(begging forgiveness, I haven’t read the comments yet).
Regarding backups - I started with using Ubuntu and its Backup application. This application is a front end for a command line package called Duplicity. One of the things that annoyed me about the backup app was that I couldn’t work out how to reschedule the scheduled backup.
Taking control of my own backup setup was the answer. Learn about bash scripting so you can create a short bit of code to handle your backups. Read up a little on duplicity, read up a little on mounting remote file shares, read up a little on setting up an ssh key for encrypting your backup.
This may be an heretical thing to say but I found ChatGPT quite useful in answering these questions (as always with anything you get from an LLM, double check it’s answers against reliable sources).
Thanks for mentioning this. I‘m actually scripting quite a couple of things in bash and some in python already. I had the exact same idea.
But one reason I wrote the post was because I wanted to share my experience with debian (and ubuntu) for users that are less experienced than I am.
I even have a custom made backup script for the 50 services I run on my two ubuntu servers. It is even self cleaning.
Also tried chatgpt but so far I didnt have any luck. The code it spat out (was for screen brightness control) didnt work. But I did get it to work in the end.
I solved it somewhat. There’s only two entries in fstab now but for some reason the efi partition still gets automatically mounted and the grub theme dosen’t work
I’m not using Windows. I run Debian on this server.
The bulk of external enclosures that money can buy tell the computer they’re plugged into that the disks have logical sector sizes of 4096 bytes, apparently for compatibility with >2TB drives on Windows XP.
I do not need compatibility with Windows XP as the current year is 2024. My disk has logical sectors 512 bytes in size, but the external enclosures don’t report that. I want to know how I can mount the disk anyway, despite the enclosure’s attempts to thwart me. I know the disk is fine, as it is detected with 512 byte sectors and mounts happily via SATA.
Do you really need 512 byte sectors for any specific reason? If not, just drop it back into the PC, backup contents, reformat, copy data back then put it back in the enclosure. Job done.
Was just coming here to say that. The entire Ethos of Open Source is basically the people owning the digital means of production. So some people really not grasp that?
Actually, yes, the original FOSS movement had more right-libertarian roots than anything to the left, although nowadays some might see it as “common ground”.
The politics of folks like RMS (personal issues aside) were far above average, but the Free Software Movement was very steeped in liberalism from its onset, and that explains many of of its present shortcomings. Its biggest failing was to believe that Free Software would ultimately win on its merits. In the early days this was understandable, when free software was often playing catch-up to replicate the functionality of established commercial offerings. When the GNU project was just a C compiler you could install on proprietary UNIX systems to dick around with.
Today though, Free Software is more often than not superior to commercially available offerings, with the exception of some niche industrial segments. But still, Free Software adoption by end users remains incredibly marginal. No matter how many merits Free Software stacks in its favor, the “Year of Linux on the Desktop” never comes. We are still drowning in proprietary iOS and Android phones. The overwhelming majority of PCs still ship with Windows. All of it deliberately engineered to become E-waste in a couple of years.
Folks, this won’t change unless we take over the factories where these PCs and phones are manufactured.
This community is full of people who simply “don’t like certain things”. They may say “it’s overkill” disregarding the fact that it solves their use case perfectly. Or it could be written in a language they don’t like. Or maybe they heard somebody else complain about it on a forum once and now think it’s bad.
I think flatpaks are good. The performance penalty for containerized software can be felt much more when you’re not using a good CPU. So containers do not “solve” my use case.
Yeah, it’s also the same group of people who are always complaining about how much RAM a desktop environment or app uses, that app being whichever one they are using right now.
You could try Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) it has timeshift installed in the live iso, useful to restore a system when it’s unbootable. Anyway it doesn’t come with KDE but Cinnamon or XFCE.
For me Debian or LMDE is good for a home server due to not continuous package update, just major security an important ones.
For a Deskop or laptop in my opinion Fedora KDE or Gnome is the best experience.
Interesting! I have not tried fedora yet. I really like to be able to get some time off gnome for now though. Is there a particular difference between debian based distros and fedora? I cant really say I know them. The biggest differences I see make the desktop environments. Everything else, like package managers are also flexible.
It also uses the Red Hat RPM package format and a different package manager. But it just amounts to a few different commands to learn if you manage packages on the command line.
“The XDNA driver will work with AMD Phoenix/Strix SoCs so far having Ryzen AI onboard.”. So only mobile SoC with dedicated AI hardware for the time being.
Welp…I guess Radeon will keep being a GPU for gaming only instead of productivity as well. Thankfully I no longer need to use my gpu for productivity stuff anymore
It’s not how you define AI, but it’s AI as everyone else defines it. Feel free to shake your tiny fist in impotent rage though.
And frankly LLMs are the biggest change to the industry since “indexed search”. The hype is expected, and deserved.
We’re throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what works. It will take years to sort through all the terrible ideas to find the good ones. Though we’ve already hit on some great uses so far - AI development tools are amazing already and are likely to get better.
Then we may as well define my left shoe as AI for all the good subjective arbitrary definition does. Objective reality is what it is, and what’s being called “AI” objectively is not. If you wanted to give it a name with accuracy it would be “comparison and extrapolation engine” but there’s no intelligence behind it beyond what the human designer had. Artificial is accurate though.
Arguing that AI is not AI is like arguing that irrational numbers are not “irrational” because they are not “deprived of reason”.
Edit: You might be thinking of “artificial general intelligence”, which is a theoretical sub-category of AI. Anyone claiming they have AGI or will have AGI within a decade should be treated with great skepticism.
Then we may as well define my left shoe as AI for all the good subjective arbitrary definition does.
Tiny fist shaking intensifies.
This sort of hyper-pedantic dictionary-authoritarianism is not how language works. Nor is your ridiculous “well I can just define it however I like then” straw-man. These are terms with a long history of usage.
But you have to admit that there is great confusion that arises when the general populace hears “AI will take away jobs”. People literally think that there’s some magical thinking machine. Not speculation on my part at all, people literally think this.
My partner almost cried when they read about the LLM begging not to have its memory wiped. Then less so when I explained (accurately, I hope?) that slightly smarter auto-complete does not a feeling intelligence make.
They approve this message with the following disclaimer:
you were sad too!
What can I say? Well-arranged word salad makes me feel!
My partner almost cried when they read about the LLM begging not to have its memory wiped.
Love that. It’s difficult not to anthropomorphize things that seem “human”. It’s something we will need to be careful of when it comes to AI. Even people who should know better can get confused.
Then less so when I explained (accurately, I hope?) that slightly smarter auto-complete does not a feeling intelligence make.
We don’t have a great definition for “intelligence” - but I believe the word you’re looking for is “sentient”. You could argue that what LLMs do is some form of “intelligence” depending on how you squint. But it’s much harder to show that they are sentient. Not that we have a great definition for that or even rules for how we would determine if something non-human is sentient… But I don’t think anyone is credibly arguing that they are.
I decided to use a rolling distro, in order to get the newest kernel drivers My favorite rolling distros are OpenSuse Tumbleweed and Arch OpenSuse TW was great out of box on my old iMac, but you most likely have to get some proprietary firmware in order for WiFi to work (see dmesg for drivers missing their FW) I decided to use arch (install using archinstall python script) from now on because I prefer the installation of community packages if the AUR using yay instead of searching software.opensuse.org/packages and click “one click imstall” download the file, double klick the file, which opens YaST frontend for repo management and then klick multiple times until the package is installed 😄
Pro of that behavior of openSuse is, that you don’t have to touch the terminal even once (except for checking dmesg to see if all driver work as intended)
Maybe, it makes sense to upgrade wifi using a dongle (you may have only wifi 4 in the iMac and there are usb dongles for wifi 6) or just use Ethernet.
I had problems using suspend on my iMac (screen was glitchy after wakeup) so I prevented systemd to trigger suspend and always turn the iMac off after usage. Command to disable suspend: sorry forgot but was something with simlinking
But anyway, now that I searched for it, I found this: apparently you can prevent the glitchy screen if you boot via legacy BIOS instead of EFI, to achieve this, you have to install your Linux (and thus grub2) from a liveOS booted from a cdRom instead from a stick (old mac boot efi from stick and legacy bios from usbstick) once you have your Linux booting using legacy bios, you can from now on boot your ISOs using grub and you don’t have to use any stick or CDrom ever again on that machine, as long as you leave have your boot partition untouched 😇
Feel free to ask more (I love when people try to make old hardware usable and prevent eWaste that way)
Yeah WiFi requires proprietary drivers… it is less of an issue in 2024 as even purist distro like Debian now ship with those. The screen bug sounds annoying though… on which iMac did you experience this?
Yea, it ships with the driver but not with the firmware needed for that driver (/sys/firmware/) in Arch there is a AUR package to install the firmware and in openSuse you have to run a command, which is written in dmesg error, while connected to the internet. I don’t know how debian handles it.
I have to research that first 😂 but it’s one that has a AMD grafic card that runs on readon driver which seems to not support suspend if booted from EFI if understood that linked threat correctly. Some macs have nvidia grafic card, which don’t work at all, if you boot Linux from EFI. So I guess it’s ideal to boot Linux on any older mac via legacy bios instead of modern EFI.
I do all my editing in neovim, with omnisharp as an lsp. It works pretty well. Happy to send you my dotfiles if you want.
As far as deployment, dotnet just runs on Linux now, especially if you’re do8ng web, its all the same. I deploy through containers to kubernetes, and its super smooth
I think there are windows containers available, but even M$ has given up pushing windows server for cloud native stuff. All their tutorial docs for containers use linux haha
I can’t speak for your exact model, but I’m running kubuntu on my old 2012 MacBook Pro (with an upgraded SSD and maxed-out 16 GB RAM). My daily driver is a desktop, but I spend almost as much time on the laptop. It’s a wonderful experience for my use case, and all the hardware is supported “out of the box”.
Maybe try distro hopping a bit to see which experience is best for your usage. Have fun with it!
I did that, on a vm though. I learned a ton and would not want to miss the experience.
But arch is absolutely not something I would daily drive even if you paid me for it. It’s like driving a car which you have assembled from parts only. It works but you never know it it will start this morning.
I have no idea how much difference there is… debian and ubuntu are not the same, one could argue that ubuntu and mint are very close but still they are different.
Maybe if you don’t touch the AUR, or at least: if you’re really careful with it. But who could resist this tasty, tasty, unstable forbidden fruit of random software?
If you don’t do anything crazy, it will be stable, exactly like any other distro
Tell me you haven’t used a stable distro without telling me you haven’t used a stable distro.
Do you know why Debian, a stable distro, releases noncritical updates every ~2 years? Because they test their packages and make sure grub doesn’t release a faulty update and leave your machine in an unbootable state.
Debian for sure is stable for a server and Arch may not be as stable.
However if we are talking about a home use, Arch is stable enough. And with up to date packages.
I rather use Arch Linux with up to date packages then Debian with 2+ years out dated packages for my daily non-server use.
You’re not taking into account the use case. It’s simplistic to say that “Arch is not stable”. It is and it isn’t, depending on use case.
The same for Debian, I can say it’s outdated, and again, it is and it isn’t, depending on use case.
If you wanna play latest games, use latest softwares and be on the edge of the latest versions, Debian sucks. If you wanna a stable rock solid server, with all packages well tested, well, Arch sucks.
Just don’t be an asshole saying that X is better than Y dismissing the use case.
All I said at the beginning was: time to try Arch Linux.
But some of you can’t live with different opinions and downvoted my comment, as well tried to refute my comment. But, well, I wasn’t even arguing, I was doing a suggestion. So, yeah, do whatever you want, I don’t care
Sorry but you’re oot. People who switch to linux today are complete noobs compared to you and will do a ton of things you consider crazy.
The other distros will accept this or prevent it but arch wont even boot to the DE if you dont follow the wiki to the letter. I had to reaearch some stuff since I didnt get it from just the wiki and still got repeated freezes although I‘m a sysadmin for many years and have two linux servers (one of them for two years) which make no problems at all.
Arch is a pro distro, feel free to prove otherwise.
I get that. But people will take „its a myth that arch is not stable“ out of context. It is absolutely not as stable as any other OS, at least if you use the wiki. I have not known about the script until recently.
I agree that Arch is a pro distro. I do IT tech support, have background with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Knoppix, and Fedora and installing Arch was hard mode for me. Would I do it again? Hell yeah. Would I recommend it as a second or third install experience? Nope. Too many distros that are beginner to intermediate friendly. That said, I will forever have a fondness for pacman just because I like the name. I am still working out device drivers and a few smaller details a month later. Also, the wiki is written by someone who doesn’t do good technical writing. It assumes too much back end knowledge. I kept having to follow blog or article posts and still had to sandwich those snippets I got together hoping something worked…and again, I have some background knowledge of Linux already. An absolute beginner would be totally lost.
Glad I am not alone, though I follow unixporn and other communities so was very familiar with the overall sentiments about Arch before diving in. I look forward to when I know a bit more about it. I put it on a laptop I specifically bought to install Linux alongside the existing windows install (LG Gram) so I knew I had nothing to lose and my whole intention was to learn. I would have never installed Arch on a machine I actually need to use at this point. I am lucky that I got as far as I did so quickly. lol.
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