@TCB13@lemmy.world
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TCB13

@TCB13@lemmy.world

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TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

I agree with that take until…

The “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

I would agree to a certain point. If you get a 10th gen CPU it is power efficient and there are a lot of gamers and whatnot selling those. Also there are a lot of MiniPCs that come with mobile “T” CPU that are very decent at idle.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

What happened is that people realized what I’ve been saying since ever - that the RPi and others are a money grab because of all the required accessories while a MiniPC will get you way more power, stable hardware , case, power supply and everything in between for the same price (if you go for second hand). Here is are examples of such posts: lemmy.world/comment/5357961 , lemmy.world/comment/4696545

For eg. for 100€ you can find an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCIe (m2) comes with a power adapter and outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + cable + bullshit adapter + SD card + whatever else money grab - the Pi isn’t just a good option.

Either way, Pis have their use cases however in my opinion it was an overhyped product that sits on the middle of a market:

  • They tried to make the Arduino easy by adding an operating system and high level programming languages such as Python. It never made much sense, why would you want to have GPIOs directly on a “computer”? not reasonable at all. Nowadays we’re seeing a raise of the ESP32 devices that have 30-40 GPIOs and Wifi for 2$ each. Cheap, easy to develop and deploy and eating away on the Pi’s market.
  • Another typical use case for a Pi is some low power server, but while it is great in theory then it lacks the CPU performance required for the container-based absurdities people want to run and the I/O sucks. USB wasn’t ever a good way to connect to storage, let alone a USB/network shared bus like we had in the past. The new PCIe is questionable (look at the NanoPi M4v2 from 2018) and requires… more adapters;
  • Price-wise it doesn’t make much sense as well because a second hand x86 will be 10x faster at the same price point… and way more stable with more expansion.

Now it’s all gone x86 and Proxmox

Proxmox isn’t a new thing, in fact it is a pile of crap and questionable open-source that people still run because they haven’t discovered LXC/LXD yet. Read more here: lemmy.world/comment/6507871. FYI you can run LXD on your Pis and get both containers and virtual machines with it in the same way Proxmox people do with x86.

The irony of this comment is that people will shit on me about replacing Proxmox with LXD in the same way they used to when I said that Pis were a money grab and x86 MiniPCs were way better.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t (specially DDR3-era stuff) because old server hardware is way more expensive, won’t be of any particular advantage and older hardware, compared to new stuff, will use a LOT of power.

Instead use regular desktop/laptop machines as they’ll probably be more than enough for homelabs. You can a good 9-10th gen Intel CPU and motherboard that is perfect to run servers (very high performance) but that people don’t want because they aren’t good to play the latest games. Modern hardware = less power consumption, cheaper, more performance.

If you go really low end, let’s say i5-6500, this will probably cost around 80€ second hand with RAM. You can use www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/ to compare CPUs the server hardware you can get with modern hardware if you’re interested.

Most DDR3-era server hardware comes with RAID controllers/cards and other things that nobody uses anymore, people have moved on the software RAID be it BRTFS or ZFS and you will want to do the same. Servers make a lot of noise - impractical for a home - and a CPU from that era will be around 150-200W, you can get a recent i5 with more performance that runs around 50W.

Another thing to consider: you’re trying to build a NAS get a basic motherboard with 4 SATA ports and then add a PCI to 5 SATA port card and it will be much cheaper than whatever server hardware. BTRFS as your filesystem and its RAID if needed. Now you may be thinking something like “I want a faster CPU in order to have fast SMB”, just don’t - your gigabit network will saturate before an i5-6500 or any mechanical drive does and when this happens you’ll be at something like 10-20% CPU usage. Just don’t waste your money.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

But idle still would run much more than 15w

This isn’t true.

  • HP Prodesk 400 G5 i5 9500T > idles at 4.5W
  • Optiplex Micro 3080 > idles at 7W
  • Unbranded Mini Atom C3758 > idles at 3.5W

Either way, quick math, on a 7W range were talking about less than 10$/year to run the device.

(Constructively) What is your least favorite distro & why?

I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit...

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Nothing at all, the main issue is that with graphical applications developers have an hard time to package things for all the useless distros out there and some other distros like Debian on stable will only haver older versions of software. Flatpak solves both of this issues.

"Must Try" distros and DEs?

Hey folks! I’m getting a fresh laptop for the first time in about a decade (Framework 16) in a couple of months and am looking forward to doing some low-level tinkering both on the OS and hardware. I’m planning to convert into a “cyberdeck” with quick-release hinges for the screen since I usually use an HMD, built-in...

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Proxmox is questionable nowadays, you should try LXD/Incus instead. Read more here: lemmy.world/comment/6507871

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah I get your thing with LXD and Canonical. I’ve been moving a ton of clusters to Incus because of the obvious reasons and I’m happy with it, obviously the fact that the original people who made LXD on Canonical are now working on Incus is a big plus.

Regarding the Proxmox kernel you can read this: pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_VE_Kernel but frankly if you search the web for “proxmox kernel bug” what you’ll find are tons of different issues on almost every version. Another thing that I really hate about Proxmox is the startup, the amount of daemons and scripts they run to make the thing work.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

There’s Debian and Red Hat Enterprise, everything else is pointless. Enjoy.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Unless you have to collaborate with others who use said Windows only apps and you can’t afford compatibility issues.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Everyone does run into a Windows-only app eventually. It’s sad, it hurts but it is what it is.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Surface Laptop 3 running Kubuntu, such an improvement over what it was “designed” for.

I’m sure it is an improvement until… you’ve to use Wine to run something Windows only or a VM and end up on the exact same spot as initially but with extra steps and less performance. 😂 😂 😂

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Everything’s about perspective… maybe GNOME became SO bloated that KDE now seems very light. :P

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

#1 leaves a lot to be desired, as it advocates for doing something without thinking about why you’re doing it – it is essentially a non-answer.

Agreed. That’s mostly BS from people who make commissions from some vendor.

#2 is strange – why does it matter? If one is hosting a webserver on port 80, for example, they are going to poke a hole in their router’s NAT at port 80 to open that server’s port to the public. What difference does it make to then have another firewall that needs to be port forwarded?

A Firewall might be more advanced than just NAT/poking a hole, it may do intrusion detection (whatever that means) and DDoS protection

#3 is a strange one – what sort of malicious behaviour could even be done to a device with no firewall? If you have no applications listening on any port, then there’s nothing to access.

Maybe you’ve a bunch of IoT devices in your network that are sold by a Chinese company or any IoT device (lol) and you don’t want them to be able to access the internet because they’ll establish connections to shady places and might be used to access your network and other devices inside it.

#5 is the only one that makes some sense;

Essentially the same answer and in #3

If we’re talking about your home setup and/or homelab just don’t get a hardware firewall, those are overpriced and won’t add much value. You’re better off by buying an OpenWRT compatible router and ditching your ISP router. OpenWRT does NAT and has a firewall that is easy to manage and setup whatever policies you might need to restrict specific devices. You’ll also be able to setup things such as DoH / DoT for your entire network, setup a quick Wireguard VPN to access your local services from the outside in a safe way and maybe use it to setup a couple of network shares. Much more value for most people, way cheaper.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Armbian has sane defaults for SBCs as well (yes log2ram so you won’t burn SD cards) and it is way more stable and polished than DietPi with less overhead. About bare Debian, you’ve the images I linked to and you can make it log to the ram with a simple line in systemd’s config.

Storage= Controls where to store journal data. One of “volatile” (…) If “volatile”, journal log data will be stored only in memory, i.e. below the /run/log/journal hierarchy (which is created if needed).

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

realizing that 11 was only going to bring more ads, force-installed applications, background processes that were nigh-impossible to disable without a lot of tomfoolery, AI bullshit and general bloat,

I don’t get this kinds of comments.

I figured that I would try dual-booting Ubuntu,

So you ditched and unethical mega corp that runs ads for a wanna be unethical mega corp that also mines your data and you’re happy about it? Oh boy the illusion.

I feel so much more capable as a computer user with Linux than I ever did on Window

I just hope you don’t require “professional” software such as MS Office, Adobe Apps, Autodesk, NI Circuit Design and whatnot Linux isn’t a viable options. The alternatives wont cut it if you require serious collaboration… virtualization, emulation (wine) may work but won’t be nice. Going for Linux kinda adds the same pains of going macOS but 10x. Once you open the virtualization door your productivity suffers greatly, your CPU/RAM requirements are higher and suddenly you’ve to deal with issues in two operating systems instead of just one. And… let’s face it, nothing with GPU acceleration will ever run decently unless big companies start fixing things - GPU passthroughs and getting video back into the main system are a pain and add delays.

Linux on servers is great, on the desktop if you’ve to collaborate with others who use those apps it’s game over.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ is your friend.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t care what you use and I wouldn’t land in the comments just to put you on blast for your personal choices.

The thing is that this isn’t “personal choices”, I don’t even use most of the solutions I cited, but I happen to know a lot of people who do in different industries and that tried Linux countless times and showed me how poorly things are. I’m talking about managers, designers, engineers, architects - a lot of people with a lot of different needs that would love to be on Linux as much as you do but can’t because it simply doesn’t work out.

Yeah, I’ve never understood people making poorly written snide comments with absolutely zero clarification, either.

Do you really want a properly written comment? It looks like you don’t but I’ll give you one anyways. Just don’t complain like you did when I bluntly said what’s the reality of Linux desktop and professional software.

realizing that 11 was only going to bring more ads, force-installed applications, background processes that were nigh-impossible to disable without a lot of tomfoolery, AI bullshit and general bloat,

Microsoft has multiple versions of Windows and if you are smart enough to install Ubuntu you might as well be smart enough to read about them for five minutes and understand that you if you pick Windows 11 Pro you’ll be moderately clean and Windows 11 Enterprise will be very clean. You’ll also find out that with ANY version you can pick English (World) for a cleaner experience:

Selecting the “English (World)” locale during Windows Setup means you’ll receive fewer advertised tiles in your Start menu once Windows is installed, but it doesn’t change the preinstalled apps that come with Windows (also known as bloatware).

The remaining or all ads and spyware can also be disabled via group policy. When it comes to disabling crap Windows offers way better control than Ubuntu and macOS because it was made for that. There are countess companies and government agencies that force Microsoft to have group policy settings to disable all the “special features” otherwise they couldn’t use it.

Microsoft also has very detailed documentation into this (…microsoft.com/…/manage-connections-from-windows-…) that you can follow to disable what you don’t want. Meanwhile Canonical, Apple and others don’t give shit about users disabling the spyware and the systems sometimes break if you block connections.

So before you say unfounded and dumb things such as “impossible”, “forced” and whatnot go teach yourself about how things really work and what can and can’t be done.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Kinda related: what if I install something like Debian/Ubuntu on it? Can I still use the NAS hardware in the same way?

And that’s what you should do because those NAS specific software is more overhead than solution. You can setup the entire thing manually use less resources and have it better. BTRFS is a good solution when it comes do a simple RAID.

To be fair for a basic NAS what you need is Samba 4 for shares and something like FileBrowser for a WebUI. Another suggestion I’ve for you is to really go Debian and use LXD/Incus to create containers and virtual machines if required. I’ve posted about it here.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Those machines are very, very good to run Linux. Stable, everything is supported out of the most, very reliable. About calling home, they don’t, however some models, like most machines, have Intel ME baked into the CPU and that can be remotely accessed. The good thing is that you can disable the Intel ME features on the UEFI and there’s a toggle to completely disable the network card before an OS is loaded.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

If you’ve an OpenWRT compatible router why are you thinking about pfsense? There isn’t much to gain there, your OpenWRT will do NAT and also has a firewall.

I like this device since 3ports would allow me to create a physically separate DMZ

OpenWRT can do this as well. What are your plans with the DMZ tho?

Be careful with the use of the acronym DMZ as in the context of typical routers and ISPs it has a different meaning of what you’re implying here. DMZ usually is used in the context for a single host that is “outside” the ISP router’s firewall and all requests coming into the ISP router will be forward to that device.

With my current diagram, it seems like it is not possible for the NAS to receive updates from the internet.

You NAS will never “receive updates” it will ask for updates. Maybe add a firewall rule that allows traffic from the NAS to the internet but not the other way around (this is usually the default state of any router, it will allow local devices to go to the internet but not incoming connections to those devices).

My TrueNas has 2x2.5Gb ports. Can i connect each NIC to a different network? Would this have any benefit?

You can, but is it really worth it? If someone hacks the device they’ll access the rest of the network. Same applies to your computers and cames consoles, they can be used to jump to the other side and vice versa.

Frankly I don’t see the usefulness of your setup as you’ll end up with weak points somewhere. Just get a single OpenWRT router and throw everything into the same network. Apply firewall restrictions as needed.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

UWP is a waste of screen space compared to the older Win32 apps. Not even Microsoft managed to make the UWP Windows Settings work decently, and they openly admit it by keeping the old panels around for most advanced tasks.

UWPs lack of density and structure totally removed whatever benefit we got from having larger 20"+ screens. It’s sad to get larger screens and waste all the space with the UI instead of actual content.

TCB13, (edited )
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

You can’t mix UWP and “functional” in the same phrase. Does not compute.

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