I completely agree with you, no discussion there. Active monitoring is required. Backup in 3-2-1 would solve the same source batch issue. Some backups should be kept spun down / cold storage so the likelihood of failure at the same time is close to none. Still I would mix the production and backups HDDs to avoid that.
If you “RAID and backup enough” any chepo used hard drive is a good and valid. :)
Generally speaking datacenter drives with manufacturer warranty will be a good option because they’re easy to get replaced by the manufacturer without much fuzz. For any second hard drive I look at bad blocks > count of starts > time they’ve been running and if it isn’t an absurd number they should be fine.
What’s your level of trust in their provider, netcup? For instance I would never trust anything hosted at Hetzner and Linode because they’ve been known to intercept traffic.
Either way, the end result is slow, the UI is basic… and the transition between the host and VMs fails half the time or performs bad like cursor going not where it is supposed to go.
I would advise you get Debian + GNOME and install all software via flatpack/flathub. This way you’ll have a very solid and stable system and all the latest software that can be installed, updated and removed without polluting your base system. The other option obviously is to with those hipster of a systems like pop, mint and x-ubuntu.
Now I’m gonna tell you what nobody talks about when moving to Linux:
The “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;
I hope you don’t require “professional” software such as MS Office, Adobe Apps, Autodesk, NI Circuit Design and whatnot. The alternatives wont cut it if you require serious collaboration and virtualization, emulation (wine) may work but won’t be nice. Going for Linux kinda adds the same pains of going macOS but 10x. Once you open the virtualization door your productivity suffers greatly, your CPU/RAM requirements are higher and suddenly you’ve to deal with issues in two operating systems instead of just one. And… let’s face it, nothing with GPU acceleration will ever run decently unless big companies start fixing things - GPU passthroughs and getting video back into the main system are a pain and add delays;
Proprietary/non-Linux apps provide good features, support and have tons of hours of dev time and continuous updates that the FOSS alternatives can’t just match.
Linux was the worst track ever of supporting old software, even worse than Apple;
Half of the success of Windows and macOS is the fact that they provide solid and stable APIs and development tools that “make it easy” to develop for those platforms and Linux is very bad at that. The major pieces of Linux are constantly and ever changing requiring large and frequent re-works of apps. There aren’t distribution “sponsored” IDEs (like Visual Studio or Xcode), userland API documentation, frameworks etc.;
The beautiful desktop you see online are bullshit with a very few exceptions. Most are just carefully designed screenshots but once you install the theme you’ll find out visual inconsistencies all over the place, missing icons and all kinds of crap that makes Microsoft look good;
Be ready to spend A LOT of time to make basic things work. Have coffee and alcohol (preferably strong) at your disposal all the time.
(Wine for all the greatness it delivers still sucks and it hurts because it’s true).
I am running 10.6. Chromium Legacy is for 10.7 and above
Can’t you run 10.7 on that laptop? It seems like you can, and that will greatly improve your software situation. Another thing to consider is to replace the HDD with an SSD. That computer will run any SATA drive (I’ve tested with modern WD blue drives), just grab something like 250GB for 30€ and enjoy speed.
There was also another user who gave me a link to some software that modifies mixed-mode ISOs so that they will boot on my potato laptop.
Yes but Debian provides that out-of-the-box and officially supported. That means everything will work fine and as stable as Debian is usually.
Despite the CPU being 64-bit, the distro MUST be 32-bit. This is because of the MacBook’s BIOS, which prevents 64-bit bootloaders from working.
That’s the thing, you can run a 64-bit distro as long as you’ve a 32 bit grub starting it :) You run Debian 12 amd64 on a 32 bit EFI:
As of 2023 and Debian 12 the amd64 installation media (available in netinst form) includes the UEFI boot loaders necessary for both i386 and amd64 boot. By selecting “64-bit install” from the initial boot menu, debian-installer will install a 64-bit (amd64) version of Debian. The system will automatically detect that the underlying UEFI firmware is 32-bit and will install the appropriate version of grub-efi to work with it.