I can recommend Debian or Fedora. They are both mature distros that are pretty easy to install and generally work well with minimal fuss and are easy to maintain. I often see Linux Mint recommend, including in this thread. I’ve never used it so I can’t speak to it. But I have every reason to believe it’s a solid choice.

As for transfer process, since you mention using spare disks, NTFS filesystems are supported and you may be able to just copy files off of them. I don’t know if bitlocker is supported.

I love Linux, but I admit these are valid. I’ve had some of these same issues.

Sleep mode that doesn’t work consistently,

I haven’t had any issues with sleep on my devices, but I have in the recent past on previous hardware.

WiFi driver issues, printer driver issues, touchpad driver issues,

My WiFi doesn’t work at all on my desktop. Though it’s worked on a live image from another distro so seems likely to be an issue with the distro’s distributed kernel, not a Linux one. I run a rolling release distro so won’t be that the kernel is too old. But don’t care so haven’t troubleshot it much. My printer requires the use of vendor provided drivers, which are only available for some distros. It works, but not a solution I’m happy with. Never had touchpad issues.

several different wonky ways to install programs instead of just double-clicking an .exe and pressing “next-next-OK”,

I think package repos > collecting and installing your software piecemeal from all over the place. But having to deal with repos, flatpaks, appimages, etc. can be daunting.

random shutdown of programs for no reason or error codes

Sounds like an OOM process kill maybe? That’ll show in your kernel logs if so. But no immediate visual feedback.

…the list goes on. And on topnof that, all the stuff that people are used to using that just doesn’t run on Linux at all.

If there’s proprietary software that doesn’t run on Linux that someone wants/needs to run and there aren’t any viable alternatives then yeah, probably a non-starter. There’s wine of course but it can be a crapshoot. No shade intended towards the project. It’s amazing what it can do, even if it can’t do everything.

I love Linux. I read this rant. I still love Linux.

Fine points. And I am considering that simplicity might be worth it. Except for:

Another fix might be moving towards software that doesn’t require the capacity to reverse updates frequently.

Totally solid advice, but I love my rolling release distro though. So for the time being I’m willing to accept the associated risk.

Your comment as well as @stupid_asshole69@hexbear.net were really food for thought for me. stupid_asshole69 advising against, and yours as a cautionary tale.

This would be a complex stack to accomplish my goal. It occurs to me that it’d be mdadm (raid 1) > LUKS > btrfs since btrfs can’t do encryption which is right in the middle of that stack, so I couldn’t use it’s raid 1 functionality. If any of those pieces break, all the protection they would have otherwise provided me goes out the window.

And I’m not really worried about losing data. I already backup my personal files and most of my configs. The appeal with this kind of setup is the data redundancy and fairly quick recovery. But a partition clone like what saved you also works pretty well for that purpose. I don’t know what I’ll do just yet, but definitely taking all that in to consideration.

I wasn’t familiar with timeshift so I took a look at it. My primary use case for snapshots is to take one before updates. So I can load from the snapshot if there’s issues. It doesn’t look like using it with ext4 would fulfill this use-case. But it looks like it also supports btrfs snapshots so could be useful as a UI to configure that.

Hearing roughly a decade of successful use, especially on systems with constrained resources, certainly makes me lean further towards btrfs.

its RAID ≠ 0/1/10 are buggy, but 0/1/10 are considered reliable.

btrfs has been solid and done everything I could want. It was a huge upgrade from mdadm and lvm

@ikidd@lemmy.world said that btrfs is poor at software RAID. I’ll do a little research in to how it fares for RAID 1 vs mdadm. I don’t see any reason I couldn’t do mdadm>luks>btrfs if that’s the better choice. But if btrfs is reliable and with comparable performance, I’d certainly rather do that.

It’s the shits at software RAID, but that’s rarely a thing on a workstation.

I am using a RAID 1 mirror over two disks. So that’s good to know. I’ll do a little research and see if it’s better to let mdadm handle that.

Look at btrfs-assistant for adminstration. That’s what Fedora ships with, I think it uses Snapper in the backend.

Doesn’t look like that’s in the void repo. But that’s ok, I don’t mind learning the command line tools.

I don’t know specifically about a medical lab tech program. But I do know about clinical software in general. It is by and large proprietary Widows software. Seems like something you may encounter. But said software could be delivered via Citrix, which does have a Linux client.

Gross. I didn’t know that. I do occasionally use AirBnB. I’m aware of their impact on the rental market, so I favor hotels most of the time. But there have been a few occasions in recent years where I was traveling in a larger group and an AirBnB made more sense. But no more of that.

I looked in to this a little, and Joe Gebbia is no longer the CEO, but he is still on the board. Still a good enough reason to boycott.

Risk is also a factor re: self hosting.

• You’re exposing potential attack vectors, which is particularly concerning if self hosting = home hosting.
• Also with home hosting, it’s probably against your ISP’s TOS. It is for mine (I actually read it!). Will they do anything? Probably not. But it’s a risk.
• You could face legal issues if someone posts illegal content, since you’re hosting it. Even unwittingly.

Those concerns are what stop me. Because I otherwise think I’d enjoy hosting a little corner in the fediverse.

NixOS is a declarative distro. Meaning it you can declare pretty much every aspect of it from what software is installed to how the system is configured from a config file.

Using your calandar example, you can list Thunderbird (or whatever) as a package you want in the configuration and it will be installed. You can also use that same configuration on another machine and produce the same environment.

Relevant to the original point, since all your software is listed in a text file, you can easily see exactly what’s installed.

Void for desktop/laptop. These are the things I like about it.

• Rolling release
• Initial installation is minimal, and doesn’t foist a specific DE or other unessential software on me.
• No systemd
• Nothing similar to Arch’s AUR. I know a lot of people love it, but I do not. I mention as the distros are similar.

Debian for my server. But I plan to migrate to Devuan.

• Stable and well tested
• Huge package selection
• Pretty ubiquitously supported. If for whatever reason what you want to run isn’t in the repo, .deb packages and apt repos are often available.
• Minimal installation available.

It’s a novel idea. But despite the article’s claims this is not a practical alternative to a laptop in planes, coffee shops, etc. Nor is a minipc inherently more serviceable than a laptop as others have pointed out.

For traveling, if it’s a longer trip, it almost makes sense to me as you’d have it set up for a while. Though I’d do a mini ITX system. The ones with external power supplies and no drive bays or expansion slots are pretty small. But even then, I don’t feel like this would be significantly better than a laptop. And that’s a lot to buy for a niche use case.

Edit: spelling and grammar

My tenuous understanding from an article I read about the AT protocol but barely remember is that it can’t be fully decentralized. I think you have to use bluesky for user authentication. And I think it said the hosting hardware requirements would be significant to the point where it’s not very feisable. I welcome corrections/clarifications.

Point is, assuming that’s reasonably correct, true decentralization isn’t possible. And by it’s nature as a big corporate owned site, enshittification is inevitable.

Best I can tell post blur, those posts are marked NSFW. You can choose to hide those posts. Assuming you’re signed in anyway, I’m not familiar enough with that interface to tell.

Looks like Win7 came out in 2008. So did KDE4 https://timeline.kde.org/. I’ve pretty much always used KDE so it’s a good measuring stick for me.

My completely subjective opinion is they were pretty equivalent. Win7 wasn’t bad. But neither was KDE4.

+1 for installing Arch. If you have enough knowledge of Linux to understand what Arch is and why it is, comparatively, a more involved installation. Then you’re probably ready to install it. As was mentioned in another content, long as you know the basics, it’s not as hard as you might think. Also as suggested in another comment installing in a VM or spare hardware is good practice.

As for learning, take the time to understand the commands you’re copy/pasting. Read the man page, see what the flags you’re pasting in to. That might sound daunting at first, and you might not always be able to completely wrap you’re head around it. But you’ll learn more and more over time.

I’d love to see something like this in a tower format, and with regular 5.25" bays with faceplates rather than these faux floppy drives.

I’d pay a somewhat unreasonable amount for that.