Basically the scheme from Office Space

One thing to keep in mind: if someone gave you a 5.25" floppy disk with this type of data on it, even if the data was perfectly readable, would you have any way to do it? You’d need to hunt down someone whos into retro technology and hope you can figure out how to decode the information. The format itself became obsolete, so even if the data would theoretically be accessible, the means to access said data may not be.

Point is, what are the chances that CD drives will be around in hundreds of years outside of a museum or personal collection? They’re already becoming more and more uncommon after only a couple decades. But there really isn’t a great solution to this, especially when it comes to video, because you can’t just print it out.

Side note, are you sure that CD Golds are more durable than M-Disk?

Okay so genuine question from someone who’s used various distros for all sorts of things over the years, just never as a daily driver. What sorts of things have caused your revulsion towards Windows? Aside from Microsoft’s bullcrap like Alexa or MS Store ads which can all be disabled, I’ve personally never had enough of a problem with Windows that justified the effort required to move away from it. And I would consider myself a power user who loves to customize things.

Again, I just want to genuinely understand what sorts of problems people have that cause them to hate using Windows that much, even if they’re just subjective things.

I’m currently in engineering undergrad and this looks like it’ll be a lifesaver. Wolfram Alpha can do some pretty good work with units sometimes. But a lot of the time it’ll do weird stuff like refuse to interpret “V” as “volt”, so you have to type out the full name of every single unit. This language should handle that a million times better.

I would look for a dongle that specifically markets itself as being Raspberry Pi compatible. Most stuff you find will prioritize Windows, but if it’s marketed to work with the Pi you know it’ll have at least some level of Linux compatibility. Once you find one, try to figure out what chipset it uses, then search if it’s supported by a handful of the distros you wanna try.

In that case, I don’t think the problem is with Arch. The battery is likely shot, as going from partly charged -> dead that quickly is a very common symptom of one that’s reached the end of its life.

When you say you need to connect the charger to get it to boot up again, do you mean boot to Linux or even to just show the BIOS? If the former, it might be that the battery level isn’t being read correctly by the OS, but if it’s the latter, the battery or its related circuitry is likely failing and you’ll need a replacement battery.

Personally I would definitely recommend starting with a live USB. It’s rare, but I’ve had a few times where setting up dual-boot broke the bootloader somehow and getting it back was a massive pain in the ass.

Likely because editing on desktop is much more common and so gets the majority of the focus. A comprehensive photo editor for a mobile platform is probably just too niche to attract enough developer interest

Hmm, I would only purchase them as a third (or more) layer of redundancy, or maybe for storing things like ripped media that could just be re-ripped (or re-torrented) should the drives fail. I would not trust them for anything important since you have no idea what kind of environment they were in for all those years.

Personally, I haven’t run into a situation where I could only configure something via UI. There’s always been an option to toggle between a UI editor, and just a text editor for the appropriate YAML. There could be exceptions that I haven’t encountered, but they’re definitely few and far between.

It just says that it’s a “popular” instance, meaning it’s likely just an algorithm putting it on that page that doesn’t know any better.

If possible, maybe try dual booting a Windows install just to test if the games run better there. If they do, it’s probably a problem with your system or your configuration, but if not, it’s likely your hardware. Might also want to look at your BIOS settings and see if something somehow got reset there, like your RAM clock.

To be fair, I’m guessing the majority of Pi’s are used headless anyway. Plus even the older Optiplexes have DVI, which is just HDMI without the audio or fancy stuff like ARC. Won’t be getting 4K or anything, but still a very good video output and IMO adequate for almost all use cases.

That’s only if you want to watch it outside your home network, and either way I would recommend not just opening a port to the world like that. I’d say to use Tailscale (which is trivially easy to install) for remote viewing.

Personally, I used TrueNAS Core (known as simply FreeNAS at the time) for my very first NAS setup knowing nothing about BSD-based systems, and it’s been pretty much fine. It has ZFS which is absolutely desirable for a NAS that you store important things on, and It has some quirks but Ive been able to accomplish everything I’ve wanted to with it just by looking up the miriad of guides available. Not saying it’s better than the alternatives, just sharing my personal experience.

However, if you’ve already got OMV setup and it’s working for you so far, I would stick with it. I believe you could always import your drives into another NAS system if you decide to move later, so why fix what isn’t broken?

Ah, I see. If you’re really looking for a beginner option, I might just setup a Samba share for the drive. Then you can get into more advanced options once you get more comfortable.

How come the folder share you currently have isn’t sufficient? Most systems should be able to access Samba, so what particular goal are you trying to accomplish?

If you’re actually ripping bluerays, I would highly recommend using MakeMKV. It’s technically paid software but while it’s in beta you can can a free license key from their forums. BluRays can be formatted oddly and include a bunch of crap you probably don’t want (preroll ads, etc), so when I tried to rip one with jusy ffmpeg it was a pain, but MakeMKV deals with most of that for you and gets a 1-to-1 copy of the movie files + anything like captions and alternate audip tracks.

Interesting, I’ve had a pretty good experience with Jellyfin recently (it used to be pretty unstable but has gotten better with time). I mostly use the browser and Roku clients, and haven’t had any issues apart from a couple of movies that stuttered. I’ve used it over LAN, a VPN, and just straight port-forwarding. However, I am running it on my Windows gaming machine since my Linux box isn’t fast enough for 4K transcoding, so it could be that the Windows version is more stable for whatever reason.