SSH is used to connect. Ownership, symlinks, etc. are preserved. Add more “excludes” to filter out more directories. Do your first run without " delete" to make sure things are going where you want.
If you want “backups” I would suggest something more sophisticated. But for just cloning this is the way.
KiCAD for PCB design.
PulseView for USB logic analyzers.
DSRemote for remote control of Rigol oscilloscopes.
FreeCAD for 3D CAD.
SDR++ and SDRangel for SDR.
Fldigi, wsjtx & QSSTV for ham radio digital modes.
I think there isn’t really something “authoritative” in Git. You can upload your changes somewhere or another developer can download changes from you. You can also all make incompatible changes and then you won’t be able to sync it anymore (you’d need to fix that first and manually handle the conflict). There’s nothing authoritive in it. In practice most people choose a central place and all upload their changes there and everybody else regularly pulls them from there. But you could as well directly do it with the computer of your colleague if you have a network connection and access to it. Files including history of changes are the same on every machine and server. (If they’re all up to date). It’s like storing a directory including past versions on 10 different computers.
Am I going off the deep end by considering Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite?
I started my Linux journey on Kinoite, which unfortunately had some issues at the time of installing; after which I rebased to Silverblue, I have since ‘mained’ Silverblue while experimenting with a couple of other distros through dual-boot or on spare devices. The first two weeks were really hard as I literally knew nothing about Linux. The fact that documentation is -generally speaking- lacking doesn’t help either. But if I was able to surpass that initial barrier, then I’m sure you can too.
But, motivation is important! Why do you even consider an ‘immutable’ distro?
I don’t really understand what new I would need to learn
You’d have to replace sudo dnf install *package-name* with flatpak install *package-name*. If, however, the package is not available as a flatpak, then -following Fedora’s initial guidelines- one should install it within a container through Toolbx(/Distrobox). After a container has been created (toolbox create *pick name for container*) and entered (toolbox enter *chosen name for container*), one simply behaves within the container as though how they would in a traditional distro. As a last resort -in case installing within a container is not possible, well supported or doesn’t work as intended- one can layer it (rpm-ostree install *package-name*).
Furthermore, /usr can’t be touched (at least not easily), except for /usr/local. And some features, like UKI, aren’t supported yet.
or really what benefits it would have.
Updates are atomic; it either happens or doesn’t, there’s no in-between state. Even a power outage or a random crash doesn’t change that. This ensures your system isn’t broken if something unfortunate befalls it.
Additionally, the system (for the most part) is reproducible; I can rebuild my system from scratch (barring configs; unless your dotfiles management is sublime) and it is exactly the same as the one that has been running since the inception of Silverblue. Cruft, state, bitrot etc can finally be left behind…, but we’re not their yet. There’s still some amount of these present in Silverblue’s current model. But we’re embracing OCIs and Silverblue’s primary contributors know what’s up over at NixOS and (hopefully) are working to make Silverblue ever so slightly more stateless. Even if a lot of work is still required, it’s infinitely better than the traditional model as it has gone from an uncountable amount of possible states to a countable amount. And the mathematicians under us know that such an improvement is infinitely times better. Another benefit of where we are currently with reproducibility would be that it allows us to combat bugs effectively.
Security benefits due to more parts of the system being read-only. This is however (somewhat) offset due to lack of the aforementioned UKI support. Hopefully, the well-defined nature of an image-based distro will eventually make more robust system-integrity checks possible.
Not necessarily exclusively granted through/by ‘immutability’, but system maintenance has been a joy. Most of the time, it just works anyways. But, if somehow something breaks, then I can easily rollback; either through the terminal if I was able to get inside. Or through the GRUB-menu if the ‘broken’ deployment doesn’t allow me to get inside. Furthermore, you can even pin a confirmed working deployment through sudo ostree admin pin *number* to select the deployment to keep around for longer. I recommend everyone to keep around their first deployment after installing Silverblue, if used wisely it’s one of the closest things to a factory reset we’ve got within the Linux space.
Arguably there’s a lot more to talk about, but these are probably the primary benefits.
Yes, the linux kernel will work! I’d say it’s even more likely that wifi, soundcard, etc. work without any problems than if you’d buy a bleeding edge laptop (although these mostly also just work nowadays). The oldest machine I’ve got is a laptop from 12 years ago which easily runs modern linux, but even much older machines shouldn’t have a problem with that, at least not with the kernel.
I’ve used Linux for over two decades (red hat to Gentoo to Ubuntu to arch) and I must say it’ll be a tough sell to get me back to an RPM or a debian based distro solely due to how god awfully slow the package managers (dpkg and rpm) are.
Since Docker came along and brought with it the ride of Alpine and APK, it made me realize that system upgrades on a modern processor, fast internet, and an SSD should take seconds, not minutes.
My gut here is saying you have a mismatched combo of how Coreboot is treating these, and how they are written. From what I’m reading, Coreboot should support Legacy, UEFI, or SeaBIOS, so go set that in the BIOS setup, then make absolutely sure your disks are being written as such (NOT mbr). Ventoy should be the tool to use here for testing different distros out, so good on finding that.
Old laptops can often be a pain if they don’t have mainstream hardware.
I have a laptop with a touchpad made by Elan. I couldn’t even find a website for them, but the laptop’s support page has a Windows driver that works well.
I put Linux on there maybe 5 years ago, and there just is no driver for this touchpad on Linux, so it works in PS2 mouse modus and nothing else. No multitouch, no gestures, no way to change any slightly more advanced settings like sensitivity.
Ha I had this issue once upon a time too! And the one above with the wifi driver b43-fwcutter. Apparently not great laptop choices. The touchpad situation was awful, because the sensitivity was always insane. IIRC I had a way to slow it down, but then it was so so slow that I had to go over it like 30 times to get across the diagonal. Good times.
I vividly remember that time when I tried to get Linux running on my old laptop in the mid-2000s. There was no wifi driver for that card in the repo, but the manufacturer provided a driver to download. But it was in C++ source code that failed to compile because it was so outdated.
So there I was as a teenager who barely knew a little C at that time, porting the driver from outdated C++ to the then-modern version. It wasn’t easy but I managed to.
I am so happy it’s not 2005 anymore, when it comes to Linux.
Yeah kind of a similar story but on my iBook G4 I had trouble getting wireless internet working with modern distros because b43-fwcutter (I think) was unavailable. I ended up installing Yellow Dog Linux to get around it
So I really only care about the RAM for speed. dont care about ssd size, dont care about fingerprint readers, I just want a solid machine that makes it easy to run linux and also easy to fix; something sturdy. there’s nothing “special” i should be noting while shopping? is it just all personal preference with the specs and such?
For the most part, yeah. If you’re looking for a laptop the older you go, the more “boring” you’ll want.
Plain form factors and the like.
Sometimes, very rarely, weird laptop keyboards need special drivers that don’t always get baked into Linux, so it can be a pain. Same for older “premium” sound stuff in an older laptop.
Doesn’t mean that it will have problems, just that you’re more likely to.
Old midrange Lenovo or Dell laptops tend to be a staple for Linux. They also contribute to Linux, so their stuff tends to just work. Contrast with apple, where getting it to work with Linux is a hard-mode hobby for some people.
Base hardware stuff is essentially all compatible.
That’s basically an example of a standard laptop you might try to put Linux on and expect effortless success. (It’s newer because that’s what came up, but it’s an example of the trend).
Note the lack of anything that makes you go “ah, a marketable feature to highlight or differentiate”.
This one probably works fine, but I’d have some concerns about that touch screen and things not playing well with any sensors that make the folding action turn off the screen.
It might work fine, but it’s the type of thing that can take a bit of fiddling to get working, or just doesn’t because people don’t care to port the functionality over.
I oughtta browse ebay and see if anybody’s selling some system76 stuff. I gotta see what to do with my Dell Xps 13 9310 thats stuck in manufacturing mode first. probably sell for parts or idk?
linux
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.