From the south coast of NSW, from the phone. For some reason I decided to leave the good camera at home when packing for this trip.

175 and still going. Let's see if we make 200 in 24 hours.

Smoke from Victoria has arrived in the mountains west of Sydney, brought to us courtesy of the southerly change that arrived overnight

Festivus for the rest of us!

The onshore airflow is dominant in Katoomba tonight. Given how cool and overcast it's become, I'm expecting mist and drizzle overnight.

One of my staff lives in Megalong (northern end) and reported a similar scale of damage on his property. He also said there was a first wave, followed by calm, then a second more destructive burst. I first thought microburst, but after seeing some of the photos, a tornadic event is looking likely.

And given the choice I made recently, it was interesting to see a link to this article pop up in my feed tonight (it may have been the prompt for this post). Perhaps we've reached one of those watershed moments and soon more people will do the same. Time will tell.

www.theverge.com/tech/823337/...

I'm very happy with where things have landed and am sure this represents the future for me. Would it work for you? Well, that depends. It's probably the case that for the average PC user, Linux is not straightforward, but if you're a tinkerer who likes a challenge, give it a go.

Of course, there are proprietary applications for which there is no Linux equivalent. So I've turned my operating model on its head: Rather than running Windows with Linux in a VM, now I'm running Linux on the desktop and only spinning up a Windows instance when I have a specific need to do so.

Apps wise, there are certainly things to get used to. But the challenge of adaptation is not insurmountable. In almost every case, the functionality I had in Windows has been replicated using comparable apps on Linux, though it helps being adventurous and comfortable with the CLI.

I've run various flavours of Linux in VMs for many years, so there was nothing unfamiliar to me once I was up and running. But performance wise, a VM instance is just a teaser; on bare metal it's on another level. Everything feels light, response and smooth, with not an ounce of bloat in sight.

I had baulked at nuking my W11 install in case Linux ended up not being workable in my use case. But then I remembered that I had a spare NVMe SSD that would suit my laptop, so I quickly swapped out the SSD and blasted Kubuntu onto the replacement.

For many years I've run Linux in VMs but W11 on the desktop. About a month back, I decided enough was enough and finally installed Linux on bare metal (Kubuntu, please don't hate me). Now I have Linux on the desktop and W11 in a VM in case I need it. I'm asking myself, why I didn't do this sooner?