@TCB13@lemmy.world
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TCB13

@TCB13@lemmy.world

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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.

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

Ubuntu because they’ve the ability to great things and end up just delivering a buggy and mangled version of Debian with proprietary crap, spyware, snaps wtv. After all we’re talking about the distro that had ISOs on their download page with a broken installer multiple times.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

I fucking wonder why. When owning isn’t owning them piracy is totally justified.

We pay for 4K, but we don’t get more than 720p unless we use some proprietary shit hardware and a

Not only that… you pay to get tv content and suddenly they remove it because of licensing or political correctness bullshit.

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

Your average Wine enjoyer:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e383f5a5-8bf5-4dea-9d65-e5a7fe8902a2.png

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b720ce9a-ee05-4168-a6e5-0830ef69ce9e.png

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ace64bce-7d42-448a-929d-d93bd457512b.png

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6246e4d4-a414-4a35-b3d1-e06dc50be1bb.png

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/fc521aa9-0fd5-41ac-ac5e-4ffd66b9dd2e.png

Wine works great, blurp…

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

Linux in corporation fails in multiple ways, the most prevalent is that people need to collaborate with others that use proprietary software such as MS Office that isn’t available for Linux and the alternatives such as LibreOffice aren’t just good enough. It all comes down to ROI, the cost of Windows/Office for a company is cheaper than the cost of dealing with the inconsistencies in format conversions, people who don’t know how to use the alternative X etc etc. This issue is so common that companies usually also avoid Apple due to the same reason, while on macOS you’ve a LOT more professional software it is still very painful to deal with the small inconsistencies and whatnot.

Linux desktop is great, I love it, but it gets it even worse than Apple, here some use cases that aren’t easy to deal in Linux:

  • People who need the real MS Office because once you have to collaborate with others Open/Libre/OnlyOffice won’t cut it;
  • Designers who use Adobe apps that won’t run properly without having a dedicated GPU, passthrough and a some hacky way to get the image back into your main system that will cause noticeable delays. Who wants to deploy GPU passthroughs for others? Makes no sense;
  • People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;
  • Electrical engineers: Circuit Design Suite (Multisim and Ultiboard) are primarily designed for Windows. Alternatives such as KiCad and EasyEDA may work in some cases but they aren’t great if you’ve to collaborate with others who use Circuit Design Suite;
  • Labs that require data acquisition from specialized hardware because companies making that hardware won’t make drivers and software for Linux;
  • Architects: AutoCAD isn’t available (not even the limited web version works) and Libre/FreeCAD don’t cut it if you’ve to collaborate with AutoCAD users;
  • Developers and sysadmins, because not everyone is using Docker and Github actions to deploy applications to some proprietary cloud solution. Finding a properly working FTP/SFTP/FTPS desktop client (similar WinSCP or Cyberduck) is an impossible task as the ones that exist fail even at basic tasks like dragging and dropping a file.

If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.

Windows licenses are cheap and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience. It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.

From a more market / macro perspective here are some extra reasons:

  • Companies like blame someone when things go wrong, if they chose open-source there’s isn’t someone to sue then;
  • Buying proprietary stuff means you’re outsourcing the risks of such product;
  • Corruption pushes for proprietary: they might be buying software that is made by someone that is close to the CTO, CEO or other decision marker in the company, an old friend, family or straight under the table corruption;
  • Most non-tech companies use services from consulting companies in order to get their software developed / running. Consulting companies often fall under the last point that besides that they have have large incentives from companies like Microsoft to push their proprietary services. For eg. Microsoft will easily provide all of a consulting companies employees with free Azure services, Office and other discounts if they enter in an exclusivity agreement to sell their tech stack. To make things worse consulting companies live of cheap developers (like interns) and Microsoft and their platform makes things easier for anyone to code and deploy;
  • Microsoft provider a cohesive ecosystem of products that integrate really well with each other and usually don’t require much effort to get things going - open-source however, usually requires custom development and a ton of work to work out the “sharp angles” between multiple solutions that aren’t related and might not be easily compatible with each other;
  • Open-source requires a level of expertise that more than half of the developers and IT professionals simply don’t have. This aspect reinforces the last point even more. Senior open-source experts are more expensive than simply buying proprietary solutions;
  • If we consider the price of a senior open-source expert + software costs (usually free) the cost of open-source is considerable lower than the cost of cheap developers + proprietary solutions, however consider we are talking about companies. Companies will always prefer to hire more less expensive and less proficient people because that means they’re easier to replace and you’ll pay less taxes;
  • Companies will prefer to hire services from other companies instead of employees thus making proprietary vendors more compelling. This happens because from an accounting / investors perspective employees are bad and subscriptions are cool (less taxes, no responsibilities etc);
  • The companies who build proprietary solutions work really hard to get vendors to sell their software, they provide commissions, support and the promises that if anything goes wrong they’ll be there. This increases the number of proprietary-only vendors which reinforces everything above. If you’re starting to sell software or networking services there’s little incentive for you to go pure “open-source”. With less companies, less visibility, less professionals (and more expensive), less margins and less positive market image, less customers and lesser profits.

Unfortunately things are really poised and rigged against open-source solutions and anyone who tries to push for them. The “experts” who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don’t even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren’t aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn’t aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn’t even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

why is it Postgres db…

Why on earth are you using that? Just use WebDAV, you’ll only be required to have some WebDAV server such as Nginx and it will sync GB of notes without issues. joplinapp.org/help/apps/sync/webdav/ medium.com/…/build-a-webdav-server-with-nginx-866…

I would’ve NEVER ever moved to Joplin if it wasn’t able to sync with WebDAV. I’m not into having a special daemon running on a server for that task, makes zero sense.

Me vs my ISP

So I was looking into getting port forwarding set up and I realized just how closed-off the internet has gotten since the early days. It’s concerning. It used to be you would buy your own router and connect it to the internet, and that router would control port-forwarding and what-have-you....

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

It gets worse - because ISPs are choosing NATs over IPv6,

Yes, because they’re mostly pieces of shit, technically inept and unable to properly deploy IPv6 at a large scale.

Either way IPv6 doesn’t fix everything as you’ll still need a real IPv4 to access a large part of the internet or some translation (MAP-T/MAP-E). Even if your ISP provided dual stack with a real public IPv6 + CGNAT / MAP-T IPv4 it would still be annoying as you wouldn’t be able to do port forwarding on the IPv4 and won’t be able to access your self-hosted services from a LOT of networks that are IPv4 only.

There are two versions of MAP – translated (MAP-T) and encapsulated (MAP-E). In MAP-E IPv4 traffic is encapsulated into IPv6 using a v6 header before it is sent over the v6 network. At the network operator’s boundary router, the IPv6 header is then stripped, and the IPv4 traffic is forwarded to the v4 Internet. In MAP-T, the IPv4 packet header is mapped to the IPv6 header and back. The difference between the two options is evident in their names. MAP-E uses IPv6 to encapsulate and de-encapsulate IPv4 traffic, whereas MAP-T uses NAT64 to translate IPv4 to IPv6 and back.

Is this Seagate Exos drive too good to be true?

I found this its the cheapest 10TB Exos drive on Newegg and looking to buy 4 of them. I will be putting them in my NAS that I use for my media library and pc backups. The price I’m posting this is $130, I’m also looking similar Exos drives that are $250 is there a difference? Should I shell up for the more expensive drives?

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

It depends. They’re simply the most annoying drives out there because Seagate on their wisdom decided to remove half of the SMART data from reports and they won’t let you change the power settings like other drives. Those drives will never spin down, they’ll even report to the system they’re spun down while in fact they’ll be still running at a lower speed. They also make a LOT of noise.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

That should be a choice of the OS / controller card not of the drive itself. Also what datacenter wants to run drives that don’t report half of the SMART data just because they felt like it?

Sorry if this is covered somewhere but I couldn't find it! I need recommendations on a good starter NAS

Title says pretty much all there is. Im just getting started in this and don’t want to go too crazy. Im willing to go as high as $250 right now which, when i look around, i know isn’t gonna get me anything absolutely amazing but hey back off im an instacart driver lol

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

Build it yourself, avoid proprietary solutions. If you’re after power efficiency go with some ARM board with PCI/M2 slot to use as SATA ports, if you want more performance and want to run a few services on it, get a second hand computer like an HP mini or even a full desktop.

I what would recommend is instead a Mini-PC like the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 DM or the Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro.

If you plan to create a small NAS for storage and self-host a few services even an old laptop will do it, however there are advantages to picking a mini PC. Those machines are quiet, don’t require much power and some can even fit a 2.5" hard drive so you won’t need external hard drive enclosures.

Mini-PCs are also cheap second hand, you might be able to get an 8th Gen Intel CPU for 100-200€. Sometimes you’ll find really old models (i3 CPU + 4 GB of RAM) selling for 50€ and while those aren’t usable anymore as a Windows desktop they’re are still more than enough to run your NAS/Cloud solution. I would pick something 6th gen or more recent.

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. Aside from the big brands like HP and Dell there are other alternatives such as the trendy MINISFORUM however their BIOS comes out of the factory with weird bugs and the hardware isn’t as reliable - missing ESD protection on USB in some models and whatnot.

A very important thing for you to consider is the storage / hard drive interface. On a Pi you’re usually constrained to USB for your hard drives, however on a Mini PCs you’ve the following options:

  • USB Storage - is slower and USB isn’t very robust, not recommended, the only advantage here is that you don’t have to DIY anything;
  • Some of those machines come with a SATA port and space for a 2.5" hard drive, either use it a single drive if you don’t need much storage or get a 5 SATA port card to expand it;
  • Recent models come with a NVME M.2. slot (PCIe) and that can be turned into 6 SATA ports with a cheap adapter like this.

In both SATA cases you just have to throw NAS hard drives and a cheap power supply at it and you’ll be done. SATA is faster and way more reliable than USB for storage, it won’t randomly disconnect and you will be able to take full advantage of the disks, no speed limitations like in a typical USB connections. Personally I would pick model that has both the SATA connector and the NVME slot and then use the SATA connector for a small 2.5" SSD (boot drive) and the NVME with the adapter above for the NAS hard drives - this option will give you the best performance.

Software: run barebones Debian and install everything from scratch OR use something already made like TrueNAS Scale or OpenMediaVault.

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

I guess the catch is the fact that they don’t really need it. They have real time location from any Android device anyways (because of that feature that sends the lists of wifi networks around you from time to time), no need to storage the timeline on their servers, it’s only duplicate data. lol

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Finally someone who learnt how to use systemd.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/712aef77-ba87-4696-9a65-7e1d076b3489.jpeg

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

Great news! Maybe now they’ll spare a day of work to get desktop icons going again. No more funding excuses for the fanboys now.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Although we’ll be hosting the repository on GitHub

Why aren’t they using a self-hosted instance of Gitea? This makes no sense move to Github of all places.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Perfection. Debian + GNOME Software + Flatpak = Rock solid and clean OS with the latest software.

There are a few things that still need to be ironed out tho. For eg. communication between desktop apps and browser extensions such as this.

Another thing I would like to see is a decent and supported way to mirror flathub and/or have offline installations.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

The best launcher you can get for AppImages is to just drop the thing and move to Flatpaks that don’t take 2 seconds to launch apps.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Here is my experience with it.

Up until last week I’ve had friends (who also use uBlock Origin, same country) kind of sequentially complaining for about a month about having the videos blocked. For me personally it has been working fine until then, but Friday I got the popup. Today the popup is gone however I get ads but they don’t play video, only sound.

YouTube isn’t rolling out the anti-adblock to everyone. It seems to depend on things like your account, browser, and IP address. And if you’re not logged in or you’re in a private window, you’re safe. As a result, there are a bunch of people saying, “I use XYZ and I haven’t seen an anti-adblock popup yet,” unknowingly spreading misinformation.

What I see with this is that Google might eventually lose more with this new policies than just leaving things as they were. Lets be real, if this shit show continues and they don’t drop it as it becomes increasingly difficult to watch without ads people will start looking for alternative frontends such as Piped or Invidious and that will hinder their ability to harvest data and force ads. What’s the next step Google? DRM protected media?

Websites to download cracked software for Windows?

Yes, I have looked in the megathread. Specifically under the sections “All Purpose”, “Tools”, and “Software”… however, I didn’t find any general, all purpose websites for cracked software. Or at least, the megathread never had something in it that said “great website for cracked software”....

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

All I see is people “beating around the bush” and whatnot. Here are my two suggestions:

Enjoy.

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