Shut up, sausage!

Will Voyager even be able to show up this time or will they accidentally land in the Delta quadrant again?

Btrfs is a partition type/filesystem. It is meant to solve two problems.

One, it is meant so you can combine partitions from multiple drives (similar to raid 0,1, or 10). Technically it is capable of raid 5, but lacks reliable performance.

Two, it also provides reverse incremental snapshotting capabilities. Good for backing up data.

I’m using it in combination with grub-btrfs so if an update fails, I can boot from a snapshot to fix it without a live cd or reinstall.

Gamescope is what runs on a steam deck in gaming mode. I have my gaming PC configured to use gamescope for HDR gaming.

Finally, the link I sent is technically a war game. It is more meant to teach you to keep things secure more than anything else. In short you will control one of their cloud hosted machines over ssh and they hid the password somewhere on it. In order to win, you need a few commands: cat, vim, cd, ls, and git. It introduces them as you go. Eventually, I think it escalated to using netcat, honestly I stumbled through that part, and the git part too.

I’m not sure if mastering the terminal is a goal of yours, but I use tools to make it significantly easier. Instead of bash, I use ZSH. Combine that with Oh-my-zsh for theming and plugins(I like zsh-autocomplete, zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-syntaxhighlighting, fast-syntaxhighlighting), and zoxide to replace cd.

When it comes to updating, it can be different per distribution. Mint uses apt, typically you will need:

sudo apt update # Gets the latest version number of each package
sudo apt upgrade # Install the latest version of each available update

Apt is the package manager of most device based installation.

Yum/Dnf are the primary package managers for fedora and Red hat distros.

There are a few others, but I’ve gotten off topic enough.

Regardless, it is good to see someone joining the community. If you need any help with anything feel free to reach out to us, you are not in this alone. And if ever you can’t figure out a command, try running it with --help. Ex:

ls --help
cd --help
cat --help

I think that if someone (even ai) is analyzing my documents, then they are bypassing my permissions and looking despite the fact that it is supposed to be private. Basically if ai is looking at my files, I don’t care if it isn’t running locally, it is bypassing my permissions to my automated stock trading algorithms. I know security isn’t exactly Windows strength anyways, but accessing my files without my consent or knowledge is a nail in the coffin for me. Granted, you can disable it, I might point you in the direction of winutil by Chris Titus, but I would bet money that a Windows update will re enable it without consent or permission.

Welcome!

If you think the biggest challenge is going to be the terminal then how about a fun little game that will make you more familiar. It is a quite basic game that focuses on some of the commands that are used frequently in Linux.

I assume you already know the package/update commands of course.

https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

I gotta say, with all the nonsense about using ai to analyze notepad and every PC is now a copilot ai PC, this feels like the year of Linux. I made the switch myself to Arch(hyprland) and personally discovered how much I love tiling Windows managers.

In case you’re not aware, btrfs is amazing. I run snapshots on my days every hour. This works for my personal data and protects me if an update goes sideways.

And finally, I’m unsure about Mint, but on Arch, flatpak has been amazing for installing software. It installs as a tenant of your PC with limited privileges.

Also, since you mentioned steam, you may wish to look at gamescope in order to utilize the full steam deck ui.

+1 for LibreElec. Note that if your tv can pass commands over HDMI then you can use the normal tv remote to navigate the menu. Or, I use an old Bluetooth SNES controller most of the time.

Mine is connected to jellyfin.

Yeah… I don’t have those pacman update issues anymore… I used Arch wiki to setup btrfs, snapper, and grub-btrfs. I can boot from a snapshot and revert if there is an issue

With an Nvidia GPU, I would recommend Nobara over Bazzite becomes it comes with the various drivers.

Ok, guys. I’m reading some of these replies which are saying the amount of outrage is out of proportion. I have to disagree with that. I don’t want an AI running on my PC that is monitoring and learning about my shit. I didn’t want that data saved even locally, let alone the monetization of that data. I don’t want to be paying for power of a device that is turning me into someone else’s paycheck.

Can you turn it off? I believe you can. But I also believe that doing it manually would be incredibly annoying since that does go with a lot of past practice. I also get it would reactivate itself after major updates, like how Edge keeps reinstalling.

Are there other solutions to my Microsoft issues, yes. Chris Titus Tech comes to mind.

But overall, the Windows ecosystem does not feel right to me anymore. Could other people still use it, yes. Am I going to stop them, not intentionally. But my Arch gaming PC runs games better than the same machine running Windows. I’ve always entertained the idea of a full switch, still have a Windows 11 dual boot and haven’t officially done it yet, but with this the moment feels right. At least for me, hopefully you can understand that.

tmux is a terminal multiplexer. Basically if you made the session in tmux, the terminal would still be an active session and you could pull it from another tty.

Or you could do it over ssh.

Do it over tmux. When the screen goes out switch tty, and load up the tmux session to see if it is finished.

Or is it dead even from that?

Not if you need custom error bars on a scatter plot in Excel.

That is true, but I would define standard practice like this: ls -l = ll And ls -la = la

Doesn’t show dotfiles.

I like the la alias.

IOT Enterprise LTSC fully works for running Windows games. It just doesn’t have a lot of the bloatware. I’ve tried it and I’m dual booting with Arch.

If it is just meant as a steam machine, I recommend looking at Nobara for Nvidia GPU and Bazzite for AMD GPU. I will admit that I haven’t tested vr games yet.

Personally, I’m maining Arch and it plays most games in HDR at 4k 120Hz. My Windows is so I have access to Microsoft Office.

So, I understand this is Ian only, I will leave out NextCloud.

I would personally say Ceph. This is a storage solution meant to be spread among a bunch of different hosts. Basically, it operates on RAID 5 principles AND replicated storage.

Personal setup: single host 12 ea. 10TB HDDs.

To start, it does go ahead and generates the parity data for the storage bucket. On top of that, I am running a X2 replicated bucket. Now since I am running a single host, this data is replicated amongst OSDs(read HDDs), but in a multiple host cluster it would be replicated amongst multiple hosts instead.

One of the benefits to an array like this is that other types of services are easily implemented. NFS overall is pretty good, and it is possible to implement that through the UI or command line. I understand that Samba is not your favorite, but that is also possible. Personally, I am using Rados to connect my Apache Cloudstack hypervisor.

I will admit, it is not the easiest to set up, but using docker containers to manage storage is an interesting concept. On top of that, you can designate different HDDs to different pools, perhaps you want your solid state storage to be shared separately. Ceph is also capable of monitoring your HDDs with smartctl.

Proper installation does give you a web UI to manage it, if some one of your skill even needs it. ;)

Does an image like that exist?! Asking for a friend.

Forgive me, but doesn’t yay -S neofetch do the thing still?

Hypervisor Gotta say, I personally like a rather niche product. I love Apache Cloudstack.

Apache Cloudstack is actually meant for companies providing VMs and K8S clusters to other companies. However, I’ve set it up for myself in my lab accessible only over VPN.

What I like best about it is that it is meant to be deployed via Terraform and cloud init. Since I’m actively pushing myself into that area and seeking a role in DevOps, it fits me quite well.

Standing up a K8S cluster on it is incredibly easy. Basically it is all done with cloud init, though that process is quite automated. In fact, it took me 15m to stand up a 25 node cluster with 5 control nodes and 20 worker nodes.

Let’s compare it to other hypervisors though. Well, Cloudstack is meant to handle global operations. Typically, Cloudstack is split into regions, then into zones, then into pods, then into clusters, and finally into hosts. Let’s just say that it gets very very large if you need it to. Only it’s free. Basically, if you have your own hardware, it is more similar to Azure or AWS, then to VMWare. And none of that even costs any licensing.

Technically speaking, Cloudstack Management is capable of handling a number of different hypervisors if you would like it to. I believe that includes VMWare, KVM, Hyperv, Ovm, lxc, and XenServer. I think it is interesting because even if you choose to use another hypervisor that you prefer, it will still work. This is mostly meant as a transition to KVM, but should still work though I haven’t tested it.

I have however tested it with Ceph for storage and it does work. Perhaps doing that is slightly more annoying than with proxmox. But you can actually create a number of different types of storage if you wanted to take the cloud provider route, HDD vs SSD.

Overall, I like it because it works well for IaaS. I have 2000 vlans primed for use with its virtual networking. I have 1 host currently joined, but a second host in line for setup.

Here is the article I used to get it initially setup, though I will admit that I personally used a different vlan for the management ip and the public ip vlan. http://rohityadav.cloud/blog/cloudstack-kvm/