gnuthing [they/them]

I’m sorry to hear about your brother’s pain. I have a herniated disk in my neck that is from an injury I got in my 30s. If it’s the disk, he might end up needing an MRI as well. Sometimes they want physical therapy tried before doing an MRI. To me the herniated disk feels different from something like muscle pain because it has like electrical pulses, it’s very distinct feeling.

My treatment started out with prednisone, then about 8 years ago I was able to get physical therapy. Since then, any time I have a flare up, I consume large amounts of cherries, fresh or frozen are best, like 1-2 cups a day. Sweet cherries work as a natural COX-2 inhibitor similar to ibuprofen. This is why cherries are used to treat gout and arthritis. I generally feel relief at day 2 but I eat them for a full 10 days just like I would with prednisone. I do not know of any negative side effects, it’s something he could try while waiting for the Dr.

It might be a pulled muscle instead of a herniated disk. With a herniated disk ice can help reduce inflammation, but for muscle spasms heat is often more relieving and ice can actually trigger a spasm. Hot baths with epsom salt can help relieve muscle pain. Aspercreme has an OTC lidocaine cream that can help muscle pain as well

I hope your brother feels better soon!

$300-350 per month per person. This is about $100 more per person per month than we were paying during covid

$3/meal also costs more than what food assistance provides

Most of the popular Linux distros should work for gaming. I’d recommend Fedora or Ubuntu for being easy and tending to just work. I’d recommend against Arch because it’s easier to break than most distros. KDE desktop environment can be configured to be lighter on system resources than gnome.

Really to know what you would like best and what works best with your hardware, you should make a USB with ventoy and add a bunch of different .iso files of different distros. Boot into the live environment and mess around, try your peripheral devices, etc. Be warned, live environments are significantly slower than a full install.

I would also recommend checking all of your games on protondb. If any don’t work on Linux, you can dual boot.

Does anything happen when you do Ctrl+shift+F3? Should give you the tty where you can log into the command line

There was a big report for kwin and Nvidia GPU causing this behavior. The user with the same issue had it resolved by updating. If you can log into tty, you can update through there. https://www.mail-archive.com/kde-bugs-dist@kde.org/msg1130467.html