What the hell is this challenge?
Am I allowed to add my printer? What about setting up my screen resolution? If I scale the fonts to match, that’s dangerously close to “customization”. Can I switch to dark theme?
I can install software, but what about shell extensions that are in my distro’s repository? That’s software, but also customization.
all of that is yes!! You can change to dark mode only, you can set up resolution, what matters is keeping the distro brand wallpaper, colors, etc, intact!! It’s to keep it simple.
Oh, it’s you again.
Well then I’ve been doing your challenge on most of my systems for the past 15 years.
I mostly just install Debian with Gnome, the programs I need, and then get on with my life.
The system (the os files to be precise) is only mutable by package manager for specific tasks like updating. It can break certain workflows if the user wants to change system files, because they can’t.
Bonuses from that are security and reproducibility. You can be sure that whatever package you have will look and behave exactly the same as on another device with the same OS. Malware won’t be able to mess around with your OS so trivially as it does on mutable distros.
Immutable, adjective: Unchanging over time or unable to be changed.
From the article: “We want a reliable desktop experience that runs everything, but we’re too lazy to maintain anything. So we automated the entire delivery pipeline in GitHub.”
So, in other words… “Please don’t ever update your system or everything will break”
It means the core OS is isolated from all the functionality in a way that allows you to modularly add all the functionality on top of it in a reproducible, robust way.
In theory. I haven't actually dug into any of them personally.
The base OS is a known unchanging set of bits. Squirt this datastream onto a storage volume and boot to it and you have a known-working system. Then you can futz around with all the self-contained packaged apps you want, and no worries about weird interactions fucking over your whole system.
Try installing Gentoo. Follow their installation instructions. I was able to install it, but failed to install a DE. So, got a console going and couldn’t go further. That was about 2 years ago. I have an extra laptop that I always install stuff on to learn.
Don’t forget your passwords and bookmarks stored in browser when doing the copy over.
Personally, I’d use Full Disk Encryption (FDE) because it’s a default option on the Fedora installer and is more secure, and well-tested, and easier to configure.
For your planned installables, I’d keep a list of apps you regularly install in a file somewhere (even better would be a script which installs them all) then when you distro-hop it’s easier as you can just change your script for whatever package manager.
Some of your apps will store their configuration in your home directory in a dot file, you might be able to copy these over one-by-one for each app.
Have you decided on Fedora Workstation or Fedora Silverblue? Each have their merits and demerits, and its worth investigating.
Bookmarks and passwords are taken care of. And for the apps I’ll try to get migrated to flatpaks as many as I can while still on original system.
I also see that full disk encryption is being recommended a lot, and I don’t have any solid reasons to encrypt only /home.
I have not given much thought on Silverblue. Is it “flatpak-only”? If so I’ll need to go through my apps to see if that could work. And my backup strategy will need to change - I use Duplicacy that is not available as a Flatpak
If your winamp is still functional, I’d just suggest you convert all mp3pro to wav using the disc writer plugin and then use ffmpeg to convert to mp4 or normal mp3.
Then you won’t need to worry about the mp3pro codec issues.
At some point you’ll have to use a new codec, even if it’s in 10 years. So it might be a good idea to download the music instead of converting.
Soulseek with Nicotine+ seems to be a good way to download music. Or streamrip/deemix with a (temporary) Deezer/Tidal subscription supports high quality audio.
More time than trying to shoehorn a defunct package for an abandoned codec in to a random player which even if it works would only be a temporary kludge not a fix?
That particular conversion is lossless but the original MP3 Pro file is lossy and converting to MP3 again would be double lossy. Best solution is to rerip or download a good copy.
wav takes too much space, the collection will grown 5, 6 times the size… I just don’t have that much online storage at my disposal, my NAS is 4 x 2TB drives in RAID5, I have about 6TB at my disposal for everything (personal stuff as well as media).
If it doesn’t work out or you find yourself tight on space in the future you can always recompress to mp3 or ogg and take the quality hit at that point.
Well it’s Black Friday and HDDs are going for cheap. 6TB is nothing these days, when you could get a 16TB external drive for only $200, or a internal SATA one for $185. Or you could replace/supplement your entire NAS with a single 6TB drive for only $50.
Disk space is cheap now, so upgrade your storage, convert your music to FLAC, problem solved.
Ummm… I don’t live in the US and $50 is A LOT for me. My monthly salary is about $500. All of these 2TB drives are used and dicomissioned (replaced for larger one, they’re from work). I just don’t have the funds to replace them. The NAS is DIY as well.
And drives are not that cheap around here. They are, but not as cheap as in the US. SSDs are about the same price though… but our salaries are not.
Well you don’t have to buy them brand new. If you guys have a used goods market there, you could look around for some good deals on used drives there. Or even used PCs, sometime people sell entire PCs for the same cost as a hard drive, so look out for those and take the drives out, sell the rest of parts.
And if things are really desperate money wise, it doesn’t even have to be a hard drive, you could even store your music on CDs/DVDs - not the most convenient option I know, but it’s an option - you could move the music that you don’t listen to often (or music that you’re tired of playing constantly), and keep your more frequently played music on the HDDs.
One thing I’ve learned over the years dealing with PC tech is that spinning drives is the one thing you absolutely don’t buy second hand. Plus, you can’t find 4TB or above drives second hand here. People use them till they die or repurpose them.
Second hand PC parts are generally overpriced here. People wanna get like 70, 80% of the price they paid for them. There are some reasonable sellers, but as I said, they usually don’t sell drives or sell drives that no one would need anyway (250GB, 500GB, 1TB spinning drives).
Your last suggestion is kinda good to be honest, I might opt for that.
One thing I’ve learned over the years dealing with PC tech is that spinning drives is the one thing you absolutely don’t buy second hand.
I think this actually depends on a lot of things. I have an old Dell rack server and I buy ex-enterprise SAS drives for it. I use them in RAID arrays with dedicated hot spares and cold spares on standby. The eBay seller I buy from replaced a drive for free once when it was “error predicted” on arrival.
I have the original source for some of them, but very few, like maybe 1 or 2%.
Doesn’t matter, I’m just gonna redownload them in flac, store them on optical media as flac and keep them as HE-AAC on my NAS for local playback. It’s the only option that’s acceptable in my mind.
I don’t think you understand how zealous C&C fans are. Some of us have entire XP machines with CRT monitors just to play the game in its purest form. We’re about as culty as Linux.
But it’s also not just one program, it’s all the c&c games, their map editors, mod loaders, and any modding tools. World builder is just an example.
You can already get it working under Linux, running a Windows VM. I remember doing that for Homeworld, it’s basically the emulator approach. A VM is ok if it isn’t too demanding graphically.
I like that you are nuanced about 99% of the information provided, but you dogmaticaly say that snaps are bad lmao. At least provide an explanation for your opinion. It just looks like you were tired at that point or something.
It’s supposed to be tuned more toward heavy workflows, such as rendering and CAD. It has support for more RAM (6TB) and quad SMP along with ReFS, and SMB Direct.
I only found out about it because we needed a beastly set up for combining lidar and drone aerials in Autodesk.
Is there some reason to think that running Windows 11 Pro for Workstations would have made a difference in a CPU benchmark? I’m not seeing anything obvious on the feature list for that version that would make that be the case.
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