If you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge and want a distro with longer support, CentOS Stream isn’t bad. Sure, there was some controversy surrounding it, when Red Hat killed the old CentOS. But ignoring that, the distro itself is pretty good and stable.
Much better. SSDs and HDDs do monitor the health of the drives (and you can see many parameters through SMART), while pen drives and SD cards don’t.
Of course, they have their limits which is why raid exists. File systems like ZFS are built on the premise that drives are unreliable. It’s up to you if you want that redundancy. The most important thing to not lose data is to have backups. Ideally at least 3 copies, 1 off site (e.g. on a cloud, or on a disk at some place other than your home).
PhotoRec and TestDisk are probably the best, but they don’t recover file structure.
Fuck up #1: no backups Fuck up #2: using SD cards for data storage. SD cards and USB drives are ephemeral storage devices, not to be relied on. Most of the time they use file systems like FAT32 which are far less safe than NTFS or ext4. Use reliable storage media, like hard drives. Fuck up #3: no backups.
I have a Surface Laptop 5 as my work laptop. I hate it with passion, it’s one of the worst laptops I ever used.
Beyond the lack of IO (not even a fucking hdmi port) and the piss poor cooling, the USB C display isn’t connected to the integrated GPU, it uses a different display adapter that is so bad the mouse stutters on high res displays.
The built-in display has a 3:2 aspect ratio. I wanted to use a lower resolution so I could disable scaling (having different scaled monitors is annoying to use), none of the “supported” lower resolutions are 3:2 and they all have ugly black bars.
It has a touch screen, but the lid only opens about 120 degrees, making it completely useless.
And it uses “special” locked down hardware that is very hostile to other operating systems like Linux.
Or just download an older live CD that is compatible, and use it in a VM.
I would just undo all the mergers and acquisitions. In 90% of cases, this just results in the games being worse, and the magic that made the studios great is extinguished.
This answer is stupid. I don’t think it’s unusual for a non-tech savvy friend who heard about Linux to ask for an opinion.
As someone who has more hobbies than time, I seriously don’t understand how people can have no hobbies. How do these people live? How do they find fulfillment? What do they do in their spare time, only entertainment?
I feel the same way. When I was a kid, my parents had a pretty small collection of tapes of religious music, and that’s the only stuff they would listen to. Once I got my first internet connection around the age of 12, a whole new world opened up.
Today, I listen to music all the time, while working, while driving. It was so weird (and depressing) to go on a trip in my sister’s car who doesn’t listen to music.
I wouldn’t recommend Optiplexes… HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts use proprietary parts making them a pain in the rear to work with. I recommend getting a PC made with standard parts.
Personally I prefer older PCs in standard formfactors. I avoid HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts because they use proprietary power supplies and motherboards, making them difficult to upgrade. Laptops aren’t really upgradable, they don’t have enough SATA ports, and USB isn’t reliable enough for storage. Raspberry Pies, while power efficient, are too underpowered. Old server hardware is also an option, but they are generally too noisy.
The only downside is that they don’t support zfs properly, and the package selection is more limited. The community repos aren’t always maintained.
Containers are very useful because they isolate the application from the rest of your server.
This solves a lot of problems: no dependency conflicts with your operating system, you can upgrade/downgrade any time you want, no state gets stored on your main system which makes resetting the application when it misbehaves as easy as deleting and recreating the container.
Before containers, changing my host OS (e.g. because ZFS wasn’t properly supported on the distro I was using) meant reinstalling and configuring a lot of shit, which could take days. With docker, I can migrate in 1-2 hours… Just install docker on the new OS, copy over the files, docker compose up a few times and done. The only things left to setup are samba, ssh and a few cron jobs.
My experience wasn’t as bad, but after the third time the database got corrupted during an upgrade I stopped using it.
Yes, that could work. I just switched to Google Messages which, other than being from Google, is pretty good.
Pulse is shit now, it’s been acquired by a sketchy company.
You haven’t used Ubuntu Server… The resolv.conf is managed by the network manager (NetworkManager if I recall correctly). But if you configure the DNS in NM it won’t survive the reboot because there is another layer on top, cloudinit.
Sure, but it’s still really interesting from a historic point of view.