An older friend of mine told me years back about an incident that happened on a university VAX running Unix. In those days, everyone was using vt100 terminals, and the disk drives weren’t all that quick. He was working on his own terminal when without warning, he got this error when trying to run a common command (e.g. ls)

$ ls -l
sh: ls: command not found

So he went on over to the system admin’s office, where he found the sysadmin and his assistant, staring at their terminal in frozen horror. Their screen had something like:

# rm -rf / tmp/*.log
^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C
# ls -l
sh: ls: command not found
# stat /bin/ls
sh: stat: command not found

A few seconds after hitting return, and the rm command not finishing immediately, he realised about the errant space, and then madly hammered Ctrl-C to try to stop it. It turns out that the disk was slow enough that not everything was lost, and by careful use of the commands that hadn’t been deleted, managed to copy the executables off another server without having to reinstall the OS.

As a workaround, you could use OBS and use OBS’s virtual camera so Discord is streaming what it thinks is a camera, and set up whatever you want to share on your desktop through OBS.

How old is “older?”

I run the latest Debian on a 10 year old Macbook Pro. Linux has given this laptop a second life as a lab machine - it’s still plenty fast enough and it has a really nice screen (Retina) which Debian gets right out of the box with no tweaking. The only thing I needed to do when installing Debian is manually get the drivers for the WiFi hardware during the install (although Debian has the non-free firmware by default these days, they aren’t permitted to distribute all firmware and the WiFi hardware in this machine unfortunately happened to be one of those).

You can use dd on another machine to make a bitwise copy of the card before you first use it.

Debian (a very conservative distro) switched to Wayland by default in debian 10 if I’m not mistaken (we’re now on 12).

I didn’t notice the change until I tried to run a niche program that really needs X11. Unless you’re doing this kind of thing, then you can probably just use Wayland. At least in Debian it’s really easy to switch between Wayland and X11 by selecting the session type when you log in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ

“I’m also very happy to point out that nVidia has been the worst […] so nVidia, “fuck you!””

Hard drives are not that unreliable, well, so long as you pick the right model.

BackBlaze’s statistics are here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/ - they run tens of thousands of inexpensive drives to run their cloud backup service. Some HDDs are much better than others.

That document also links to their SSD statistics (they don’t have that many SSDs yet, so the stats aren’t as good) but while SSDs tend to have lower failure rates, there are some models of SSD that have higher failure rates than HDDs. For example, one Seagate SSD they use has an AFR (annualised failure rate) of just under 2%, but one Toshiba HDD they use has an AFR of only 0.31%. (Another thing to be aware of is that Backblaze’s drives will all be in air conditioned data centres, not in the random temperature/humidity spreads of a PC in someone’s home).

If you look at the stats as a whole generally SSDs have half the failure rate across the board to HDDs, but it varies a lot by make and model. So be careful on which you pick, and take backups :-) For my money, all my PCs (desktop and laptops) are pure SSD setups. My server still uses spinning disks, mainly because it’s older server class hardware with a SAS array.