I admin around three hundred linux servers and this is one of my most common tasks - although I use -shc as I like the total too, and don’t bother with less as it’s only the biggest files and dirs that I’m interested in and they show up last, so no need to scrollback.
When managing a lot of servers, the storage requirements when installing extra software is never trivial. (Although our storage does do very clever compression and it might recognise the duplication of the file even across many vm filesystems, I’m never quite sure that works as advertised on small files)
Before I used Debian, I’d constantly fight with my operating system. Every time I opened michaelsoft binbows(which would take ages to open), I’d make sure that simplewall is running, so that bill doesn’t get any more info, after every 180 days, I’d run MAS to renew my office 365. I’d manually sync time since windows would use that same domain to send telemetry.
Now everytime I turn on my computer, the swirl of Debian greets me in a flash, my i3 being ready even before I sit.
I can spend hours doing work without any mandatory updates . It is an operating system that never makes me feel its presence. For that I’m grateful to people like Ian, Stallman, Linus, among countless others making my life better.
I can spend hours doing work without any mandatory updates .
Weird way to say spend hours fixing something that just randomly borked your PC.
Seriously, though. Windows has a fuck ton of issues, but it seems like every distro I install I am eventually greeted with something just completely breaking for no reason whatsoever and spend the next 6 hours scouring Linux forums for a solution, where everyone is just hostile as fuck screaming at people to “figure it out yourself” and to “use Terminal”.
Glad it works for you, though. Wonder how many downvotes this cold take is going to net me lol.
If you’re having this much fun digging into distros, I have to recommend* Gentoo and Funtoo :3 I think you could have some fun with those toohehehehehehehehe
*(re-commend, not recco-mend! … Now I wonder if “recommend” at some point commonly/ever sounded like “Riikka mend” 🤔)
I have heard of Gentoo, but not Funtoo. I’m still fumbling my way through Arch but I will definitely make some VMs one day to see what it’s all about. From my understanding (correct me if I’m wrong please) Gentoo is like Arch but even more customization, everything has to be compiled from source.
What is your experience with Gentoo, how would you describe it compared to Arch? Also I’ve seen FreeBSD as well and think it would be super nice for a server but not able to play games without difficulty due to fundamental differences to linux.
I’d say Gentoo is kinda… grittier? It’s less eager to help you out and be nice. Where Arch is like “Oh, you want Foo? Okay, here’s Foo, along with Bar and Baz to go with it” Gentoo is like “'Kay, building Foo.” Then you wonder why Foo doesn’t do Baz-y things and how it’s any good to anycritter without Bar, and it turns out those are compile-time options and you didn’t set the USE flags to include them for Foo so it wasn’t built with them. Your system never downloaded, built, or installed them at all because you didn’t tell it to. It pretty well expects you to know what you want and what you need to do it >:3 … that, and have a nice beefy CPU 😅 I tend to alternate between Arch and Gentoo every few years. Am currently using Arch (bytheway ;P) after switching from Gentoo for some comfy convenience but I kinda love both.
Funtoo is… I don’t entirely remember what it was meant to be, compared to Gentoo 😅 I vaguely recall it was supposed to have some nice features but wanted me to do sensible things like stop using ancient GRUB so I just didn’t get into it. May try that next.
As for BSDs, I’ve kinda wanted to run a BSD for a long time but none of them are what I actually want (despite my nonsensical eagerness to be and do weird wherever possible- er, I mean, despite how good and stable and cool they are!) so I just kinda poke one or two every few years, accomplish nothing, then give up. I do want to like them, though 😅
I appreciate the big response, and definitely have to look into compiling and the build process, using git, more terminal centric applications, etc. I’ve seen that there is a distro to learn Linux that comes in stages, I don’t know what it’s called off the top of my head.
Setting flags does seem very annoying, it’s hard for me to keep track of programs and settings already.
EndeavourOS - I have tried Arch as well but EndeavourOS is just nicer out of the box. The AUR is awesome, and I generally find answers for any problem more easily than I did for any other distro.
The best way I know of is to get yourself a VM and get into the weeds; try to configure a system to your liking.
Follow the NixOS manual. The Wiki is unofficial; often opinionated, out of date or just plain wrong. Take it with a grain of salt. The canonical source of documentation is the NixOS manual and it’s not nearly as bad as you may have heard.
Make extensive use of search.nixos.org/options or man configuration.nix. Finding and making proper use of options and the module system is the bread and butter of using NixOS.
Eventhough everyone and their mom will recommend them to you for nebulous reasons, ignore flakes for now. You will know when you’ll benefit from using them; namely when you need to use something outside of NixOS/Nixpkgs. You’re going to have enough to figure out with plain old NixOS on its own though; I don’t have external dependencies in my config to this day.
Just this morning I was having issues with a wacky dual-boot install with NixOS and Windows sharing an EFI partition, and quite interestingly ChatGPT and I were able to troubleshoot the process and get it resolved in under half and hour. I was really impressed by the specific configurations it was giving me for my /etc/nixos/configuration.nix , so that is also another resource you may consider leaning on when you run into walls in other documentation sources.
I learned a ton from this, it’s kind of “The Book” I guess. For OP, there’s a pretty massive series of blog posts I fumbled along with too, ianthehenry.com/posts/…/introduction/ though it’s a couple years old.
Having read poetterings blog posts a bit and he explains that the TPM2 based encryption is entirely just for system resources (basically everything under / with exception of /home). For home he still “envisions” (its already possible and not really hard with sd-homed) that the encryption is based on the users passphrase/key/whatever and not unlockable by anyone else than the users passphrase/…
My experience with the linux boot has never been flicker-free. It’s bugged me for years, but I don’t have the technical knowledge to fix it. There’s a black screen between BIOS and plymouth, then a black screen between plymouth and the login screen, then another black screen between the login screen and the splash screen, and finally a black screen between the splash screen and when the desktop shows up.
Mac and windows do a much better job at having a seamless experience from boot to desktop.
And the price for that beautiful, flicker-free experience is … some Macs will brick themselves. You can get them into a state where (IIRC) the dual-boot between an older macOS and a newer one (or Ashai) disagree on display modes, and the bootloader dies. Only Apple can fix that.
I usually just disable all this useless eyecandy shit. I like seeing the raw boot messages scroll across my screen. Let's me know early if something is fucked.
I’m also trying to get the flicker-free boot. switching to systemd-boot improved the jerkyness, but the blank before the decrypt password remains.
I’ve enabled suspend-then-hibernate and whereas earlier I’ve had to endure this jerkyness rarely, now I have to witness it multiple times a day when resuming from disk. at least it’s faster than cold boot.
In 2007 I tried Ubuntu and it was weird, then again in 2008, no! In 2009 I found Mint and was really happy, until they stopped supporting KDE. Then I tried a ton of distros, Xfce, no. Lxde, no. open suse, no. fedora, no, lots of others, no. I finally found Kubuntu and I have been on it ever since. Even tested Neon lately but hated it.
Kubuntu does what I want it to do.
Linux always seems scary at first, but once you learn enough, it's super easy.
Yeah, did you find mint easy to use? I’m in Ubuntu and thinking about switching. I just worry about driver support, cause everything works on Ubuntu for me. I try and apt get everything I can TBH.
I really liked Mint at the time, but only the KDE version, and would never have left if they hadn't stopped supporting it. They had great nVidia support. I no longer have nVidia on any of my computers because it's just annoying to fight with that mess.
Plus Linux as a whole has better driver support than it used to.
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