Avery's Blog!

A new era...

AveryEclipse — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

In this article...

(EDIT 19-04-2026: Since writing this blog post I have given myself the permanent name of Clyron (Sunn was definitely not the best name so it was rather temporary), and of course later on I changed to KayAurora and now to AveryEclipse. I've changed, that's for sure)

Almost 5 years ago (half a decade, crazy), I have introduced the Lynxmic branding.
When I have first thought of the name Lynxmic, I have first thought of it as a compelling, unique name that will last me a long time, if not forever. I have myself liked the name, but I feel it’s time for a change.

Why?

For short, I don't think Lynxmic represents me as my online alias anymore. Thinking about it, there are quite several factors that led me to realizing this:

my satisfaction for the Lynxmic alias dropped compared to when I first introduced it. Not something I want to get much in detail, all I can say is that said satisfaction didn't go down in a way that affects the Lynxmic YT channel, since in a way I'm still completely aight with the name, but not beyond the scope of the project revolving around said channel (I will explain later in the post).
as said above, I had this alias for almost 5 years. I have grown a lot since then and my interests have of course changed in a way. However you can't tell very much since publicly I... do almost the same things, except adapted in some way or another to today's reality. I am simply not comfortable sharing what I'm actually doing (including potential future projects etc) under the name Lynxmic, it's a purely personal thing.

What?

Effective the date this blog post has been published, my online alias will be Sunn, or sunn.ia32 (I might eventually change it later on to be longer; I tried to think of one from the start bbuuuuutttt my brain cannot easily think of something creative for that matter). You will start seeing it everywhere throughout the next week or so.

This website is just the beginning, this is a rewritten website built this time with CSS from the ground up (no CSS framework like Bulma) so the website may not be of the best quality, though feedback is appreciated (this website is open-source, feel free to open issues or whatever). As part of the name change, this website has migrated from lynxmic.github.io to sunn.is-a.dev (you can still view the old Lynxmic website here).

I am also launching a new YT channel under the name Sunn (check it out here), which will be becoming my new main. It was actually created in Jan 2014 (>10 years ago), keep in mind that this previously used to be my main channel (it already has 20+ subs, all are "dead subs" but for small channels, any additional number matters).

Anyways, the content variety + schedule on this channel will be more relaxed, so nothing will be really consistent there in terms of both, random content will be coming at random times.

My Fediverse/Mastodon account will also migrate as well to @sunn@wetdry.world. As for the future of the Lynxmic's Square Discord Server (join here), I have not decided on anything yet, a poll will be ran on the server for the naming.

The future of Lynxmic (yes, there's a future still)

Although Sunn will be my main YT channel from now on, that doesn't mean I will be leaving the Lynxmic channel with its 700+ subscribers behind. I still love working on videos for that channel and will continue doing so for the foresseable future.

At most I might just switch the content on the Lynxmic channel a little bit and focus more on what's giving it the most views and subscribers right now: installing/taking a look at interesting bits of software. I may also extend to bootlegs as well, I've seen other channels do bootleg content and sure enough I'd want to hop in to this train in the future! There's just a lot of things that can be done.

That said, to speak in other words, the channel that you know as Lynxmic will keep the name Lynxmic, at least for now. It's just that it won’t be my main channel anymore. The Lynxmic project goes on, except only in the form of a tech YT channel. It’s just like parting ways, the channel keeps the name Lynxmic, but I am not actually Lynxmic anymore.

Closing thoughts

Anyways, I hope this rebrand will help me in some way or another to be more open etc. As for everyone reading this, I hope y'all enjoy the new chapter of my onlline identity as much as I do. I think these changes overall are for the best, including for my mental health.

Look out for new projects and many other things to come!

Wrapping up 2024

AveryEclipse — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

In this article...

Woop, which date it is? 31 December? Well, it's time for another year wrap-up post! ^^ The tradition continues.

What's been poppin' in 2024? By far the biggest change this year was me entirely changing my online alias from Lynxmic to Clyron. Right now Lynxmic does still exist, but it now just means the tech-focused YouTube channel which, well, kept the name Lynxmic. The Lynxmic channel has seen its best year so far; as a TL;DR this year it joined the 1K+ subscriber club. This would not have been possible without y'all, but let's dive in even further.

Let's talk Lynxmic

Now emerged as a complete separate project, Lynxmic has seen its best year so far - as already said previously. Everything has been at their peak, from the quality and quantity of the videos to the analytics side of things. What a glow up from the past!

Let's start with something basic: subscribers. 2024 started with the Lynxmic channel at a mere 430+ subscribers. Today the subscriber count is deep into 1K subscribers, in fact we're now almost literally halfway there to 2K! The sub count right now is above 1,390+. Just a few years ago, that would have been just a dream at most! The channel is finally on the map, that's all I have to say.

Even more than that, quite many videos from this year have surpassed 1K views. Some of them have even gone past 10K views: to list them, Swapping Windows 11's and Windows NT 4.0's Registries (20K+ views, from Oct 2024), Recreating my First PC in a VM (17K+ views, from Aug 2024), as well as There's a variant of Windows 8.1 with a Start Menu... (14K+ views, Jul 2024). There's also a fourth video that's also closing up as well, namely *Microsoft *finally* overhauled Windows Setup... from Jan 2024, sitting at 9,8K views.

In total there have been 25 videos uploaded on the Lynxmic channel this year. Definitely not a lot, but the waiting time between videos was definitely compensated with better productions. One major change was me finally letting go of both Camtasia and Vegas (the two video editors which I have been using since 2016, both ehhy) in favor of one single more professional video editing software, DaVinci Resolve

For the second channel, MoreLynxmic, 2024 was also a year of achievements. For the past 6 years the most popular video there used to be a GameCube menu video (currently at 730+ views). That video has been overtaken by the one video where I unsuccessfully attempted to get Geometry Dash (a game I notably started playing in 2024) working on Windows 2000, which also became the first MoreLynxmic video to reach 1K+ views. The channel is currently at 60+ subs after having started the year at around 35 subs, a rise of +25.

Closing this section with YouTube's 2024 year-in-review emails for both Lynxmic and MoreLynxmic channels.

About the Clyron rebrand

Before I go any deeper into that, if you aren't aware yet of the major changes happening (and you're curious at all), I'd suggest reading the initial blog post announcing this rebrand (here) to get the most awareness. This separation of the brandings took effect during July 2024. I was initally Sunn/Sunnville, later changed to Clyron in August (which marked 5 years since the rebranding from solarixtech to Lynxmic), since Sunn/Sunnville didn't sound good at all imo

TL;DR, this decision was taken mostly due to personal reasons. I felt like it was best for me to not have my alias called after my tech YT channel especially in an era where said channel is at its peak, and will probably not merge the brandings back anytime soon

As part of the rebrand, I have launched this current website (clyron.is-a.dev), which basically merged the old lynxmic.github.io website and the Lynxmic Blog for a simple yet user-friendly personal website made entirely from scratch with Jekyll without any CSS frameworks or anything, with what I call a """Win2K-style""" design (can even be viewed well in old browsers like IE6!). This site turned actually good, not something I'd rate 10 by 10 but it does its job well.

My fediverse and Bluesky accounts changed to bear the Clyron name rather than the Lynxmic name, while my Discord Server was renamed from Lynxmic's Lodge to LynxPlaza and became more of a home associated with the Lynxmic channel than just the (kinda boring in retrospect imho) persona once known as Lynxmic

The rise (and fall) of NightskyArchive and Whirlbox

Also this year, I kinda resurrected what I used to call my third YT channel, Lynxmic Archives, which was renamed to NightskyArchive, name distinctive from both Lynxmic and Clyron identities. Notably the channel now addresses more than just Lynxmic-related content, it is now a basically everything archive channel, from pure old media to various demonstrations recorded as videos for perservation purposes

Additionally, in November, I also started a fourth YT channel, called Whirlbox, on which I aim to post various gaming content

I however recently came to a realization that I don't actually have any long-term interest for any of these two channels. I don't actually find myself much of an 'archivist' or 'gaming content creator' in the long run, so to free my mind I decided to retire both NightskyArchive and Whirlbox as of 1 January 2025. What will happen is that both channels will be deleted enitrely, with content being reuploaded either on Clyron or MoreLynxmic.

For a little bit of history, NightskyArchive, a channel created in August 2018 (6 years+ ago), used to go by multiple names before, being centred around multiple topics.

It initally started as BW Tech Tutorials, back when my alias was "BW Tech". It was then renamed to Solarix How-To, coincinding with the rebranding from BW Tech to Solarix(tech) during the same month. The channel was centred around tech tutorials/guides
In December 2018, Solarix How-To completely rebranded to Solarix Archives and had its main focus change from tech tutorials/guides to video perservation for the first time. Multiple unreleased Lynxmic/pre-Lynxmic videos were uploaded. It would keep its name until March 2019.
From March 2019 until January 2020, the channel was known as Codarix, with programming/coding its main focus. No Codarix videos/streams were ever made
From January 2020 to... I don't explicitly remember, but it was during 2020 when the channel was known as Axeon Productions, being more as a general "all-topic" YouTube channel named after my Discord Server, back then known as Axeon Community (Yes, the same server now known as LynxPlaza, it just turned 7 years old this year, which is unbelievable to think about)
After 2020, the channel got the name of Lynxmic Archives and returned to primarily video perservation. The channel was mostly left abandoned until this year (2024), when it was renamed to what it is known today, NightskyArchive

What else?

Jumping in to other events that marked my year, first off (back in February) I have decided to set up a new Windows-Linux dualboot on my main machine, after which I kinda started to main Linux (I've been using it more than Windows tbh). Since my last blog post on it I decided to switch distros (as of July), from Kubuntu to Debian

I then set up a third Windows-Linux dualboot of the year in September, when I have switched main PCs, from the i3 4GB RAM laptop I have had since 2021, to an AMD Ryzen 7 12GB RAM laptop (this was a completely worthy upgrade)

Presence on social media? Been pretty much the same on Mastodon/Fediverse. As for Bluesky I started to use it more often (since November) after previously creating my account there a year prior, while it was still in invite-only beta, I've been checking it pretty much daily, been crossposting posts from the fediverse there for some time, if you have a Bluesky account feel free to follow me there (@clyron.is-a.dev). I have also created a secondary Bluesky account specially for the Lynxmic side of things (channel updates, new videos on feed etc) if that's more your thing (@lynxmic.bsky.social) (yes, my original bluesky handle before the clyron rebrand ik ik)

Regarding Twitter (no im still not gonna call it ""X"". absolutely never), I kinda """attempted""" to make a return there while only posting about project-related stuff most of the time, but ultimately failed (which ngl is a good thing). I have recently locked down the account and set up an archive of my tweets overtime (from 2019 to 2023, I don't have the solarixtech tweets I deleted en masse from 2016 to 2019 lol), the archive can be viewed at tweets.clyron.is-a.dev - have fun ig

The future. 2025 resolution

Introducing a new permanent section in the Wrapping up (year) blog post series. Before the end of each post I will be basically telling y'all my plans for the next year

Regarding the Lynxmic channel, what I plan to do is try to go more towards like installing, exploring stuff, trying out OSes old and new with different third-party apps (in the likes of the recent OS/2 video), setting up cool full-fledged OS installations complete with their own apps, settings etc (in the likes of Windows 98 for Daily Use or the First PC/Laptop Recreations). Additionally some interesting experiments as well whenever one comes in my mind, in fact after seeing the OS/2 video underperform (200+ views in a week compared to the at least 2K+ views in preceding videos), I'm definitely gonna continue working on videos similar to those that made 2024 the best year yet

2025 will also be my very first year of me being involved in a YouTuber collab. That could have been 2024, you may remember me announcing my involvement in a collab with StuffyXP at some point during Fall. Multiple circumstances led to the collab video having been delayed until 2025. The collab video should finally come out soon, likely in January.

Regarding this website, I actually currently have in works a rewrite using Astro and Tailwind CSS, which you will eventually see during early 2025. A separate blog post will be made on the new website, when ready, to explain more about it, but for now all I can say is that I'm basically cookin'~

In addition, maybe some other cool stuff that may come in mind??? Only time will tell, of course. 2025 is gonna be a crazy year full of events both IRL and online...

Closing thoughts

2024 was a year for the books, with even more memories made. I don't have anything else much to say, ...wweeeell I do have a few final words to say: whether you only came in the "Clyronverse" in recent times (2023-24), or you're an OG from like 2017-20 or whatever at this point, thanks for sticking around and supporting me and my projects, for yet another year! Hopefully 2025 will be just as good as 2024, if not better

See y'all in 2025! Until then, Clyron signing off for the final time in 2024~

In the meantime, enjoy this visual representation of 2024 that totally didn't take me too much to complete! What a masterpiece!

I have rewritten this website

AveryEclipse — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In this article...

After like over 3 months of off-and-on development (since I procrastinated a lot), I'm finally here announcing a new iteration of clyron.is-a.dev.

This is a complete rewrite, doing away with that Jekyll+pure CSS with "Windows 2000-esque" design introduced in August 2024 in favor of something more cleaner.

Now I have been using Jekyll, a static site generator developed with Ruby for all my websites since 2021. Jekyll worked well enough, it suited my needs very well, but sometimes you gotta explore new things too.

When I first chose Jekyll, it was at a time when all I wanted was a blog that wasn't on any of the major popular blogging websites (eg. Blogger, WordPress, Medium), and I needed something to handle all the blog stuff more easily. Over time though what used to be just a blog evolved into an all-round personal website

So with that all over the way, plus the fact that:

I'm not familiar enough with the Ruby programming language used by Jekyll, nor I wouldn't really want to learn it
Over time I've been liking the Win2000-esque design less and less, with absolutely lack of interest whatsoever in finishing it

I have rebuilt this website from scratch.

What's new?

This time I chose Astro as my site framework and Tailwind CSS as the CSS framework.

Astro from the beginning seemed pretty interesting to look at (and I'm still interested in looking into it more and take advantage of every feature)

About Tailwind CSS, it's pretty much exactly what I need from a CSS framework. Essentially like Bulma but without any pre-built CSS elements since I often have a tendency to just come up with my own design for many aspects anyways. All it consists of is some class elements that effectively make CSS easier to work with. I'm not the best in the world at explaining things, but I hope this explains it well enough

For the design of this new website itself, I chose to kinda go back to the "legacy" and go with a design rather similar to my old website lynxmic.github.io (or sometimes called the LynxWebsite)... except I can say it's of course better... at least by 1%

Overall I like how this turned out, there have been some ups and downs but after 3 months of like procrastination, being overall demotivated, etc the usual, it's finally here. There are still some features and adjustments I'd like to roll out sometime later but for now the base thing is finished enough to finally replace the old website - otherwise it would have taken much longer

I do wish I was more creative with design stuff, the current design iteration wasn't the first of the Astro rewrite website. Beforehand I did experiment with several other designs, from all this was the best I could think of

Probably the only disadvantage of going back from pure CSS to using a CSS framework is that the site is no longer being rendered properly on older browsers. This is not a big deal since most-if-not-all people will use a modern browser but I always thought this ability was cool to have

The old site is still available at clyron.is-a.dev/legacy-site for the time being, I may or may not eventually make a cooler retro site for other browsers idk, but for now the old site will have to do

Lenovo IdeaPad 1 15ALC7 6-month review

AveryEclipse — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In this article...

Almost 6 months ago I somehow got in the hands of this laptop that replaced my previous main PC, a "Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15ITL6" from 2021

Judging by the specs of this laptop I have expected it to be much more powerful; speaking of specs, here they are:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700U, Lucienne
GPU: Integrated Graphics
RAM: 12GB DDR4
Storage: 500GB Western Digital NVMe SSD

Compare this to my previous main laptop; which only had an Intel Core i3, 4GB RAM and 256GB SSD. And as you may have guessed, one of the reasons why I switched was the specs. Like I could have kinda lived with them, but in reality this was just not enough for me anymore

Yes I could have gotten a PC with more RAM etc earlier, but I just didn't have the budget at the time. Better late than never, right?

Additionally my previous main laptop (by the time I switched from it) already had hinge issues after like 3 years of constantly opening and closing the lid every day. As a "fun" fact, just a week later, it bit the dust

With my "new" current laptop, I pretty much stopped the practice of closing and opening the lid every day and I'm now just keeping it open all the time unless i need to close the lid for any reason. To further justify:

I barely travel with it anywhere aside from some exceptions
- most of the time it's on my desk. Sometimes I do use it in bed, but that's it
this was not the first time I ended up with a broken laptop hinge
- before the IdeaPad 3 15ITL6, I used to main my i5 G50-70 laptop (which I do still have and use occasionally). It was in a good shape when i first got it in 2018, 3 years later it also got hinge issues, also from constantly closing and opening the lid every day
like what's even the point
🅰️

As of now I no longer own my previous laptop, it's basically an identical body to my current one except less powerful and just broken. The only differences are the color and the Windows key - previous laptop had the Windows 10 logo, current has the Windows 11 logo

BIOS

When first powering on the "new" current laptop, I actually went in the BIOS first... and surprise, surprise, we have a GUI!
As opposed to the non-GUI "Lenovo Setup Utility" of my previous laptop, you have a cursor that you can use to browse around

Clearly the UEFI here is different. It was easy for me to notice - on my previous laptop, the GRUB menu would appear when powering it on. However on my current laptop, the Lenovo logo would show up first before the GRUB menu, so if you choose to boot to Windows you will only get the loading circle without any logo

Unless you change the boot order in BIOS so that Windows Boot Manager is first, you would end up with this (FYI that this was when my distro of choice was Debian)

It doesn't bother me, but it was just something I felt like pointing out

Additionally (probably thanks to the GUI), literally 2GB of the total of 12GB RAM is allocated for the "hardware" - the same amount my first PC had, a contrast from the 200MB on my previous laptop. Doesn't bother me either, as thankfully I never really run out of the 10GB usable RAM, yet (shoutout to Windows's page file and Linux's swap file)

Basic tasks

Let's start with something basic - daily tasks. Of course if my previous laptop could at least handle "basic tasks" well (as in, for example, just one or two browser tabs plus maybe some music in the background playing through headphones, eventually some """"office"""" stuff), so can my current one

Main difference? The RAM doesn't really instantly go up to >90% usage anymore. Often with my previous laptop the RAM would go that far and programs etc would start freezing

On Linux it would often go so high that it'd trigger the kernel's OOM Killer where everything will freeze for seemingly forever and you'd often have no choice but to force power off the PC.

You will need a swap partition of at least 2GB or higher, alternatively you could also use earlyoom but that's often a painful experience, it will close even the app you're currently focused on if it uses the most RAM

With everything out of the way, I notice with my current laptop that most of the time I check either Task Manager (on Windows) or the System Monitor (on Linux), the RAM usage is often past 4GB. This really implies how important was to have more RAM

Heavy tasks

Virtual Machines (VMs)

Since I can finally say I have a computer with reasonable specs, I can now properly VM any operating system (even the most "resource-hungry" ones like many of the modern-day OSes, like Windows 10/11 etc) without having either my VM or my host slow down, and even during recording (most of the time I use VMs these days is primarily for Lynxmic videos)

I no longer really need to add DWORD keys in setup to bypass Windows 11's (rather arbitrary) system requirements, as I can now actually allocate 64GB storage AND 4GB RAM for my VMs. Secure Boot is easy as 3, 2, 1 to activate, CPU isn't a problem, and TPM is just as easy to activate as well

Nonetheless I'm still going with just using registry keys to bypass at least one of the requirements, primarily TPM since enabling it for a VMware VM requires putting in a password for the VM itself, which is something I don't really feel like putting, especially when Windows 11 runs just fine without TPM!

I have even ran a macOS Sequoia VM, and sure enough that performed better than even a macOS Mojave VM on my G50-70

If I could recall any issue virtualizing, it was "modern-day" OSes running slow after a while on VMware on Linux, but that might be because I didn't give my Linux swap partition enough GB's from what I heard

Gaming

After playing several heavy games or the games I previously played on previous main PCs but with more intensive performance settings, I'm very impressed. At first sight i thought it would still have been at least kinda laggy, but nope!

In the past month I've been playing quite a bit of Minecraft Java on this machine and just cannot not notice the fact it is playable even with more intensive graphics (e.g. Shaders or max Render Distance)

Of course it shouldn't mean you should actually play MC on this PC with shader and max render distance all the time, sure it looks cool and all in some circumstances but I'd still prefer render distance set to 16 and no shader

Not even I thought this machine would run Minecraft so well so at that point I was confident enough to try even heavier games. So I lately started playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 (or "ETS2" for short), a game I was quite interested in for a (long?) while but which none of my previous PCs could handle. Again, zero lag at all, even with high graphics settings

Video editing

So if it can run heavy games actually well, then video editing should work as well, right? Well, yes

Previously, on my previous PC I used to edit with DaVinci Resolve 15, an old version of this free editing software from 2019 at this point.
In fact while my previous PC was my main, I always used versions of editing software from 2018-19 just because they... work, and are not as heavy as editing software are nowadays

With me switching to this current PC I upgraded to the latest DaVinci Resolve 19 which notably works well with increased DPI scaling unlike 15

The time taken to render/export something has substantially decreased compared to the previous laptop (and previews are not as laggy), so if I want I can now pump out videos much faster, eventually even fully transition to 60FPS

About 4K rendering, I don't actually know, but considering I'm just someone making YouTube videos it's just unnecessary to put even more pressure on the CPU just for a video quality in which only like 3 people even watch YT videos on

Current Setup

From the very beginning when I got this laptop, it had a Windows-Linux dualboot, just like my previous one. Except this time I finally have more SSD space

My current partition setup consists primarily of:

64GB partition for Arch Linux (primary OS)
64GB partition for Windows 10 Pro 22H2 (secondary OS)
350GB partition for my data
rest of the disk reserved by the system

What I should note is that when I initially set up this laptop, I initially went with Debian 12 (stable) with KDE 5.27 on the Linux side, same distro from my previous laptop
However, I recently "distrohopped" (actually almost a month ago)...

The Arch Linux Experience

Soooo yes, now I can say that i use arch btw. ln late January, I decided to make the switchover from Debian to Arch Linux. So far it really didn't disappoint me at all, haven't looked back
(I was initially gonna make a separate blog post about this but ultimately gave up on it, so here's just some quick two-three words to say)

All I can explain is that I actually installed Arch on this laptop "the hard way". In other words, using individual commands, not scripts e.g. archinstall (for the uninitiated, the Arch installer is a command-line interface (CLI), as opposed to the GUI in installers of Debian or Ubuntu)

To make sure I wouldn't mess something up, I did first try successfully installing Arch in a virtual machine (for the first time! I never installed Arch before) - this was recorded, for anyone interested I made a Lynxmic video on it, available on YT as usual

My Desktop Environment (DE) of choice here is the latest KDE Plasma 6.2, which is an important glowup from 5.27. Especially the Wayland session, which is now more bearable.
For example, on KDE 5.27/Debian, the laptop would often sit around >1min30s in the shutdown phase if shutting down from the Wayland session. Frankly, KDE on Wayland is actually good now from experience (so far)

One of the primary advantages of having Arch installed in place of Debian is that I can choose to start with a clean KDE desktop with only the essentials (by installing plasma-desktop), as opposed to the KDE package that debian-installer provides, which includes KDE + many apps

Debian's KDE package comes included with apps that I generally just don't need at all. An example is Konqueror, a web browser that I don't use (chances are even that this blog post is the first time you even heard of Konqueror).
If you want to uninstall Konqueror, you can't. Uninstalling Konqueror on Debian KDE (or any of the included software, essential or not) will uninstall the entire DE

Overall with Arch I observe that so far I'm not running out of disk space as quickly, which is a nice "upgrade", considering that (again) my Linux and Windows partitions are only 64GB each

Closing thoughts

Best main PC so far, 100000/10

Of course, if I could I would have gotten something with even higher specs. Especially even more RAM and even more SSD space wouldn't hurt, maybe sometime in the future, who knows. For now though hopefully this will last me a few years, ideally more than 3 years (~~if this laptop's hinge won't break within that timeframe like the previous 2 laptops~~)

I also just realized as I'm writing this section that I forgot to talk about battery life, and I can say that it's actually pretty good, the battery will last a few hours on you (if you don't do heavy tasks on it). Pretty power efficient

The half-baked Discord Linux client

AveryEclipse — Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In this article...

(UPDATE 12-05-2026: Discord has addressed the issues with the Linux client pointed out in this blog post, while a proper title bar was introduced months prior. Consider this a relic of the past)

It's no secret that the official Discord client for Linux is half-baked compared to its Windows and macOS counterparts. For a long time there already has been (and probably the most famous of all) Discord's updating system which always sucked on Linux and still does, but lately things only have been becoming more obvious with the client in general.

Update system

Seemingly (almost) every single week, Discord releases a new update for the client. If the behavior on Windows and macOS is that Discord auto-downloads and installs the update (no user interaction needed at all!), on Linux you will instead be greeted by a certain "Must be your lucky day, there's a new update!" screen.

Especially for one who is on Debian or Debian-based distros (e.g. Ubuntu) and uses the .deb packaging, chances are at least a good chunk of your Downloads folder is just Discord .deb files (unless you keep your stuff organized all the time):

You cannot get past this screen at all. You're forced to having to manually update Discord every time, either (in the presented case above) by downloading .deb file from Discord's site everytime, or even using the package manager in the terminal etc, depending from where you got the Discord client.

Only after you did the manual updating, Discord will begin to "automatically update", as the updater will only then say that it's "downloading and installing updates". Like what

There exist workarounds you can use to at least get into the Discord client itself even if an update is available (just search on the web!). Of course Discord still wouldn't actually update itself but you would at least still be able to open it and use it, even if it's not the latest version.

All things aside, it's a classic. The update system could've been better than this, one shouldn't have to go through extra steps to use the Thing properly.

(No wonder why some people say Linux is not as easy to use)

Title bar

I don't know about other desktop environments if it's any different or not, but at least on KDE (afaik it's also the same on GNOME and XFCE, probably basically everywhere), the title bar of the Discord app is just the native one of the OS.

Cherry on top, when logged out, the title bar would just display this:

It became even weirder was when Discord rolled out its desktop+web redesign last March:

A "feature" of the desktop+web redesign is the "new title bar" that displays the server name and icon and also contains the Inbox and Help buttons on the right side. In Windows and macOS, there would also be buttons for minimizing, maximizing and closing directly integrated. This is not the case for Linux, so the Linux client now literally has two title bars!

All it does is give Discord's official Linux desktop client the feeling of a "glorified" PWA in my eyes. It displays even on the web/browser version of Discord, something which became one of the main criticisms of the redesign, and for a fair reason (it's just purely a waste of space).

Wayland

Better late than never, but thankfully screensharing now properly works on the Discord Linux client under Wayland since a few months ago now. So at this point I can say the Discord client is essentially just as usable in Wayland as in X11.

Doesn't mean I don't have two words to say, though. When logged in to the Wayland session, even to this day, Discord actually runs by default under XWayland, which is a X server meant to run X11 apps on Wayland.

It is actually possible to get Discord running under native Wayland, by passing the appropriate command-line arguments (--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland).
Everything works like a charm, I've never run into any particular issues so far under native Wayland that aren't present under Xwayland, heck it even fixes one issue, that being AFK detection not triggering.

AFK Detection (Auto-Idle) in Wayland

Normally, if 10 minutes pass without the Discord desktop client seeing any keyboard or mouse activity on the computer, it will detect you're AFK. Your status indicator would automatically change from Online to Idle (unless you manually set your status to idle, DND or invis). Any pings would instead send to your phone as a push notification.

This is the behavior on Windows, macOS, and Linux (X11). However it doesn't also work under Wayland by default (or specifically, via Xwayland). It simply just won't detect if you're away from your PC or not.

What I can confirm is that Discord's AFK detection actually works under (native) Wayland. That is, again, unlike on XWayland, where it just doesn't work. I have tested all of this beforehand.

Conclusion

When you look just at how half-baked things are on the Linux version of the Discord client, it's literally the "second-class citizen" vibe.

Again, no wonder why people don't switch to Linux! You cannot just pester someone to "switch to Linux", when Linux isn't even compatible with all apps they use on Windows (e.g. the Adobe apps), or the Linux version of the app is half-baked (e.g. Discord in this case). Sure you could use third-party clients for Discord which may fix one thing or two, but we aren't talking about them in this post. Not to forget they are against Discord's TOS, and usage is at your own risk.

I could even nominate other popular apps I'm aware of that work well on Windows but don't support Linux just as good if I want.

Generally speaking, what even to expect from a company like Discord anymore? They have different priorities, and Linux obviously isn't it. Linux really only accounts for several percents in the OS market share, and is not as popular as Windows and macOS, but it is positioned as a viable alternative especially amid Windows 10 EOS - lately more and more people have been making the switch to Linux, heck even PewDiePie.

Galaxy A26 5G first impressions

AveryEclipse — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In this article...

Last time, I said I will keep my previous phone (my then-new Galaxy A23 5G) as my main for at least 1-2 years. I initially got it in late January 2023, and it's been frankly almost 2 years and 6 months since then!

The initial plan later on was to keep this phone as my main for another 2 years before moving on to another phone, as I had thought that there was basically just barely any innovation 'n stuff nowadays or like just any reason whatsoever to upgrade my phone when it was still working just fine, and I thought I wasn't missing out on anything really.

However, later on I realized that the phone was only entitled to 2 major Android version upgrades, not 3 like I initially thought this whole time! The phone came out around the end of summer 2022, so out-of-the-box it only came with Android 12. This means that (for better or worse) it can only be officially upgraded to Android 14 with One UI 6.

This however wasn't a big issue for me as at some point my phone usage was gonna drop to 1 hour at most, mostly consisting of stuff like checking socials, weather or whatever I needed to check, or putting notes and reminders for myself. At some point I did also have issues arise with the phone's charging port (Sep-Oct 2024), but they since thankfully faded away.

With everything out of the way, the A23 5G was an actually good midrange Galaxy phone for its time, and still works well enough to this day, at least for "basic tasks" like what I've been using it for.

However at the end of the day I just ended up getting a different phone: the Galaxy A26 5G. To my defense, it was just given to me in an all-new condition, literally waiting to be set up. It was already powered on displaying the first-time setup experience. I was literally just handed over the phone with its entire box and its contents, that's it.

i use android btw

Basic specifications

The Galaxy A26 5G is a rather recently-released Galaxy phone. It was announced on 2 March 2025, with availability by region by 19 March 2025. Frankly not too long ago!

Out-of-the-box it comes with Android 16 (One UI 7), not supported on the Galaxy A23 5G! Aaand oh boy, things are quite interesting in One UI 7, I'll get to it later
(TL;DR: signficant refresh to the UI! It feels so fresh compared to previous One UIs :D)

Some upgrades on the A26 5G compared to the A23 5G:

AMOLED is back! Every Galaxy phone I had since 2019 were literally all LCD displays. Yes I consider AMOLED an upgrade, things on screen look cooler and with pitch black dark mode it helps improve battery life
- Just like the A23 5G, this phone also supports 120Hz refresh rate, to complete the display side of things
IP67 dust/water resistance, up to 1m for 30 minutes. Not really a very important feature for me but nice to have
Base variants come with 128GB internal storage, double from the 64GB of the A23 5G. That is literally just as much as the SSDs of some of my laptops!
- The phone still comes with an microSD slot so the 128GB of storage can be expanded!

Not-so upgrades compared to the A23 5G:

No headphone jack! Samsung decided to go full iPhone 7 with this one. Not that I use wired headphones that often, I've went the wireless path for some time but I've been still sometimes using wired headphones
The phone only comes with an in-house Exynos chip, as opposed to the A23 5G which comes with an Qualcomm Snapdragon chip
- However, whether Exynos or Snapdragon is better was never an issue for me, personally both always did their job just as well
The base variants only come with 4GB RAM. Still.
- However, my variant has 6GB of RAM. Neat! Again, not that I will really use my phone for anything other than "basic tasks" primarily, and the 4GB of RAM on the A23 5G served me well enough.
Still no seamless updates.
- Better late than never, recent Galaxy phones finally come with seamless updates supported. However, for some reason, Samsung omitted the A26 5G and I can confirm it rather still updates the old-fashioned way. This is a ""funny"" yet sad move from Samsung that literally makes no sense at all (and idk how surprised i should be about it in the first place), like how can you 9 years later still be attached to the old-style way of updating when there's a better alternative??
- For those uninitiated, seamless updates work by downloading and installing the update in the background, and then restarting immediatelly lets you into the updated system, thanks to having A/B partitions.
  - In the other hand, the non-A/B update mechanism used by the A26 5G (and most older Galaxy phones) involves downloading the update then booting into Recovery Mode to apply the update. As the update screen warns, it is impossible to then fallback to the previous software, and the phone basically becomes a brick while it updates

Other than that, nothing much really significant about the A26 versus A23.

The software

As previously said above, the Galaxy A26 5G comes with Android 15 (One UI 7). Unlike the A23 5G, the A26 5G is entitled for 6 major Android version upgrades, which is a huge step-up meaning I won't have to worry about missing any new Android version for a while

Now say what you want about it but One UI 7 for me personally geniunely feels like a refresher compared to every previous One UI since 2019. At first when I saw One UI 7's look I was like eh, but when actually using it, it geniunely feels like a "new and exciting" thing, and so far never ran into any issues with the software specifically.

Something you'd have to get used to when going from One UI 6 (or anything previous) to 7 is the fact the Notifications panel and the control center are now separate from each other, accessible from two separate parts of the screen from the top.

Preinstalled apps

No significant differences, they are mostly the same except bearing the new One UI 7 look. The phone continues to come preinstalled with apps like Facebook and Netflix. Both can be uninstalled, but the same cannot be said for the former's accompanying Meta App Installer, Meta App Manager and Meta Services apps, which can only be disabled.

Just like the A23 5G, it still comes with this Samsung Free app (which like who even uses it lmao), however you can actually uninstall it. This is as opposed to the A23 5G where you literally cannot even disable it, let alone uninstall it, as if it's """essential""" (no it's not).

AI stuff

Unlike on the A23 5G which launched at a time when AI wasn't popular (ChatGPT didn't even launch yet!), the A26 comes with Google's Gemini AI chatbot preinstalled as a system app which can only be disabled. There are also Galaxy AI features as well, but they do not really serve a true purpose for me personally at least... maybeee for those who are actually fans of AI, I ain't one of them

They're just there to be there, because they're basically AI and it's a trend for literally every major tech company at this point, but that's a whole different story (let's be honest, AI is overhyped)

Built-in screen recorder

There's finally a built-in screen recorder included out-of-the-box, so need for a 3rd-party screen recorder (like AZ Screen Recorder, which is what I've been always using) anymore.

For some reason, just like with case with seamless updates (which I've already talked about above), the built-in screen recorder was not available on all but select Galaxy devices. So the A23 5G didn't come with a built-in recorder, but higher-end phones from the same generation did (unless you count the built-in screen recorder from the Game Booster menu).

The camera

The A26 5G camera has more features than the A23 5G's. We have especially new modes like Hyperlapse, Single Take, Pro Video and Super Slo-Mo.

One major feature not present on the A23 5G is the ability to change the shutter speed, possible on the A26 5G either by adjusting speed in Pro Video mode, or alternatively by enabling Super Steady in the main video mode, which I guess could help when trying to shoot from the window of a moving vehicle for example. None of such videos I made with previous phones turned out to be good. Will only have to test the next time I go on a trip though, then I can come to a conclusion.

Oh, and as a bonus, apparently we have Snapchat Lenses?? (which are actually just face filters). BTW you'd have to switch to the Fun mode for this, but I did it just for the sake of exploration.

...aaaand the blog post is concluded just like that. How much time will I keep this phone as my main? Hopefully at least 2 years again if not longer. Time will tell

How low can you go with your site's browser compatibility

AveryEclipse — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In this article...

For quite a while now (that is, since April 2024), I've been considering a more retro/Web 1.0-style version of my website. Later on the plans evolved into using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) site builder (specifically Microsoft FrontPage 2003), as one of the people I know did, which I've actually proceeded to do.

I however later on realized this would mean maintaining two separate websites, that if something was gonna change (e.g. social media handle, new projects etc.) I would have to separately change them, which means extra unnecessary time! And said Retro Frontend wasn't gonna be maintained as much as the main ClyronWebsite, to put it simple.
If I also added a blog to the "Retro Frontend", that would also mean that this blog post will - once it is out on the ClyronWebsite - also have to be separately adapted for the Retro Frontend.

So I gave up entirely on FrontPage, and my new plan became building a kind of a ""Retro Frontend"" on top of ClyronWebsite instead. Thus, everything updates when needed, regardless if the browser is new or old.

From this point on, I will refer to ClyronWebsite as "this website".

Phase 1: Internet Explorer 11

We're gonna start simple, with IE11.
Where to start, though? This website, in particular v2.x versions, has been using Tailwind CSS.

Tailwind is a CSS framework. Unlike others like Bulma or Bootstrap, all Tailwind provided were some CSS classes in order to basically make it easier to build a website's design, and that's what it did. For starters it's pretty good.
However, Tailwind uses CSS code that only modern browsers support, which is a blocker to supporting older/ancient browsers at all.

As such I decided to drop Tailwind CSS to start with, translating all Tailwind CSS previously used by this website into pure CSS defined in the already-existing style.css file. (And this is how v3.0 of this website came to life, with a general redesign to go alongside it that I'm pretty satisfied with! ^^)
As such, I now basically have full control over the CSS for the first time since the v1.x era of this website.

From there on, getting the website to work with IE11 wasn't the hardest task at all. However even without Tailwind, this website was still using CSS code that IE11 doesn't support at all, so I had to set up some fallbacks, but nothing too radical.

Along the way I've learned of the CSS @supports rule - that's gonna be of major help that will make things waaay easier!
Basically you put "by default" fallback code, then using the @supports rule you can then write code to be used in modern browsers in curly brackets, where there is actual support for the certain CSS that the website "normally" uses.
Just to get a better idea, an example CSS structure would be this:

html { /* "Default" CSS code. This will be used by older browsers, which do not support @supports */
    background-color: #000000;
    font-size: 16px; /* Older browsers don't support the rem unit, so we use px */
}
@supports (display: flex) { /* The following code will be used by modern browsers. */
html {
    font-size: 1rem; /* 16px = 1rem */
}
}

Important to keep in mind is that the @supports rule has been only available across browsers since 2015. It is not supported by any version of Internet Explorer, or just any older browser for the matter.

So as of right now this website loads on IE11 well enough to say.

There are several issues that still need to be addressed like the whole "click to copy 88x31 HTML code to clipboard thing" not working or the footer and webrings not being properly centered (which can be attributed to IE11's flexbox support being pretty "ehhy")

And yes, you're totally right, what you have actually seen is Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 11. Normally trying to run iexplore is supposed to open Edge, but even in the latest 24H2 there's still a loophole you can still use to open IE11, namely by going to Control Panel -> Internet Options -> Programs tab -> Manage add-ons -> Learn more about toolbars and extensions. Saved me some potential extra time of having to set up a separate Windows VM and all that stuff.

Phase 2: IE 7-10, Safari for Windows, Opera Presto

So on to the next phase of bringing this website to work on ancient browsers!
Our target now are basically all browsers from 2007-2012 (13-18 years ago!)

For this phase I decided to set up a VM with Windows XP MCE 2005 (I usually do Professional but decided to try something different), which came with Internet Explorer 7 out of the box. Here's v3.0 of this website on IE7:

I was expecting something better. Even worse, between the "Hi there!~" and the navbar there is a singular weird shape (which is actually a partial star). I was able to easily get this issue addressed (at least for IE) by moving the CSS code associated with the stars in the navbar inside a @supports.

Now I've already talked about the fact support for the rem unit is more newly-introduced than that of the px unit. Well, about other core aspects of the website, the logo & text sizing issues were due to the use of rem.

What I've done about it? Put all rem sizes inside @supports and switch the "main" sizes to px. Now I could have just switched it all to px but I was simply too lazy to convert all rem to px while making sure there aren't any differences afterwards. For the background, setting a separate background-color fallback fixed it.

I've also tested this website on Opera Presto and Safari for Windows. Presto appears to render everything mostly fine at this point, except for a floating star and the logo being abnormally big.
I've already fixed the star issue for IE as said earlier, but for some reason Presto is just a pain to deal with when it comes to this, as I've tried numerous CSS fixes with no effect :<

Meanwhile on Safari, we have what I'd definitely call "the most cursed thing I have ever seen as a webdev": the lack of navbar. Like, where did it go?!?!?

Now maybe maaayybeeee it might not have been the "most cursed thing" after all. The problem here was that the animation just wasn't playing in Safari, to put it in simple words. So the whole navbar was stuck at zero opacity. I moved all CSS code associated with the navbar's animations inside a @supports and that fixed it!
Of course there were other issues (like links or blog tags not displaying properly) but like with other aspects of the site, I've also resorted to fallbacks here as well (the power of @supports frfr)

Another issue was that images in blog posts did not load at all. For some reason, Astro (in particular the v5.x versions this website uses) tends to """optimize images""" and convert them to WebP, a file format only supported by modern browsers. Unfortunately the best workaround I could find here was switching to absolute URLs.
(UPDATE 04-06-2026: I've since discovered a way to bypass Astro's image optimization without using absolute URLs, the problem lied in me using ../../)

The final step was to essentially ditch Flexbox and Grid entirely. Support for them in older browsers is either hit-or-miss or absent entirely, so I've switched the navbar, footer etc to use display: block and text-align: center instead, in order for them to stay centered regardless if the browser used is ancient or not.

Aaaand there you have it. A website that works on browsers as old as IE7, Opera Presto and Safari on Windows.

As you can see I also decided to try monospaced fonts as a fallback if the default font(s) do not load. I am not sure-sure if I like it or not, but at this point I have more ambitious ideas in mind, which I'm however leaving for until the right time comes :p.

Phase 3: IE 5-6

We're definitely going retro with this one!!~
As the section's title reads, our next target are browsers from the late 90s/early 2000s.

For this phase I will be using a Windows 2000 VM. I've first tried the site on IE5. It loads, everything is generally displayed properly (thanks to fallbacks set in the prev phase), but with caveats:

Background is white instead of blue
- Usually it should fallback to background-color, knowing the gradient seen in the navbar in modern browsers does not even load in IE11, let alone IE5. However it.. just doesn't.
- To fix this, the CSS code for the gradient seen in the navbar in modern browsers had to be moved inside a @supports
The logo is displayed as a square
- The logo is a .PNG file, support for which was only added in IE4. Even then, proper support for transparent PNGs only came in IE7.
- Alternatives here are either a static GIF or just a text fallback.
Images overflow in the blog
- To be properly scaled, they use the max-width property, only supported from IE7 onwards.
- No good alternative exists aside from manually resizing images.

We basically just reached a limit of how low we can go just by adapting the normal website CSS layout.
Now I previously said at the end of the previous section that "I have more ambitious ideas in mind, which I'm however leaving for until the right time comes :p".
Well, it looks like the right time is basically now.

Building a proper "Retro Frontend"

Sooooo we were able to get the website fully working all the way down to IE5 (IE7 if we do not count the logo issue), now we're going to build an actual Retro Frontend that actually looks retro, if you will that will load on... basically any old browser predating @supports
(just to keep things simple, since at the end of the day I am not like a full-stack webdev to know everything, this is all for fun :3)

The current website layout is well suited as it's mostly text, as opposed to cards being an main element of the website design in v2.x. The only main exception is the blog index page.

Actually building it

To start with, I went to look up for a good background image for a 90s website. So the first thing I did was google "good backgrounds for retro website". However that turned out to be the best example of Google not giving relevant search results that I could get.
Most of the search results were """retro backgrounds""" sourced from stock image providers that have literally have nothing to do with what I'm searching for! And y'know what's the most hilarious part? The "People also search for" list:

Yes Google you can be sure if I search for 90s site backgrounds, I also search for AI Image Editing tools. Two things from two different internet eras...
Jokes aside, in the end I found GifCities from Internet Archive themselves where I was finally able to find exactly what I was looking for~

And so now I'll seriously start, stripping any unnecessary code from style.css and moving them under @supports to be used only by modern browsers and then "forcing" the fallback CSS to display by commenting out all @supports. Then did several basic-ish refinements to differentiate the Retro and Modern frontens.

Let's test!

So I've pushed the Retro Frontend work to GitHub as a beta of v3.1 of this website, then tested it across the different browsers.
My main observation following this is that Opera Presto (at least later versions of it) does actually support the CSS @supports rule, which explains the floating star issue that I've previously mentioned (which safe to say I've got a headache trying to fix it) - I wish I knew earlier.
I was able to finally hide the stars in Presto now knowing what's actually going on.

Anyway, now that we have a Retro Frontend, that now ensures support for browsers as old as IE5!
So, as a matter of fact, it is now possible to access this website on OSes as old as Windows 95! (an almost 30-year-old OS!)

It is actually super duper amazing that I managed to go down this far while not affecting the "modern frontend" that much and I honestly cannot wait to get this out (of "beta") :D

Even further down?

For the sake of it I decided to test this website on even older browsers. Unfortunately, CSS support in them is either hit-or-miss or non-existant at all

Internet Explorer 4 does render this website well, albeit with quirks. Particularily from my testing there are parts of the modern frontend leaking or even replacing those of the Retro Frontend. Thankfully the code can be adapted to somewhat fix IE4.

Meanwhile I've also tested the website on Netscape 4, however it won't work with the website's CSS at all. The output is no different than if I just deleted or renamed style.css within my file manager then start the Astro dev server and preview the site locally on my modern browser
Same goes for basically any browser that lacks CSS support entirely, such as earlier versions of IE and Netscape etc. Not the end of the world though, we can adapt the HTML!

So there you have it, a Plaintext Mode. In theory this website should now be able to display almost-if-not-fully properly on every graphical web browser.
The only differences between this and the CSS Retro Frontend are the lack of a website background and lack of proper padding in some areas, which are not really that big of a deal.

Conclusion

And there you have it, the answer to "How low can you go with your site's browser compatibility", as the title literally says. Of course at the end of the day that depends on each website, but the way this website was thrown up together allowed for this whole ancient browser support thing without the need for any radical changes..

This has been a work in progress for a whole week, having started working on it immediatelly after I pushed the final v3.0 of this website.
This was pretty fun, what's for sure though is that around the IE4 mark it started to be quite a bit """demotivating""" with all the issues and quirks, and literally testing all those various fixes with trial-and-error. Either way my goals are accomplished, just as I planned, and I can finally move on to other stuff!~

Wrapping up 2025

AveryEclipse — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

In this article...

Sooooo let's get straight to the point: 2025 was quite a big year full of events. It wasn't the best, nor the worst, just somewhere "in-between". I don't know where to start, but there have been both positive and negative points that I do wanna go through

A different persona

As a background, back in 2024 I realized Lynxmic no longer felt like myself, so I decided to separate my online identity from the tech YT channel of the same name I've been running since 2016.

And just like that was how the online persona Clyron came to life. The foundations were laid out basically for what was gonna be next. I was quite content with it but the kicker was that it only really fixed part of the problem.
It was always more meant as something ""temporary"" as I didn't have better ideas for names and I've been in the process of figuring out who I actually am, experimenting with various ideas overtime (such as an Original Character/OC).

In the end I settled on KayAurora. Or, for short you can call me Aurie or Kay, or even Amethyst which is the name I'm currently using on social media, all work~ >w<

For the branding, I ended up putting together something minimalist per se, that is simple but professional-looking at the same time, with a sleek color pallete. The outcome ended up SO good I find myself using it for a while from now on:

I'm not that much of a creative person when it comes to design, so that'll have to do.

So right now I am at a point where I am satisfied with my current online identity and can say that hey! thats actually me!!

In fact one thing I've been realizing from the process of "figuring things out" (which my online identity reflects) is that my personality went increasingly "girly" over time. Though there's definitely still a road along the way until the real answer to what's actually going on in this matter. For the moment I've been labelling myself genderfluid.

Online Recap

YouTube

The state of Lynxmic

I've ran the Lynxmic project since 2016. 9 years.
1,500+ subs from over 300,000+ views and counting, with a catalog of more than 400+ Lynxmic videos/streams in total
(on both main and 2nd channels, including content that was since unlisted/privated/deleted)

It used to be all fun while it lasted, even my screenshot archives prove I used to have loads of fun messing around with Virtual Machines in the first few years of the Lynxmic project.
Though overtime it was starting to get clear for me that my passion has been dwindling after all this time :(

My motivation and interest just wasn't really there anymore. YouTube has changed substantially this entire time.

One thing is that once your channel is picked up by the algorithm, you have to do anything to keep the channel back on track so that the algorithm keeps recommending it to new people.
Video ideas (that guaranteedly don't flop!) aren't easy to come up with and you have to maintain a consistent enough upload schedule. And this is in no way specific to my channel at all, I've seen others talk about it as well.

Though sometimes you can even have the most random video picked up by the algorithm, if you're lucky enough as a small channel. I've seen such videos occasionally come up in my YouTube recommended. Not even Shorts, normal long-form videos. YouTube's algorithm is just very (and I mean very!) random.

Lynxmic went down from mostly >2K views per video one after another to flops after flops. The 3rd-party apps on OS/2 video (the last of 2024) only got just over 440 views as of writing, as opposed to the video before it where I casually revisited the VM of an old series of mine (2.5k+ views). Most Lynxmic videos since the OS/2 only had <1k views per video.

I simply just did not have the energy anymore to constantly push out new videos, so I told myself "that's it" and stopped uploading any new videos actively after March, except for spontaneous content every now and then. I was getting so sick of life I just wanted a break anyway >_<

Looking forward

I slowly started coming back to content creation in Fall/Autumn. Despite my dwindling interest for "VM videos" like I once did, I still love doing content creation to an extent and still see myself doing this for a long time from now on as I think it's what I know best.

I've been part in the team for the AstroNT project, a brand new tech channel with a similar focus to Lynxmic's, where I've been contributing with my own set of videos.

I've also been making proper videos for the KayAurora channel, starting with my first YouTuber collab that I previously teased in October 2024 but which was delayed. I had several other videos planned but they were either cancelled like mid-way or just I never happened to do them

2025 was definitely not my year when it comes to me making videos (that title still goes to 2024~)
I cannot guarantee or promise anything but I wanna try to push more videos in 2026. Not just videos, I wanna get in other projects as well.

Website

This website is now completely different from what it used to be at the start of the year.
In February, I switched the website over from Jekyll to Astro and gave it a whole new look replacing the previous ""Win2000-style design"" which was quite awful imho.
(also 4 months in the making, just like with the YTber collab, mostly due to procrastination)

I initally went with Tailwind for the frontend but then later dropped it in July to give myself full control over the CSS so I can make the website work on ancient browsers for the funni-

Another thing worth noting is that I finally have my own 88x31 button(s), not only for me but also for some of my projects (as seen in the website homepage)! Pretty cool, right?

Just like with the KayAurora branding which this website's design incorporates (unless you're reading this on RSS or the Retro Frontend), I'm satisfied with the outcome and this current site should stay for a while ^^

Axeon Network

I figure I should talk about this as well.
At the beginning of the year, we had LynxPlaza as the "official Lynxmic Discord Server". However as I moved on from the Lynxmic project this year, that server was originally also gonna close at some point. However the changing landscape of Discord communities at the time led to a change of plans.

So on 30 April, the LynxPlaza server has been rebranded to Axeon Network. Basically a return to origins.
(before 2022, the server was known as either Axeon Community or just Axeon)

But that's not all! Axeon Network has been becoming more than just being that average Discord community. Other projects came under this umbrella, such as the MidoriMC Minecraft Server (initially AxeonMC for a short time, later shut down after a few months), and since September KuroWiki and its underlying engine, Deltari. Oh, and for the first time since 2019, it has its own website linking to everything (though pretty rudimentary rn lol, that is to be worked on).

Back to the server, it just had its 8th anniversary since it was opened on 28 December 2017, which I can now safely say I have reasons to believe it's one of the older still-surviving 'tech' Discord Servers (it was always described as a server where you can talk about anything, but tech had always been the dominant topic), and personally I'm glad to be owning a server this old and for so long :D

Overall for what it ended up being, it has been a success. For its size it has been quite an active community this year, so at the very least I still did something in 2025

The future.

Let's start with the basic stuff: my 2026 resolutions.
That's right, my resolution is 1920x1080!

Okay, okay, jokes aside my resolutions are pretty simple: learn and try out new things and try to get out of my comfort zone. And of course, don't procrastinate again and again and again like I did this year. How far will I go? I don't know.

In my section in the last wrapping up year post where I was talking about my "2025 resolutions", I was mostly pointing at YouTube-related stuff. About 2026 though? I have no concrete idea.

As I previously said in my YouTube section, I wanna properly lock in and get back to making videos actively (eventually try out a new style for the KayAurora channel, there have been some thoughts in my mind about it), as well as start some more side projects to have my portfolio more complete. What side projects though is a question that remains to be answered in 2026.

As for the "comfort zone" part, in the way of addressing this there is one main obstacle: social anxiety. This is something I'd like to try to overcome in 2026.
In fact, my mental health this year hasn't been the greatest it has been compared to other years with everything that happened IRL with all their circumstances, though I've been thankfully recovering as of late!

What doesn't help is my current living situation which isn't the best. It's not the worst, it's just not adequate enough for my preference. A truly distraction-free environment would be nice to have and of absolute help, but at the moment that still feels like pretty far on the horizon.

Remember that everywhere you look there's an increased cost of living, which leads us to another thing that defined the year: the AI boom.
I had a blog post planned about it which I ended up abandoning (and there's also a lot to debate on this!), but AI is being shoved everywhere, even in the most unnecessary places. Companies nowadays just love AI way too much to the point it's overhyped, simply because it gives them profit! All we can do is if/when the AI bubble bursts, we grab our popcorns and watch as everything happens, like literally. It's not gonna end well.

Oh, and lastly, if it isn't obvious by now, 2026 is the year the Lynxmic project turns 10 years old (channel created 5 December 2016). I plan some special Lynxmic content to celebrate, so look forward to that~

Closing thoughts

So there it is. Yet another year passed.
2025 wasn't the most interesting year, but for sure it brought more memories.

What else left to say anymore? For the final time this year, thanks for reading till the end and, take care! <3 Hopefully 2026 will be better.
And of course I couldn't forget, Happy New Year to those of y'all who are already in 2026 as of the time of publishing!

Growing a YouTube channel

AveryEclipse — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In this article...

(UPDATE 14-05-2026: Added a new subsection "The "Triuosfjd" case" to the Lynxmic section)

I've been in the content creation space for over a decade. Since I was small. So thus I've accumulated some experience with growing a channel from scratch and by extension anything when it comes to YT's algorithm for some time.

Most of what I know and learned from is from maintaining the Lynxmic channel. Since I started that channel in 2016, for the longest time it was a big struggle to get it to grow.

Now one important thing to know, and that's the fact Shorts didn't exist until 2020. Lynxmic was created at a time Musical.ly and Vine were (still) a thing.

2016 wasn't too meaningful since I only started in December. And of course I only had started to get editing skills at the time, and combined with the content I was doing it wasn't too professional. in 2017 I already evolved a lot with editing, I was very obviously doing everything for fun, 2017-19 generally I had lots of fun playing with Virtual Machines. In 2018 my young self even felt like my channel was "ahead" of other small channels its size.

Anyway, let me get into more detail into my history on YouTube when it comes to growing a small channel like mine:

Growing the Lynxmic channel

Solarix 2018-19, first year of actual growth

After being stuck under 30 subs for almost two years, the Lynxmic channel then known as Solarix finally started to somewhat grow in late 2018. But there's an aterisk.
The videos that have been giving the channel most subscribers and views around this time were mostly "How to get X Rich Presence on Discord" videos or those from the "Discord.js Bot Tutorial" series.

If we break down by Traffic source, a majority of the views come from External or YouTube search.

Most of the views coming from "external sources" were from Google Search.

Now was it a "good thing"? Maybe in the short-term, but in the long-term? I don't think so.

The "most popular" videos of the channel weren't really pushed by the algorithm. As tutorials, they came to be because people were looking for them and only for them, not for the channel itself.

The channel itself has always primarily been a "tech" channel. Indeed other types of videos were also done during this time including programming and gaming, but they were always secondary.

The subscribers the channel gained in late 2018-early 2019 were basically nothing and rapidly turned into "ghosts". Not to mention I 'quit' programming in 2019 to only primarily focus on tech-related content on the Lynxmic channel, basically the thing I actually love doing, but even then.
Average views per video didn't go up with the subscriber count, most times you were lucky to even get 100+ views on a video.
Any growth is good, but this wasn't sustainable. I made content, but I barely got anything in return, as much as I wanted.

Now thinking about it, maybe I actually felt like having a third channel was a good idea at the time without realizing it?
In fact those who were around for me long enough might remember NightskyArchive, which used to be my "media perservation"-focused channel which I since deleted. It started as a "tech tutorial" channel before later evolving into Codarix, a coding-focused channel.
And considering the programming/IDE videos were for some reason more popular than my other videos, maybe it would actually been a good idea if Codarix happened earlier sticking just to the programming/IDE videos?

At that point it was already pretty much too late either way, since Spring 2019 my channel has struggled to grow past the 75-90 subscriber range, and things wouldn't improve until 2022, when it finally hit 100 subs for good and never dropped below that threshold again.
And that leads us to the next blog post section:

Lynxmic 2023-24

By early 2023, nearly every video started to get beyond the 100+ view milestone and I even got a most popular video which today has 37K+ views: a remake of a remake of a Windows Consumer Upgrade Fest.
Did I expect it? No. At this point I didn't expect anything after struggling to grow for years. It is fundamentally the same thing as with the original videos from 2019 and 2021.

What actually happened is that by 2023 YouTube appeared to have changed their algorithm and in a positive way for small channels like mine was. Below you can see views by traffic source between 1 January 2018 and 31 December 2024:

By far, Browse features dominates. It means traffic from the "homepage/home screen, the subscription feed, and other browsing features" but at this stage it means the actual YouTube Algorithm is pushing your channel and videos to people that are truly interested.
Only thanks to the algorithm, the Lynxmic channel picked back up in growth again while getting an audience that is actually (even somewhat) loyal to the channel and actually watches the videos that I've been posting there.

And it wasn't just the Lynxmic channel. In recent years I have observed increasingly more videos with like 30 views being recommended to me, let it be from the homepage or suggestions in watch pages.
It doesn't necessarily have to be a "professional-looking" video, it can be the most random video ever on YouTube. It can even have just an auto-generated thumbnail and a title that is just the date e.g. "3 March 2026" (default behavior on YT Mobile if no title is set), it can get many views overnight.

2023-24 wasn't exactly "too late" but at the same time "was", considering.. now. The Lynxmic content at this point was fundamentally the same from earlier years, and my passion for messing around with VMs was already starting to wind down compared to 2017-19.

The peak of the Lynxmic channel growth-wise was fall 2024, when it finally hit 1K subscribers. The channel at the time was growing at a rapid rate, and that could have been the best opportunity to grind, grind, and grind more, however as I said my interest and energy to make the same VM videos I did for years were in a decline :(

What I learned

First off let me emphasize that for a period, between summer 2022 until March 2023, the Lynxmic channel primarily had a weekly schedule where videos would be uploaded every Saturday.
It was at a time where I kinda started to miss having frequent uploads like I once did in 2018-19, which I might have knew it might work, and surprisingly enough I managed to build surpluses (a.k.a. have videos ready multiple weeks in advance.)

After March 2023 though I dropped the schedule and uploads slowed down since I was shifting my focus on the behind-the-scenes and how I could improve my content. And even without the weekly schedule, by the end of 2023 the Lynxmic channel was above 400+ subscribers.

As for 2024, in the first half I generally had the same "old" schedule of generally at least 1-2 videos per month. Growth wasn't that notable, except for that one video showing the then-"new" Windows 11 Setup.
Later I knew summer was an opportunity for me as a creator so for throughout July-August 2024 I reintroduced the weekly upload schedule previously abolished in 2023. This has been a success which has benefitted the channel even into fall.

So, the important things to note:

Upload frequency is important if you wanna seriously get far with YouTube.
- It doesn't have to be a schedule you have to strictly adhere to, ideally you just have upload at least every 2 weeks or something if you wanna have your channel/videos pushed.
- If you don't feel like making a video so often, it's fine! You don't have to do it. You can take a break if you need to. Making a video is something you should be able to enjoy doing, not one that feels like a chore. The more passionate you are, the better you can cook a video that both you and your audience enjoys!
A video shouldn't be too boring, starting from the title and thumbnail.
- The first thing people see about your YouTube video is the title and thumbnail. The more better they are, the more catchy it becomes for people to click/tap on your video. It shouldn't be too boring, but at the same time not clickbaity either.
- Then, the video itself. The better the editing is, the better your recordings are, the better your video is.
- Though I should say that I'm not the best at giving examples so if you want the closest idea, stick around for the AstroNT section!
  - Generally for inspiration/ideas, I'd recommend looking at other channels then drawing your conclusion based on what you're seeing. Look at how other channels edit their videos, their quality etc.

The "Triuosfjd" case

Honestly? Chances that the algorithm pushes your content can still be pretty random at the end of the day. And if nothing in this blog post has been convincing enough to think about it, this definitely might be one.

In late March 2026, I uploaded a new video to the Lynxmic channel for the first time since October 2025, where I was looking at a random strange Windows ISO I found on the internet the other day that was called "Triuosfjd" (yes it was seriously called like that).

The analytics in the first week are high-key surprising considering the over 5-month gap between uploads (unusual considering past Lynxmic history):

No video from 2025 has gotten this many views. For one thing, I did not expect the algorithm to pick this video up to begin with. At this point I didn't really care about views or subscribers on Lynxmic as much as in 2025, and I had already decided to "return to the basics" here, as in "pre-2022 style", given that I already moved on to AstroNT. Nothing but proof you can be inactive for months and still have a chance.

What I think also mattered here is the title + thumbnail combo which is SO GOOD to the point it makes you wanna click on it. Probably one of the most creative good-looking combos I've ever made imo. It really stands out.

A new start

In October 2025, I became part of a different YouTube channel project: AstroNT. This basically marked my return to the content creation space after a six-month break.

Throughout this whole time I've used my experience previously accumulated from the Lynxmic project when making videos for AstroNT. The plan: improve as the channel grows.
One key thing here was that for each video I tried to make the titles and thumbnails as "catchy" and as good as possible.

So my first videos were simple edited videos with recordings and textboxes. In 2025 I uploaded roughly 2 videos to the AstroNT channel, which they didn't do too bad for a channel at the beginnings.

Then no videos would be posted to the channel at all until January 2026, when I finally finished the two other videos I started in 2025 but left behind: Y10K on Linux and 5001 via DOS. Analytically speaking, they flopped, and that's completely fine at this stage!

Then came the 8Store video. Style-wise it was no different from previous videos. Everything was fundamentally the same.
It did better compared to all other videos in the first week. In fact what I noticed in the tech side of YouTube in particular is that the videos that actually perform well the most are Windows-related. That are interesting enough.
Even if we look at the Top 25 most popular Lynxmic videos right now, every single video is Windows-related. Except for the 25th one, that being the KolibriOS video from early 2020.

Anyway back to the 8Store video, guess what happened after a week of it being out!

Notice the clear spike in both views from Browse features and Suggested videos? That means YouTube's Algorithm is pushing the video and the AstroNT channel got its place on the map! So far so good ^w^

I knew what to do from here this time, thanks to the Lynxmic 2024 experience I've previously mentioned: push another video. How did it perform in the first few hours?

Remember, this is literally just your ordinary Windows-related video. It's nothing wow, even less than 5001 via DOS.
Now let's check the analytics for the entire channel right now as I'm writing this blog post:

Granted it's past the peak, but almost 300 subscribers in just almost half a year since the AstroNT channel was originally created in September 2025, of which most of it gained within 1.5 weeks is impressive!
There's still work to do though, and for that ideally all what's needed is to keep up with the videos as they are, staying consistent with the current uploading schedule, which so far ended up to be 2 videos per month. No rush. No hurry.

Although maybe I should make sure I have everything properly set up beforehand before making a video, the ExplorerEx video was recorded twice, the first set of recordings turned out so well but it turned out I forgor to enable Capture Cursor in OBS (which i thought i had the entire time!) so my mouse cursor didn't show up in the recording and that ruined the vibe arghhhh >.<

Why am I saying this though? In the niche AstroNT is in, when you do some shenanigan video with all of the fun in it, you can get the best shots from the first try! But if you somehow accidentally get one thing wrong without realizing or just anything happens and you have to re-record 100% of the video, the vibe is gone and you have to act dumb, instead of being dumb.

I'm still pretty satisfied with the outcome of the video nonetheless.
And that's another advice not just for future me, but for others who also want to start a channel: make sure you've got your settings and equipment right before starting to work on your video.

Conclusion

This was pretty much all my personal experience with YouTube's algorithm and overall growing YouTube channels. Definitely cannot call myself an expert here, but this has been pretty much my advice to anyone who wants to start a new channel in this day and age.

In the meantime I want to keep going not just with the AstroNT channel, but also my personal channel at some point. Who even knows what will happen in six months?

Side note, if I somehow happen to come up with any missing points I didn't think of when first writing this I may or may not edit this blog post to include them, because useful information after all... This is a pretty complex topic in its way, sooo yeah.