EndeavourOS is pretty good at making using Arch a bit easier in an opinionated way.

Fedora’s usually do a good job making the keyboard thing consistent. If you’re gaming and want something that you don’t need to adjust all the time check out Bazzite.

In any case give KDE Plasma desktop a shot especially if you’re used to how Windows works. I mean a more vanilla version that what Garuda probably came with.

The people saying tiling managers are the shit are the ones who have been Linuxing for quite some time. I think newcomers should just always go for a major, mature, opinionated desktop first. KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon. Mate or Xfce if you really like some old school aesthetic or have no RAM to speak of (<4GB). Distro choice comes after, I don’t recommend base Ubuntu for most people because of the risk of enshittification from Canonical that I see on the horizon.

No I know. But there’s no going around the keyboards physically having a different number of modifier keys left/right of the spacebar. Macs have 4 left, 2 right, my desktop keyboard has 3 left, 4 right. And there’s no way that I have found in either KDE or GNOME by which I could wire the Macbook keyboard to function exactly like in macOS in each and every application. There are so many pitfalls if you attempt. And the window management features would be different anyway. And thus my old macbook will always feel like a Mac to my fingers (after using it with macOS for a decade), but behave differently now. I might adjust if I only used Linux, but since I have to use an actual Mac on the daily, it’s not clicking. Cross-use is just not a good experience.

It’s been great overall, after about one full year now. The only major complaints are keyboard-related. Between my work-supplied macbook that runs macOS, my old macbook that runs GNOME, and my desktop that runs KDE, keeping my muscle memory in tune with keybinds and shortcuts and window management is a headache. Maybe sometimes I’m thrown off by some command line tool not being available on Mac or Linux or it’s named differently.

I’m in a lot of the same landscape as you, currently running a mac but ubuntu/fedora with gnome is looking at me from behind the corner. What’s blocking me at this time is client IT policies, in order to access stuff in their network it has to be their device and they don’t ship linux so. Next year it is.

Yeah, I’m planning to spin them down so infrequently that it shouldn’t matter in the long run.

I currently have exactly this setup but I really want to migrate to a single machine :)

I’ll consider this!

I’m possibly biased by the amount of initial fiddling with all the disks and pcie cards and hunting down where the noise was coming from. Will keep in mind.

This could be an option I guess - however the current case is a HP z440, which is SO convenient for building in that I need an extra good reason to get rid of it. Zero screws, just latches. Carrying handles.

Thanks - from what I see myu CPU doesn’t support VT-d, only VT-x, which at a glance makes it not suitable for passing through these drives safely. I’ll get to dismantling the NAS VM setup actually.

Thanks! This sounds like an option.

I’ll gladly take the advice on the NAS VM, I see so many tutorials virtualising TrueNAS and not a lot of the opposite viewpoint. If it’s not a good practice I’d indeed rather recycle that setup while I’m at it.

I don’t need to keep using Proxmox, or TrueNAS for that matter. If I need to DIY this with bare metal Debian, I will. My constraint is to have both always-on services and on-demand HDD backed services on the same machine. Sky is the limit after that…

Scheduling doesn’t sound the best indeed, which is why I’d ideally want a simple button that I can click from a GUI.

Not an option, because it will also run some essential services off SSD’s. :/

Cool! Saving for later.

Huh.

There’s a time and place for a DIY solution and academia can well be like that sometimes.

The latest Mac Mini can’t run Linux though. It’s M4 and asahi doesn’t even support M3 chips yet. But if you actually got the previous model with M1/M2 you can do Linux if desired. I might not attempt, and just use the Mac as a server as-is. It’s not too different from Linux. Asking the duck for “how to xx on Mac” when you already know the Linux equivalents should make your life tolerable.

I mean, there are quite a few others than Arch+family that package a very recent kernel too. Fedora as you mentioned, but also NixOS, openSUSE Tumbleweed and even Gentoo if you’re that kind of a person. I bet I missed some.

But yeah Ubuntu is not necessarily one of them

Me, because someone at my work picked it for servers back in the day

Wanna share more details? Sounds like something I should actually put on my 32gb

No more security updates, so it will gradually become unsafe to use online.

Something to consider, advice given to me, is that ZFS support on Linux regularly breaks with newest kernels so if you go for ZFS long term, be prepared to run a lts kernel at least as a backup.

I use both. LUKS+btrfs being nice on the Arch desktops, and ZFS on a serverside pool, managed by a TrueNAS Scale VM.