God, that reminds me of the debate on XML that I had with a developer about fifteen years ago.

Both our companies were working for a client who needed to publish product catalogues in several languages twice a year.

They had implemented a sort of Content Management System which they used with a plugin to feed data into Quark Xpress files as well as their website, IIRC. Cross-media publishing, essentially, and they had their own little set of format instructions to make words appear in bold, different colors, etc.

Since my company was tasked with translating the text into various languages, I suggested they come up with a way to store their data as XML. The standard tools in the translation industry can be easily customized to work with that, and XML would be a good way to future-proof their software. After a lot of delaying, grumbling, and ho-hum, they agreed to implement this plan.

Lo and behold, when the first meeting on the new XML format came around they showed it to me for the first time and… everything was in CDATA sections. Entire paragraphs of text with proprietary formatting instructions. 😐

When I tried to explain, very politely, and very patiently, that this was not going to work, the lead dev started insulting me. I swear to God, I’ve never been this close to punching someone in the face at a business meeting. 🤬

Thankfully, the client understood the issue and we eventually got an XML-based data exchange going. It is probably still in use today.

if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems

What kind of problems? I REALLY don’t want to have hundreds of gigabytes in duplicate files on my system.

Yeah Ventoy did the trick for me eventually but then I ran into the next issue, namely that the instructions said to place the ISO on the drive. What I actually needed to do was to mount the ISO and to copy the files contained therein to USB.

Thanks for pointing out the folder location. That was it. Now I don’t have to launch the Battle.Net installer each time I want to play Hearthstone (added it to Steam as an external game, which is not a bad idea, if a bit awkward).

Next will be how to share my Steam libraries between OSes and retain access to my (cloud) saves. Making first steps there with mounting my existing drives… but now I have to learn how to edit FSTAB… sigh.

Okay, I finally installed a new SSD yesterday so I could dual boot and put CachyOS on it. Played a few games and it worked surprisingly well.

But it did take quite a bit more doing than installing Windows. The USB drive wouldn’t boot when made with Rufus and I don’t quite get how to manage the games installed in Proton (like where is their virtual C: drive?).

I plan on migrating more of my stuff onto Linux in the coming days and will see if it can’t replace Windows eventually for me.

I’ve read about K-9 becoming Thunderbird on smartphones but mine still says K-9.