thejevans

thejevans, 1 year ago

When I said “got rid of,” I mostly meant “gave to friends and family.”

I recently installed NixOS on my partner’s 2013 macbook air to give it a new lease on life, too.

thejevans, 1 year ago

I had similar issues. My Nvidia GPU was the main thing hold me back for so long. I finally upgraded to an AMD RX 7900 XTX and cycled my Nvidia GPU to my home server for transcoding, gpu compute, and KasmVNC GPU acceleration.

I also decided that ray tracing, HDR, and games that don’t support Linux just aren’t important to me, but it took me a long time to become okay with that.

For development, I guess I’ve been lucky in the type of work that I do in that Linux is a perfect fit. I find Windows to be far more of a hassle than it’s worth, but if you do game development or Windows-specific development, I can see that being a barrier.

thejevans, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I just got rid of my last Windows installation, and I got rid of all my Apple devices a couple years ago. The Linux life is so nice!

On the other hand, I just setup a Windows gaming machine for a friend (I would have pushed Linux, but I live far away and can’t commit to being tech support). There were so many hoops to jump through to cut through all the crap:

• I had to set the region to somewhere in the EU so that my friend can uninstall Edge sometime in March, 2024 without breaking other functionality
• I had to run a hidden script at a specific point during the install to allow me to not have to use a Microsoft account
• I had to disconnect the non-boot drive and reinstall because the Windows installer uses motherboard drive ordering instead of UUID to decide which drive to put the boot partition on.
• I had to run Win Debloat Tools to get rid of all the crap Microsoft adds to their OS
• I had to find a 3rd party driver update tool because the motherboard manufacturer’s software is terrible and installs a bunch of extra crap.
• I had to install a 3rd party Nvidia driver update tool because their official one requires making an account and gives a bunch of unwanted ads as notifications.

It’s seriously bonkers. It makes you really appreciate Linux as a whole and package managers in particular.

thejevans, 1 year ago

Windows 11 Pro is $200. There are ways to get it cheaper, but that is what Microsoft charges for it…and they still collect a bunch of data and serve you a bunch of ads.

thejevans, 1 year ago

I don’t know when the last time you tried to install Windows was, but when I installed Windows 11 Pro yesterday, there was no obvious option to install without an internet connection and a Microsoft account. To make that option appear, I had to hit shift+f10 at the country selection screen to open a command prompt and run the script located at “oobe\bypassrno.cmd” to have the option “I don’t have an internet connection” to pop up and allow me to bypass needing a Microsoft account.

thejevans, 1 year ago

For sure, there are compromises no matter what you pick. I just hit the point where Linux checked enough boxes for me to ditch Windows. I hope that it gets to that point for you eventually!

thejevans, 1 year ago

That’s fine, and people said the same thing about Windows 10, and Windows 7, and Windows XP, and…

If you control for bloat, tracking, and ads, the install process for Windows versions has gotten steadily more difficult as time goes on. Installing Windows 11 is a snap, too, … if you don’t care about all the crap they added.

The thing us Linux users are complaining about is not how easy it is to install if you accept the enshittification that Microsoft forces, but how difficult it is to install without it.

thejevans, 1 year ago

I use a 2013 macbook air for almost this exact use case. Ask friends and family if they have any old laptops lying around.

thejevans, 1 year ago

What hardware do you have? I have all AMD, and it works just fine on Nobara on Wayland.

thejevans, 1 year ago

I totally empathize. I did the same thing at the end of 2020 and just switched to an AMD GPU last month.

thejevans, 1 year ago

If you live near Washington, DC, I’ve got a good system ready to go that I’m selling.

thejevans, 1 year ago

I put it all under a spoiler tag because it’s a lot. Let me know if you’re interested!

inventory/specs# UPS Eaton 5SC 1000 full sine-wave inverter # Rack 13U enclosed rack w/casters and magnetic front door # Networking ## TP-Link EAP225 Wifi AP ## Aruba Networks S2500-24P-US Switch - 24 Port Gigabit Switch - PoE - 4x SFP+ 10Gbit ports # Servers ## Dell R720xd ### Components - 2x Intel Xeon E5-2667 v2 @ 3.3GHz (8-core CPUs) - 14x 8GB Samsung ECC 2Rx4 Dual Rank DDR3 10600R 1333MHz RAM (112 GB) - Intel 4P X520 NIC (2x SFP+ 10Gbit, 2x 1Gbit) - 2x 750W PSU - IDSDM 6YFN5 dual SD module - 2x Sandisk 16GB UHS-1 Extreme SDHC SD cards - PERC H710P Mini Host Bus Adapter - PERC H310 Host Bus Adapter - Dual 2.5" Hotswap Drive Backplane 0JDG3 - 2x Crucial MX500 500GB SSD - 2x 2.5" Dell Hotswap Drive Caddies/Trays - Front Hotswap HDD Backplane - 12x HGST Ultrastar KP06 6TB 7200RPM HDDs - 12x 3.5" Dell Hotswap Drive Caddies/Trays - Rack Rails (They hold the server in place, but they’re missing some bearings. If the server is pulled out on the rails it may not go back. Replacing these should be less than $50) - Locking front panel - iDRAC Module ### Notes - Runs ~235W at idle - Can handle many VMs and multiple simultaneous 4k Plex transcodes - This is basically the best set of parts for the xx20 series Dell servers and is more capable than a lot of the xx30 units ## Dell R710 ### Components - Rack Rails - Locking front panel - CD Drive to 2.5" Drive Adapter - Samsung 860 Evo 250GB SSD - Front Hotswap HDD Backplane - 6x 3.5" Dell Hotswap Drive Caddies/Trays - 2x 870W PSU - PERC H216 Host Bus Adapter - 2x Intel Xeon L5640 @2.26GHz (6-core CPUs) - 18x 4GB Samsung ECC 2Rx8 Dual Rank DDR3 10600R 1333MHz RAM (72GB) - Dell 0KJYDB 2xSFP+ 10Gbit NIC ### Notes - Set up to be an ideal backup server - Just add hard drives and it will be ready to go - iDRAC modules are available on eBay if you would like out of band management

thejevans, 1 year ago

I will not use software that has analytics that I have to opt out of if there is an alternative that has analytics off by default with the ability to opt-in.

The psychology surrounding opt-out vs opt-in is very well understood, and choosing to include analytics with an opt-out structure is taking advantage of people to make development potentially easier. Not cool.

thejevans, 1 year ago

As others have stated, porkbun + cloudflare + ddclient will do everything you need.

thejevans, 1 year ago

Make your own brackets with construction lumber or plywood?

The 45Drives homelab case is 17.125" deep

thejevans, 1 year ago

I do scientific computing and I’ve used Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, and NixOS for work.

Any and all of these can do what you need. Hell, you could probably throw your whole development environment into a docker container and use it anywhere. Pick one and go with it.

That said, here are my preferences:

Right now, I really like NixOS and Nix for development environments, but it’s a lot to learn, so I wouldn’t recommend it unless you were really excited to try it.

Before NixOS, I used Arch on my laptop, and it was soooo nice to be able to build my own desktop environment just the way I wanted it from the ground up, which is possible on any distribution, but the Arch documentation makes this much more approachable. If you are happy with KDE Plasma or Gnome, and you’re using well-supported hardware, then I wouldn’t say Arch is really worth the time (unless you’re excited to play with it).

Fedora and Nobara (a Fedora-based distribution with a lot of gaming-focused presets) have been a breath of fresh air coming off the heels of painstakingly setting up Arch and then NixOS. Fedora is pretty nice out of the box and Nobara has been the best experience of going from zero to gaming even when compared to Windows.

Debian (especially Debian 12) has been fantastic for servers and for machines that don’t need to use the newest hardware. It’s still my go-to for lots of things.

Ubuntu is fine, but Canonical, the company that makes it, has made some unfortunate choices lately, and with Debian 12 being as good as it is, I don’t think I’ll ever have a reason to go back.

Side note: One thing to look out for in the near future is System76’s COSMIC desktop environment, which seems to be doing a lot of things right. There is already active development to get it working on NixOS, and I’m sure it will be available on Pop!OS from the start. I would also bet that it would be ready to go on Arch not long after. It will likely eventually be easy to install on all distributions, but if you want to try that out as soon as it’s ready, one of those three would be a good option.

thejevans, 1 year ago

That is an entirely unreasonable suggestion from a security perspective.

thejevans, 1 year ago

SmartTubeNext (STN) is the Android TV equivalent of Revanced.

I did end up making a Google account just to get mine set up and for syncing subscriptions between STN and Revanced on my phone. I don’t use it for anything else.

As others have said, replacing the launcher with something like Sideload Channel Launcher 4 is a good option.

Other useful apps are Button Mapper (for killing the netflix remote button and for mapping the home button to your new launcher) and Send Files To TV to easily sideload apps without a ton of setup.

thejevans, 1 year ago

Transitioning from owning and using you own car to using a taxi service with an app solves parking issues and pretty much nothing else. Fuck Uber.

thejevans, 1 year ago

The COPR package didn’t work for me on Nobara, so I had to build from source, but it works great. There are a couple of things I don’t like, but overall seems pretty neat.

If I can get Xwayland to work nicely for steam with high refresh rates, then it seems like this might be the WM for me until COSMIC-DE comes out.