Normally its better practice to have the server configuration stored in a declarative way like ansible or similar and only store the userdata in the backup.
So you can fast and easy reinstall your server including all of its config files and then clone the usage data like dbs or files into the new machine. This is more reliable and also faster than just do a full dump of the system.
Nix os has a thing like that. Personally I use an arch distrobox. I have a backup of the distrobox image container that I can put on any computer and have all the apps and settings available.
I did it from the other side of the planet. I accidentally ran an rm -rf … command on a running system. Luckily I had an identical system running that I could use to copy over the files, devices, etc.
Learning about inodes and /proc/xxx/fd works, I was able to recover enough files to then copy over the rest from the other system.
Doing it over SSH from the other side of the world was a tough 14 hours.
100% possible with a Windows 10 guest in kvm/libvirt.
You can connect the disk to your Linux system, and then pass through the disk’s entire block device to the VM. Windows will see the device as an actual disk, and you can perform your repairs that way. I have something like this in my domain definition to pass through my game drive to my Windows 10 VM: pastebin.com/GzuvMTWP
I can even use the manufacturer’s SSD maintenance tool from my VM.
Edit: lemmy doesn’t seem to like XML in code blocks, so used pastebin instead.
Also, don’t forget to take a look at time shift or w/e it’s called. It’s a tool that creates btrfs system snapshots. It creates them when most updates are installed, and you can make em manually too. Really good if you start setting custom kernel stuff or w/e. Allows easy rollbacks from grub menu.
Fedora or, the ProtonGE guys spin Naburo (spelling?) Is also a good choice.
But if you don’t have any complex software requirements besides gaming and the usual desktop apps, then Bazzite is a much, much better option. It gets updates much more earlier than Nobara (which is still stuck on Fedora 38), and is much more stable (immutable OS) and more gaming optimised. You can even boot directly into “gaming mode” for a Steam Deck-like experience, with all the same (+more) optimizations that you’d get from the Deck.
Thank you for the suggestions. I’ll def be looking at new flavour of distros as my knowledge of Linux expands. Garuda was just the first one that made me jump.
+1 from my side for universal-blue.org, where Bazzite is part of.
@Ultimatenab I often see Garuda and other distros like those appealing to newcomers, because they come themed ootb and look fancy af. Don’t forget that you can get every tweak of that by just installing a theme, which is a matter of seconds.
Garuda is based on Arch, which is known to be not as highly noob friendly as some others.
For “normal” users like us especially, who just want to game and do other normie stuff, the immutable Fedora variants are excellent. uBlue fixes some of their minor issues, and they run wonderfully.
They work just how Linux should do it as desktop OS imo, and how other non-Linux-OSs should supposed to be too.
Also, there will soon come a time where you begin Distro-hopping and reinstall your OS every weekend. On immutable Fedora, you can change your DE (the GUI/ desktop environment, which often defines the distro) with one command cleanly and switch from KDE to Gnome for example, which feels like a clean reinstall, but keeps your data and config.
I do enjoy a challenge and having to use cli is what got me into my profession. I did my research and found Arch to be one of the better distros out there, but I didn’t want to start at the deep end as I don’t have time like to fully delve into it like I used to.
You can always use Fedora Atomic with an Arch Distrobox.
Silverblue and the Arch container update themself, and you can always enjoy your Arch CLI if you want :) I wouldn’t say Arch is unreliable, but it won’t intervene if you do something stupid.
SB on the other hand is almost unbrickable and extremely low maintenance, which I like a lot.
But if you did your research and enjoy Arch/ it’s derivatives, then have fun! Arch is great and if it suits your taste, then that’s wonderful! 😊
the repos are either close to upstream, or they backport security fixes. Everything else is not secure
make working, secure, sometimes branded bundles including Desktop, some apps, some specific software
the bundles get updated and if it is a point release, upgraded to a new set of packages. That is called a "Distro version"
This ensures new features and security fixes
the Distros care about bug reports, work with upstream, getting new contributors, packaging (bundling the packages, presets, libraries into a set with a name, handling dependencies etc.)
Distros also often package and build their own Kernel or multiple ones. These kernels are general purpose most often, even though there is the kernel-hardened or Oracles “unbreakable kernel” (whatever that is). Also there is a lts Kernel that has backported security fixes, as well as other releases of the kernel like git (latest of everything)
Distros take care of the versioning, so not every package is always the latest but tested to work with other packages.
Distros also implement security systems like SELinux and Apparmor with matching configurations
So you see that is highly complex. So stay as close to upstream as possible to get the best experience. I think of the main distros as
Debian + Ubuntu
Fedora + the RHEL stuff or clones (Oracle, Alma, Rocky etc)
Opensuse, SEL
Arch
Gentoo
Alpine (busybox and musl, not real Gnu+Linux)
NixOS
GUIX
ClearLinux
Coreboot (yes that is a Linux distro)
Slackware and other probably outdated projects
small ones with different focus
All the others are either downstream modifications of these, or less known. Some Line ublue, EndeavorOS etc. also just take an upstream distro and change very little.
If you plan on using windows only for games and absolutely nothing else then there isn’t much of a point in making a shared partition between the two OS’es. Just keep them separate, to each partition its own. (So your first example win 100gb, Linux 400gb is what I personally would go with)
I did this way back in the day on my Mandrake installation with a 1.44" floppy. Only tricky part was that I had to run cp from the floppy instead of from normal $PATH as I’d wiped out /bin.
I’m guessing that you’ve been using kernels from packages provided by your distribution and its maintainers simply haven’t decided yet that Wayland is used wide enough to put things it needs into default kernel. But that’s just a matter of time.
On distribution I use, for example, I did not have to compile my own kernel when I decided to check Wayland out. But that’s only because kernel package maintainers of my distribution have decided to enable it earlier
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