Unrelated, but I just took apart my old IBM thinkpad from 2003/2004 to clean it up and get all nice and pretty for it’s last few years of updates. I also did my newer-ish HP laptop from 2016 at the same time.

The thinkpad was just beautifully laid out, with thought put into the placement of vents, heat sinks, heat generating components, alternative air pathways if the entire bottom was blocked, easy maintenance of components, etc.

The HP was …not. The weakest ass heat sink I’ve ever seen, miles away from the processor (no wonder it sounded like a wind tunnel when playing a youtube video). One intake vent where your thigh would be if in your lap and the exhaust right where your knee would be. Extra bonus was the placement of the CPU (running usually 80c+) is right above your junk, the vent being offset from the processor a smidge.

Granted I’m comparing enterprise vs consumer laptop in the days when there was a massive difference in quality between the two, but damn, this experience has me decided (again) that internal layout and design is just as important as specs, even more so if you need more powerful components.

Ubuntu has started going off the deep end. They’ve been heading in that direction for a while, but they recently (I guess like 5 years-ish ago) hit this corporatey, money-grabbing, mentality that’s so completely opposite of what made Linux great.

The feel I get about it is 10 years ago, tutorials were written using Ubuntu because it was an easy distro to use and was a great platform for beginners, so people used that as their platform to teach. Now it feels like tutorials are written using Ubuntu because they’re being sponsored to. A lot of how-tos I come accros have the same vibe as watching a video animation tutorial that uses adobe and oh gosh, it’s also sponsored by adobe. Or a networking tutorial sponsored by Cisco. I’ve actually started just looking to see if another distro is acknowledged before I actually see what they have to say.

There’s a very different feel if you’re trying to set something up and a website has “if you’re in this family of linux, here’s what you do, or if you’re in this one, do this” versus “so you want to set up x in linux? Here’s how you do it in Ubuntu”. It’s as if no other distro exists.

Anyway, ignoring that rant. Linux is super stable these days, you can take pretty much any distro and you’ll be fine. I tend to gravitate toward the base distros, like fedora, opensuse, and Debian over Rocky, mint, etc. I haven’t come across one in the past five years that gave me any trouble, except when it came to updated nvidia drivers and wayland. In which case some distros were behind a month or two on getting those updated.

Vscodium isn’t in the repos for opensuse, but yes, this user should have found a way to install it on bare metal in the first place.

I just had an issue with the vscodium flatpak, been using it for two months with no issue in an online course, got to learning GUIs, import module, doesn’t exist. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t there, installed three different python versions of it three different ways, still nothing. Couldn’t even get vscodium to point to a different interpreter that I knew was there (yet it doesn’t say it’s not there, just that some things won’t work). Still nothing. Three hours later, after trying everything I could think of, I realized that it was because I installed the flatpak version when it clicked that it worked in Geany and I didn’t have python 3.13 in my repos, yet that was the only one I could see in vscodium.

…Dad?

I want <device 1> to interact with <device 2> as if it was native

“KDE connect can probably do it”

Just get some of these

Our work tried to push thin clients. It didn’t go well because they did not invest in the back end and infrastructure to do it. Constantly unable to reach the server, often bogged down because three people were running heavy applications where they should have had a dedicated machine, the storage server was sometimes a microwave link away that would nearly die if it was raining.

I’m usually at three different workstations throughout the day, sometimes there’s even three others that I might end up at, and it was so nice to just connect to my instance and continue, nothing’s worse than opening up an excel you worked on for two hours at a workstation five minutes from your current one and it’s “locked by another user” and you don’t remember what all you might have changed from your last save.

I do not do any resource intensive work that isn’t on a dedicated machine, so I would be perfect for thin client use. But there were so many little things they didn’t or couldn’t do that built up to it being a useless endeavor.

I’m mostly bottlenecked by IO performance and network speeds. So in order to happily take advantage of a blazing fast machine I’d need to do some upgrades everywhere else. As long as I don’t get one, I won’t feel the need to update. I got real close the other day transferring 1.5 TB of data to a backup drive over 1Gb after doing some file server to file server shenanigans over 2.4ghz wifi with a 32GB filesystem image.

FYI, decompressing an image on a fileserver back onto the server through a laptop, then writing the decompressed image on that server to a disk connected to said laptop, all over 2.4ghz WiFi, is a monumentally stupid way to do things. Many circumstances were involved, the biggest of which in this escapade was me unwilling to walk across the house because of… I don’t know, reasons. The second biggest being I had already pressed enter, so screw restarting the process in a way that would be 4x or more faster, I was already 10% done.

I had my partner put in the addresses of my *arr stack into their phone and showed them how to add things they wanted. They never close any tabs so all I need to say is what weird-ass unrelated name handles whatever media they want and I’m done.

I’m not going to say how long I used linux before learning this. It isn’t “this many days old”, but it may as well be.

I have 7 headless linux boxes running.

The fact that M$ forced uefi on everyone then couldn’t implement it properly on their own and does this fuckery instead, should make it very clear the quality of the rest of their work.

I’m on one 99% of the time. I very much appreciate being able to use them that 1% of the time I need more.

I haven’t had plasma crash on debian, fedora, or opensuse using wayland on three completely different, albeit older setups. It was completely unusable briefly on opensuse with an Nvidia card, but zero crashes that I can recall.

Just wait until you need to figure out what you want when you want something other than all or none for those permissions. 4 is read, 2 is write, 1 is execute. Add them up to get what you want for each owner/group/other portion.

I learned this relatively quickly running my own server with the intention of my family also using it. Data on a separate drive, backed up regularly and automatically. System on it’s own drive, dd’d when it’s in it’s final state and backed up before I screw around any deeper than trying out a new container. I can bring my server back up in however long it takes to transfer data.

I’ve been interested in setting up a monitoring setup like this, mostly out of curiosity about what’s going on when I’m not looking. But I know what the answer is and it’s not as exciting as I’d like it to be.

From the article, I wish them the best but this line of thinking is not the Linux way:

The first app I installed on Ubuntu (on both my machines) was Chrome browser. While Chromium, the open source version of the browser, is available in Ubuntu’s App Center (its app store), the official Google version is not.

If you’re wanting to give Linux a try, you gotta be willing to let go of the Windows way. Chrome is not better than chromium because Google. Don’t complain that a specific app is hard to get running if you aren’t willing to try the alternatives, especially if there’s literally a Linux version maintained by the same developer

My laptop with 4gb of ram and atom processor came with Windows 10 (I purchased it intending to put Linux on it). I tried it out just to see how W10 worked on it and it was absolutely excruciating and borderline unusable, and I was coming from a Pentium M with 512mb of ram. I have no idea how anyone would have thought it could be a functional system running that.

Looks to me like Nobara might be what you want, it’s fedora based and is tailored toward gaming. I haven’t used it myself, so I can’t comment on how it’s different from fedora, but Fedora itself is pretty darn solid