patchexempt

patchexempt, 6 months ago

it’s easy to recommend a ThinkPad for Linux, and something in the T or P series laptops might suit you. video editing is a potential difficulty though, as that feels a little more workstation-grade than the rest, and you’ll probably want to go big on RAM (32GB would be best) and be sure to get at least an intel i7. I’ve not had great luck with battery life on AMD (shame because everything else is great) but perhaps others have tips for doing better.

you could also go for the ThinkPad yoga models (make sure they’re still ThinkPad though! they also sell a different model line just called “yoga”) if you wanted a tablet/convertible for graphics work.

anyway look at the T14, P14s, or P16 if you want something bigger. whatever the latest generation of those models is.

patchexempt, 6 months ago

I’ve used rclone with backblaze B2 very successfully. rclone is easy to configure and can encrypt everything locally before uploading, and B2 is dirt cheap and has retention policies so I can easily manage (per storage pool) how long deleted/changed files should be retained. works well.

also once you get something set up. make sure to test run a restore! a backup solution is only good if you make sure it works :)

patchexempt, 6 months ago

these are my choice as well, and they work pretty flawlessly with Linux over Bluetooth; I use Momentum 4s for many hours each day to do meetings and they’ve been highly reliable. however they are not perfect:

• ear pads are non-standard and have a built in plastic backing; I’m worried about long-term availability of replacements
• can’t do audio+mic over 3.5mm headphone jack, just audio. makes them useless for gaming when you don’t want Bluetooth latency
• they have USB audio support which I hoped could be used in place of that 3.5mm connection, but the quality is so poor that everything sounds like you’re on a Skype call from 2003

so they are good but don’t solve all problems, still looking for that perfect set of headphones, but these are excellent as work headphones where I’m just doing meetings and listening to music.

patchexempt, 6 months ago

I hadn’t heard of CasaOS before; looks very cool. I am currently on TrueNAS and it’s been fine, but I had been running it in a VM because it wasn’t a good fit for running other things along side it. This seems like an interesting solution, thanks!

patchexempt, 6 months ago

I got out of the “surplus hardware” a while ago; way too expensive and noisy to run, so super recommend ditching the poweredge. for home use, I ended up just going with a USB3 JBOD for storage, and a Intel NUC (which I think they don’t make anymore). it runs a ton of virtualized servers under kvm, a virtualized NAS, all without issue because it honestly spends most of its time nearly idle. point is: it’s definitely nice to have it all in one case and with high speed storage but maybe having to find something that can house a ton of drives isn’t a strict need if you aren’t actually going to put a ton of load on it.

patchexempt, 6 months ago

fwiw I’ve been on Wayland for a few years now and the amount of times I’ve had to think “oh, I’m on Wayland” are in the single digits. not to pretend it you don’t run into things you have to solve or alternatives you have to find, you definitely do, but I’ve been very happy especially over the last year or so.

I do not use asahi though so I can’t comment on that specifically.

patchexempt, 6 months ago

yes, I’m using sway as well. i was lucky that my old i3 config mostly worked without modification, although it took a while to find good replacements for many of the little apps I’d come to rely on. I settled on bemenu, waybar, and then a dozen little glue apps like clipboard managers eventually fell into place. the archlinux wiki pages on sway and wayland are a great resource.