stateside.