Tonight I decided to do something fairly simple: plug my Pi 400 into a secondary monitor in the form of an old LCD TV I have mounted on the wall. I even mounted my sound bar above it and mounted a swivel mount platform for the laptop to sit on. I fired up the Pi and the dual monitor setup works fine. Too bad the wifi is useless. Oh well, I can deal with that for now. I confirmed it's a signal problem. Nothing I can do about it now. I went to go set up audio and make sure the "Dummy Output" device problem wasn't back. It sure was. Awesome. So no audio at all. All I wanted was to listen to some music while I do some chores. Not an option. Fine, screw it, I'll just do a fresh install of Pop!_OS on the SSD and be done with it, as I know it's likely an update that kills audio device support. Fresh install, can select which audio device just fine. Open file viewer to load music off an external drive, locks the entire system up. Awesome. Restart, try to open file viewer again, locks the entire system up again. Sweet. Gave up, cloning my known working flash drive over to the SSD for probably the 10th time. I'm getting so sick of this and just want a reliable evey day PC to work with. I have a software project I want to start on, but I can't even get the Pi to stay running long enough. My old laptop won't boot anymore and has a broken screen, so I doubt I'll be able to get it working anytime soon,so I can't even go back to that. The most frustrating part is that the hardware seems to be fine and all my problems come from software. I can't stand Raspberry Pi OS as a daily driver, Pop won't run properly and just randomly destroys itself, and nothing else seems to boot on my Pi 400. I'm getting incredibly tired of this and about to go buy another PC and be done with this all. I love Pop on the Pi, but it's painfully slow from a flash drive or SD card, and is unreliable on the SSD. I know I should just throw more money at this problem and get a new SSD and such, but that's not an option right now. Even when I've built new PCs for people, wasted so much time troubleshooting software issues that it makes me sick. Nothing is simple and reliable anymore. Everything is geared towards consumers, which is an incredibly insulting term that no one seems to notice, and is just dumbed down or has every feature you could ever imagine. Raspberry Pi OS seems dumbed down to me, but for a good reason. It's reliable, but it gets in my way constantly. Pop is the most comfortable OS I have every used, but the experience on the Pi 400 is very disappointing. 

Today's rant brought to you by me.