Suburban Chicago since 1981.
Just got unraid up and running for the first time today. There’s a bit of a learning curve coming from TrueNAS Scale but it supports my use case: throwing whatever spinning rust I have into one big array. Seems to work alright, hardware could use additional cooling so I’ve shut it off until a new heatsink arrives.
I’m self hosting a lot of things, but those services are mostly on Debian. I’m daily driving AlmaLinux on my main desktop. I do a decent amount of video editing using DaVinci Resolve Studio, and while I’ve consistently gotten it working on Pop!_OS and EndeavourOS, I couldn’t get the Micro Color Panel working on anything other than the CentOS successors. I tried manipulating udev rules, sniffing USB traffic, etc but it just wouldn’t go on anything else. The product was fairly new to market when I bought it so the body of knowledge may have changed since then.
Blackmagic Design officially supports Resolve and Reaolve Studio on Linux, but only on their lightly preconfigured version of Rocky 8. Everything else is best-effort, so I started with the Blackmagic ISO, converted it to AlmaLinux 8.6, and then upgraded to 9, and the Micro Color Panel still works.
I also love that my external disk array works with every kernel update because the kernel’s so old. I keep all my originals on an 8-disk ZFS array connected to a cross-flashed Dell PERC H810. Endeavour and Pop sometimes go beyond the kernel versions supported by zfsonlinux, and editing the source code of a file system is not something I’m particularly comfortable with.
Also, every game I’ve played on it works, though I mainly play single-player titles.
As for parity: I’ve got several hundred VMs at the office on Rocky, and maybe a dozen on Alma, and both are running flawlessly. They’ve been as solid as the RHEL physical machines. Quite happy with all of them, to be honest.
If you use a distro with the nvidia drivers preinstalled, or you get the drivers set up with dkms, you don’t need to reinstall the driver with every kernel update.
Pop!_OS has the drivers in their repo and they get applied during system updates like any other package; I’m sure this is the case with Bazzite as well.
I use AlmaLinux at home with the driver from nvidia’s site (yes, I’m aware that rpmfusion exists), and have never had to reinstall the drivers as the installer configures dkms to do it every time the kernel is updated. Same with my Plex server (Debian, Quadro P2200) and my office workstation (Arch, Quadro P600).
Nightly rsync to two NAS boxes in the house (TrueNAS Scale and a Synology). Docs go in NextCloud, hosted on a VM in my basement, which is also backed up to the Synology by Proxmox. Also backing up my main machine (Pop!_OS) and my wife’s laptop (ThinkPad E595, also Pop!_OS) using Spideroak One.
Cosmic - both the GNOME extension and Epoch 1 - is my favorite tiling DE. It just makes the most sense to me, in a way that no other tiling environment has.
This - but I’d take it a step further and use a small-ish USB 3.2 SSD with Ventoy instead. That way, your live Linux experience isn’t kneecapped by having to load programs off a slow USB stick. In a pinch you can use a SATA SSD with a USB-SATA adapter too, that way you can cram a ton of ISOs on there and go to town.
If you’re using Debian as a daily driver you can always use a Flatpak if you need a newer version than what’s available in the repos. The foundation is solid, though, and that’s what matters - it’s one of the things that keeps bringing me back to Debian for office workstation use.
Is it possible to run what you need in a VM? That’s how I’ve been running things that need Windows to function correctly and it hasn’t broken yet. Can even get 11 working with an emulated TPM, including Windows Subsystem for Linux inside the VM if you’re feeling particularly bored.
…no, I don’t want to put all my stuff in OneDrive. No, my settings shouldn’t sync across everything. No, I don’t want to log in with the same account on all devices. I already have email and do not want to use outlook.com thanks. Stop warning me that I did not agree to put all my stuff in OneDrive, it’s really not necessary. What do you mean I can’t change my wallpaper unless I activate? Are you telling me that your antimalware solution that comes bundled in the OS isn’t able to block malicious ads in the browser that also comes with the OS? Why do these applications that I never installed keep showing up in the Start menu? What’s up with all these calls to Azure-based websites in my Pi-Hole logs when I’m away from my desk? Why are my CPUs going at full blast when I’m just staring at the desktop?
I’m not running Resolve on a supported distro so I’m already taking matters into my own hands, but installing it on anything newer than Rocky Linux 8 is just asking for weird stuff to happen.
For the record the solution to that one is to launch by running this:
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libglib-2.0.so:/usr/lib64/libgio-2.0.so:/usr/lib64/libgmodule-2.0.so /opt/resolve/bin/resolve
Make no mistake, none of this denotes a negative experience. I wouldn’t use it if I hated it, and I sure as shit ain’t going back to any other OS.
Need to launch DaVinci Resolve Studio from the CLI to figure out why it won’t launch from the GUI, and then launch it again with a list of libraries to exclude in order to get it working.
Really weird errors if you try to use a USB stick formatted with FAT after applying a kernel update but before rebooting.
Multiple password prompts when attempting to update Flatpak applications over ssh in its default configuration.
Basic applications included with commercial operating systems often missing (e.g. paint application missing from Pop!_OS).
Good luck figuring out emergency mode if you don’t know what fstab is. And changing kernel parameters on Rocky 9 must be handled via grubby, not by editing configs like in Debian, Arch, or Pop.
Can’t emulate SSD on VM qcow2 files on Debian unless you use the version in backports; can emulate SSD but can’t use anything involving spice in RHEL9+clones unless you add a copr repo because it’s been removed. This makes desktop virtualization annoying.
Can’t participate in Microsoft Teams calls if the input and output audio devices are the same device or the call disconnects/reconnects every few seconds. Microphone and speaker must be separate devices for optimal experience.
Can’t use OBS Virtual Camera in Teams on Firefox.
That’s the stuff I’ve dealt with in the past 3 weeks.
Seconded - most notably the ability to tell it to resize when you’re pasting an image larger than the canvas. It strikes me as a mix between Paint and Paint.NET.
After seeing some of Craft Computing’s videos on YT I’m considering getting my hands on one of those cheap Erying mainboards off Aliexpress with a laptop CPU on it. Seen those as low as 140 bucks with a 13th-gen i5, just add a cooler and desktop DDR4.
Absolutely, and it’s usually up to the organization disposing of the drives to set and document the standard by which they abide.
Somewhere, an ISO27001 auditor’s jimmies started rustling.
Same…but with Ungoogled Chromium as Flatpak because it made me feel the least dirty.
Pi-Hole’s great. Got my primary instance on a Pi 4 and three secondaries (one per vlan) on LXCs. Works so well it feels weird seeing ads when I’m not at home, I’m actually considering using Tailscale to route all my queries through my home connection.
I’ll second the Pop!_OS recommendation that others have been posting. Don’t get me wrong, Linux Mint is great, though I personally prefer Linux Mint Debian Edition over the Ubuntu-based one, but I think Pop!_OS is just as easy to use while presenting a different look & feel. Pop tends to support newer hardware as well: despite being stuck on an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS base until Cosmic is finished, System76 releases new kernels to support the hardware they sell. They’re currently running kernel version 6.6.6, as opposed to Ubuntu’s 6.2.0 (I think – that’s what server’s on, at least).
I gave my wife, who “hates computers,” a laptop running Pop!_OS when her Windows 10 one failed and, apart from the standard new PC complaints, I haven’t heard anything Linux-specific. She runs two businesses on the thing; the only changes I made to the standard Pop!_OS software were to replace LibreOffice with OnlyOffice, and to replace Geary with Thunderbird.
If I’m not mistaken, the Alaska Airlines accident aircraft completed 99 flights, as it went into service only a couple months ago.
Not an expert myself but I binge air crash investigation shows like nobody’s business, and this seems to speak to QC and maintenance workload/culture issues.
Yes, that’s the only reason. You can mix drive sizes and still have a dedicated parity drive to rebuild from in case things go poorly. I am aware that it’s basically LVM with extra steps, but for a NAS I just want it to be as appliance-like as possible.
Still using Scale at work, though - that use case is different.