Plex and plexamp are quite good. Jellyfin and finamp too.

For sure. I would say if you run a distro like Arch, using it without cow filesystem and snapshots is not a good idea… You can even integrate snapshots with pacman and bootloader.

I’ve been running nixos for so long, that I don’t really need snapshots. You can always boot to the previous state if needed.

If you write software and run tests against a database, I’d avoid having the docker volumes on btrfs pool. The performance is not great.

Yeah. I would not for example install ZFS to a laptop. It’s just not great there, and it doesn’t like things such as sudden power failure, and it uses kind of a lot of memory…

ZFS is still the de-facto standard of a reliable filesystem. It’s super stable, and annoyingly strict on what you can do with it. Their Raid5 and Raid6 support are the only available software raids in those levels that are guaranteed to not eat your data. I’ve run a TrueNAS server with Raid6 for years now, with absolutely no issues and tens of terabytes of data.

But, these copy on write filesystems such as ZFS or btrfs are not great for all purposes. For example running a Postgres server on any CoW filesystem will require a lot of tweaking to get reasonable speeds with the database. It’s doable, but it’s a lot of settings to change.

About the code quality of Linux filesystems, Kent Overstreet, the author of the next new CoW filesystem bcachefs, has a good write-up of the ups and downs:

• ext4, which works - mostly - but is showing its age. The codebase terrifies most filesystem developers who have had to work on it, and heavy users still run into terrifying performance and data corruption bugs with frightening regularity. The general opinion of filesystem developers is that it’s a miracle it works as well as it does, and ext4’s best feature is its fsck (which does indeed work miracles).
• xfs, which is reliable and robust but still fundamentally a classical design - it’s designed around update in place, not copy on write (COW). As someone who’s both read and written quite a bit of filesystem code, the xfs developers (and Dave Chinner in particular) routinely impress me with just how rigorous their code is - the quality of the xfs code is genuinely head and shoulders above any other upstream filesystem. Unfortunately, there is a long list of very desirable features that are not really possible in a non COW filesystem, and it is generally recognized that xfs will not be the vehicle for those features.
• btrfs, which was supposed to be Linux’s next generation COW filesystem - Linux’s answer to zfs. Unfortunately, too much code was written too quickly without focusing on getting the core design correct first, and now it has too many design mistakes baked into the on disk format and an enormous, messy codebase - bigger that xfs. It’s taken far too long to stabilize as well - poisoning the well for future filesystems because too many people were burned on btrfs, repeatedly (e.g. Fedora’s tried to switch to btrfs multiple times and had to switch at the last minute, and server vendors who years ago hoped to one day roll out btrfs are now quietly migrating to xfs instead).
• zfs, to which we all owe a debt for showing us what could be done in a COW filesystem, but is never going to be a first class citizen on Linux. Also, they made certain design compromises that I can’t fault them for - but it’s possible to better. (Primarily, zfs is block based, not extent based, whereas all other modern filesystems have been extent based for years: the reason they did this is that extents plus snapshots are really hard).

I started evaluating bcachefs in my main workstation when it arrived to the stable kernels. It can do pretty good raid-1 with encryption and compression. This combination is not really available integrated to the filesystem in anywhere else but zfs. And zfs doesn’t work with all the kernels, which prevents updating to the latest and greatest. It is already a pretty usable system, and in a few years will probably take the crown as the default filesystem in mainstream distros.

About five years with Wayland now. Started with sway and now running KDE Plasma 6. It is snappy, simple and definitely so good I will not miss X11.

(I also think systemd is cool, you can crucify me now)

Did they get all the MM1 levels somewhere? There are some true classics that would be really sad to lose…

It was great to watch all these runs on twitch. Now if Nintendo would just release an open source version of the server and all the content people have created…

You can also very easily run the bridges yourself if you don’t trust them. I do so in my homelab, it was 10 minutes of work setting it all up. Super stable, and e2e from my side.

For me their value proposition is their new beta android app which is the best Android matrix client, and their quite fast matrix server. That might change in the future when conduit is fast enough…

thab’s been trying to beat “The Last Dance” for a few days already, it’s really fascinating to watch. And even barb finished one level, then said “fuck this garbage” and spent the next days finishing Paper Mario and complaining how boring it is…

It’s been a few good weeks on Twitch…

They finally accepted the web as the platform after all these years…

This is my nix config for our brother scanner. Just run any Linux scanner utility and it just works:

https://git.sr.ht/~pimeys/nixos/tree/main/item/core/home-services.nix#L10

Yes. We’ve had one Brother for ten years now. Still prints and scans just fine :D

The mandatory comment to any printer discussion. Buy a brother laser. Nothing else. Preferably used.

I borrowed an installation CD from the local library around 1998. It was RedHat 5.x, and I started messing around with it due to me being interested in alternative operating systems. Before it, I had OS/2 Warp 3.0 in our IBM Pentium 100 MHz family computer which didn’t really do it for me to be honest.

It took weeks to get anything working with Linux. I went to the library, borrowing books. In our middle school we had an internet connection, so I utilized it to learn how to configure modelines correctly to get X11 running.

When it did finally run, the default window manager was FVWM95, almost like Windows 95!

I used OSX a few years in the power PC times, just to switch back to Linux around 2008.

Edit: my real love for Linux started when I got Debian running. RedHat didn’t have anything comparable to apt those days. You needed to download RPM packages manually with all the dependencies, while apt just worked with one command.

And Finland…

Yep. I switched from xorg/i3 years ago, and it was already super snappy back then compared to the previous setup. Today everything works with Wayland, and I don’t really need to think about it anymore.

But, ymmv. I avoid Nvidia’s products, which helps a lot for the stability.

The first 20 minutes I got transaction errors from the order, then it went through, I got charged and… a transaction error. Made my second order without PayPal, paid the second time and a 1TB model is coming for Christmas. The second payment was returned a few hours later.

This is our first Steam Deck, never tried one. Goes to Christmas wrapping immediately and we open it on the 25th.

Me too. Although I will not cry if Stubb takes the presidency. Will not vote for him, but it will not be the end of the world either.

I should install this to my homelab tomorrow. Thanks for the tip.

So… They’ve been A/B testing this the whole time and will continue to do so. Do you think OP is lying or could it be that you’re having the B variant until it flips for you too?

Yeah, well we were a month in KC just before and ate the most amazing food. It was so crazy to get that thing from the restaurant when we got back.

Yep. I’m from Europe and of course this is kind of not understanding American culture enough to not compare different qualities of mac&cheese. That reminds me, we came back home from the US and had mac&cheese in a restaurant in Germany. They served us Kraft with fried onions and parmesan flakes on top. At that moment I understood Germans will never understand American cuisine…

What about Annie’s? Or call we even compare them?

T or X series is really good. Just be careful to get an IPS panel, the TN film models are really bad.

If the computer worked that three year span in a corporate environment without breaking, it’ll last for years.

I’ve been using Linux since the 90’s so you’re preaching to the choir here :D Photoshop and Lightroom work quite badly with wine, so windows it is for my partner.

Edit: you can buy a key from eBay, but it is a bit in the gray area…

Is there an easy way to get this version as a normal citizen? I remember needing Windows 10 in my previous job a few times a year, and we spent quite a while with our office manager to get me a license and get the LTSC version of Windows installed with the key. It worked eventually, but was definitely trickier than a normal Windows installation.

That to be said, my partner still uses that Windows version and it is definitely the right thing to use, if needing Windows.

Nice! And they will probably differentiate from the competition by allowing GPL applications and sideloading, and having a total control for your privacy and no tracking, right?

Right?

There’s a pretty vibrant open source diabetes community in Germany. Some tools such as AndroidAPS and xDrip have been existing for a long time and work together with many pump and CGM models available through the health insurance. GPL-3.0 licensed.

At least these were very beneficial for me, A1c went down from 7.5 to 5.5% without many hypos. You have to compile AndroidAPS by yourself due to distributing binaries would not be legal. It requires some knowledge, but for my partner not needing to call an ambulance ever again when I have a nightly hypo, that is a big win.

No nightly hypos for the past five years I’ve been using these tools…

I really liked Silmarillion when I was a teenager. But, I was also an avid reader and read some really serious literature back in the days. It’s not like a manual, it’s just having so many characters and timelines going on. It’s very interesting, if you’re interested on the history of the Middle Earth and its characters.

But, not for everybody for sure. Not like Lord of the Rings, which is a real feel good sick day book to read.

This is a good one. Maybe even start with something easy and entertaining, Lord of the Rings is a good sick day book.

Thanks for mentioning this. Now my instance runs it as the main UI. It is so nice, and written in Svelte I see. Fast and clean.

None of the new removed laptops can run it really well at least. It’s being reverse-engineered by a small team, so maybe everything works in a few years. You can buy a Dell or Lenovo with Linux pre-installed and all the hardware works. Not so with removed.

Lenovo Thinkpad T14s AMD. Runs Linux perfectly, is fast, has a great keyboard, has a great trackpoint, and has good battery life.

If it doesn’t run Linux, I don’t buy the laptop.

Cries in Alpha Centauri…

There are already good answers to this, so I just add that yes, I’ve used vim/neovim for about 20 years before starting to use helix. I’m very familiar with the editor.

Helix. A perfect programmer’s editor you can use with almost no config.

I use foot together with foot-server. The client opens in less than a millisecond, and I usually have tens of terminal windows open at the same time. Tabbing comes from the window manager.

Yep. Also had a 21" CRT and very wonky window decorations with Enlightenment.

Nowadays I can’t use non-tiling window managers anymore, so I’m stuck with sway.

My mom lives in a different country, is retired and can very easily use Signal to msg me and do video calls. She has no technical education, and is not very good with the devices. But… she could install Signal and use it every day.

Traces of the Rust work gets merged in every version. They come in small pieces, and now the next version has even more abstractions that are needed for the M1 GPU driver to eventually get there.