If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.
To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.
You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches
But remember that the kernel knows best — this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).
I’ve been super happy with it. Knock on wood it’s been super reliable. I have a single ZFS drive, take snapshots with various retention policies, nothing fancy.
Another fun thing is to set up a reverse proxy on it as an endpoint for services on your local (home) network which can only be accessed by VPN. For example, my Jellyfin service isn’t public facing, but I didn’t want e.g. my parents to need to set up WireGuard. So instead they can point their TV to a raspberry pi on their network to access the service — even a first gen RPI can handle Jellyfin reverse proxy over WireGuard for moderate bitrates!
WireGuard, and an external HDD. Run at a remote location for off-site backup.
I do this with a raspberry pi 3 at the in-laws. I copied the data over locally before setting it up, and after that it’s just nightly incremental rsync, which is fine even over my slow (35Mbps) upload.
IIRC chvt is a privileged command, which makes sense (if an unprivileged user could execute this command they could effectively brick the computer for a local user).
That said, my understanding is that modern DE’s are given a lot of access, so presumably chvt is allowed (and in this case, is required because as others mentioned, password is required). So the only other option is to fail unlocked, which is all kinds of Bad.
It’s overpriced hardware
Have you seen the M4 benchmarks?
If you’re memory bound then sure, you can get way more bang for your buck with Intel/AMD. But for pretty amazing CPU performance I think the “Apple is overpriced” trope isn’t really true any more.
Maybe they mean four year uptime…
For very simple tasks you can usually blindly log in and run commands. I’ve done this with very simple tasks, e.g., rebooting or bringing up a network interface. It’s maybe not the smartest, but basically, just type root, the root password, and dhclient eth0 or whatever magic you need. No display required, unless you make a typo…
In your specific case, you could have a shell script that stops VMs and disables passthrough, so you just log in and invoke that script. Bonus points if you create a dedicated user with that script set as their shell (or just put in the appropriate dot rc file).
I like the “this can’t really be compared to Windows or macOS” aspects of tiling window managers. I like it when the window manager sort of “gets out of the way,” but that’s just me.
I think there’s a bias in the US against this sort of thing that doesn’t exist (or not to the same extent) in Europe due to the age of the cities/buildings.
In the US, a building from the 1700s is a historic artifact to be cherished, while in parts of Europe a building from the 1500s is just the local pub.
So, the US is often hesitant to modify these old buildings, but Europe seems to have more of a perspective of “it’s a building, not a museum, let’s give it new life by modifying it.”
This is just from the perspective of me, from the US — and I think these old/new buildings are really neat!
IIRC that was the release that cleaned up the make output substantially.
EulerOS, a Linux distro, was certified UNIX.
But OS X, macOS, and at least one Linux distro are/were UNIX certified.
The network gear I manage is only accessible via VPN, or from a trusted internal network…
…and by the gear I manage, I mean my home network (a router and a few managed switches and access points). If a doofus like me can set it up for my home, I’d think that actual companies would be able to figure it out, too.
IIRC Torvalds uses Fedora.
(Debian for me.)
Remote backup server would be my suggestion.
Configure it with a VPN to talk to your home network and set it up at a trusted friend’s or family’s place.
I do this with a raspberry pi and an external HDD that takes daily/weekly/monthly snapshots, with daily rsync. Works nicely for me.
We tend to use between 3kWh (vacation/idle power consumption) and around 8kWh per day. If we switched to electric stove, water heater, and heat pump, and add a hot tub, that’d increase substantially. But if we added solar (on our long Todo list…), the battery in the article (60kWh) would probably be able to handle all our storage needs, and it’d fit in he garage (bonus of it can be placed outside/under a deck!). I live in a major city, but I would absolutely love to effectively be off grid.
Exciting stuff — it seems these are touted as being extremely robust/safe, which is of course important for me if it’s going to be in/near our house. Storage density not a huge concern, but price is somewhat important — let’s hope this sort of thing ticks all the boxes.
This happened to me when Debian switched from SysV to systemd. I am not the only person who experienced this (e.g., https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147478 ).
This is not to say the systemd behavior is wrong, but it essentially changed the behavior of fstab. Whether this is Debian’s fault, Arch’s fault (per the above link), systemd’s fault, or my fault is a fair question. But this committed that most egregious of sins per our Lord and Savior Torvalds — it broke my userspace.
My favorite was when the behavior of a USB drive in /etc/fstab went from “hmm it’s not plugged in at boot, I’ll let the user know” to “not plugged in? Abort! Abort! We can’t boot!”
This change over previous init behavior was especially fun on headless machines…
Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).