rastilin

They probably are, but it’s not really about cost, it’s about fear. I fear that while it costs $x to switch to Unreal Enigne now, it’ll cost $x+10 after a few weeks when they do their next decision, and $x+20 a month or so after that.

That’s fair. nixOS can be savage. But I think it’s also helpful for a beginner since you can’t break it. A beginner is much more likely to break their system than an expert.

nixOS , because it’s a completely atomic distribution, like a docker container OS style. You define the state of the system in a configuration file, which can even control the kernel, and you can switch to an older configuration file in any reboot. It’s more of a pain than the others, but it works ok out of the box and when you fix something it stays fixed so you’ll never end up in a situation where something breaks and you can’t fix it.

Also, all the packages bring their own versions of their own libraries and directly link to them so they’ll never break during upgrades, but conversely a lot of Linux installers that try to link to system libraries won’t work.

I can tell you from experience I have a Samsung T5 (500GB) that has over 95TB of writes over 5+ years to it and it’s only used up 17% of its spare blocks. The T7 which is the newer model is like $40, I’d just get one of those. They’re very reliable, I’ve bought a few and none of them have failed. The larger drives have more spare blocks and are even more resistant to writes.

Personally I would recommend a portable SSD, over a HDD as I’ve had several HDDs fail but never lost an SSD, BackBlaze backs this up with their total drive failure statistics being 2.5% for HDDs and under 0.5% for SSDs. Your real danger will be that a portable drive is guaranteed to get jostled and an SSD is far more resilient to that.

Oh wow, 100% improvements in some cases, that’s no joke.

EDIT: In Nginx, there’s one benchmark where they get tripled performance on the EPYC9754.

Bcachefs sounds incredible.

Yes, and every package specifically defines the exact version of its libraries that it needs and the system symlinks everything together package by package, so there’s no chance than an update will break something further upstream. The configuration file also controls things like MySQL configuration and user permissions so you can get literally the exact same system. I think even docker doesn’t control for library versions with its regular configuration.

EDIT: And it keeps older versions of the configuration file and its symlink arrangement around, so if something goes wrong, you can reboot the machine and select an older version from the bootloader.

More nixOS development. It’s the reproducible builds on the OS scale, one configuration file that will always generate exactly the same system when run, and you can update and rebuild from that file without restarting the system in most cases. This should make triangulating and fixing distro issues much easier, as well as making a distro easier to maintain from the user side.

In some places you can get a home internet line that runs through the mobile phone data network, and they tend to be more reliable than cabled connections, they can get even better if they use a modem data plan and not explicitly a home bulk plan. It really hinges on how much data you use and what plans are available where you are. Of course if you do it this way you won’t have a private IPV4, but if your ISP allows IPV6, that should be unique and directly accessible no matter what.

As the other poster mentioned there are routers that have a SIM connection as backup, and now they’re being offered with a SIM and automatic fail-over as part of some fiber to the home plans.

I’ve seen owncloud merge files together. Like, you open one file and see data from another file inside it. That to me was a dealbreaker.

There was an API floating around ages ago that let you mount a Gmail instance as a virtual hard drive and use it like block device. Dropbox does have an API for file access, so it’s entirely possible to write a miner that talks to Dropbox and not your local drive.

For management ports, I set up a firewall on the VPS to only respond to connections from known IPs.

I don’t see how it affects the Steam Deck. It’s entirely possible that the Steam Deck supports fTPM purely because it was part of the motherboard template Valve chose and it would have been more trouble to change it than to just leave it in.

Linux still has too many issues, for example…

• Fedora doesn’t provide binary drivers even if they exist, you need to get a pluggable wifi usb tool that is supported and install the repositories and configure binary drivers to get wifi working on a huge amount of laptops.
• Ubuntu does provide binary drivers but the configuration tool can just crash by itself a lot of the time and just fail to load the driver.
• Ubuntu’s desktop sometimes just crashes.
• Fedora uses some strange memory compression driver to handle its paging file and this can sometimes just crash the OS entirely by itself.

These are major issues that shouldn’t be issues, they should either have been fixed as a priority for the crashes or have some kind of workaround that doesn’t require owning specific USBs that regular people just won’t have. There’s no reason for the memory compression thing either, it probably doesn’t do that much for performance overall but random hard-locks are a huge negative. Linux is its own worst enemy on the desktop.

TPM is basically never for your benefit. It’s becoming a requirement because Microsoft is going to one day say “you can only run apps installed from the Windows Store, because everything else is insecure” and lock down the software market. Valve knows this which is why they’re going so hard on the Steam Deck and Linux.

If it became a thing, I’d keep an older machine around just for accessing stuff like that. How much is a second hand craptop these days, like $400, not nothing, but not a huge amount.

I had no idea Proton Drive was a thing. I’ll switch to it, Dropbox is becoming incredibly obnoxious with the advertising popups and notifications.

Objectively, Youtube Premium is the one streaming service that I actually use… with youtube dlp because actually I can’t stand the interface at all anymore; but even so, I use it and I feel ok about paying for it.

At this point non-internet connected Windows machines are such a niche part of their budget that they’re almost but not quite mandating cloud accounts just for installation. They can absolutely force this on people’s machines.

Absolutely, with TPM chips now being a requirement to install Windows, it’s only a matter of time until DRM becomes a mandatory low-level part of the OS.