Solar Bear

Whatever you get for your NAS, make sure it’s CMR and not SMR. SMR drives do not perform well in NAS arrays.

I just want to follow this up and stress how important it is. This isn’t “oh, it kinda sucks but you can tolerate it” territory. It’s actually unusable after a certain point. I inherited a Synology NAS at my current job which is used for backup storage, and my job was to figure out why it wasn’t working anymore. After investigation, I found out the guy before me populated it with cheapo SMR drives, and after a certain point they just become literally unusable due to the ripple effect of rewrites inherent to shingled drives. I tried to format the array of five 6TB drives and start fresh, and it told me it would take 30 days to run whatever “optimization” process it performs after a format. After leaving it running for several days, I realized it wasn’t joking. During this period, I was getting around 1MB/s throughput to the system.

Do not buy SMR drives for any parity RAID usage, ever. It is fundamentally incompatible with how parity RAID (RAID5/6, ZFS RAID-Z, etc) writes across multiple disks. SMR should only be used for write-once situations, and ideally only for cold storage.

I explained my reasoning and you made no attempt to engage with it and just asked a question I already answered in depth. I’m not sure what you want, but it’s clearly not an answer.

Hard disagree. Everything you learn on Arch is transferable because Arch is vanilla almost to a fault. The deep understandings of components I learned from Arch have helped me more times than I can count. It’s only non-transferable if you view each command as an arcane spell to be cast in that specific situation. I’ve fixed so many issues over the years using this knowledge, and it’s literally what landed me my current job and promotions.

Arch is why I know how encryption and TPM works at a deeper level, which helped me find and fix the issue a Windows Dell PC was having that kept tripping into Bitlocker recovery. Knowledge of Grub and kernel parameters that I learned from Arch’s install process is why I was able to effortlessly break into a vendor’s DNS server whose root password was lost by the previous sysadmin before me when everybody else was panicking. Hell, it even helps in installing other distros, because advanced disk partitioning is a hot mess on a lot of distro GUI installers, so intimate knowledge of what I actually need helps me work around their failings. Plus all the countless other times that knowledge has helped me solve little problems instantly, because I knew how it worked from implementing it manually. When my coworkers falter because the GUI fails them and they know nothing else, I simply fix it with a command.

If you use Arch and actually make the effort to learn, not just copy and paste commands from the wiki, you will objectively learn a lot about how Linux works. If you seek a career in Linux, there’s nothing I can recommend more than transitioning to using Arch (not Garuda, not Manjaro, Arch) full-time on your daily driver computer.

Anyways, after about a decade I’ve recently switched to NixOS. Now there’s a distro where the skills you learn can’t be transferred out, but the knowledge I gained from Arch absolutely transferred in and gave me a head start.

I think they’re just making fun of the bad font kerning in the app which causes a gap in the word Unmanaged

Your response is “why are you doing X, you should do Y”

Because they’re right, you shouldn’t do X. I know that’s not a satisfying answer for most people to hear, but it’s often one people need to hear.

If the process must run as root, then giving a user direct and unauthenticated control over it is a security vulnerability. You’ve created a quick workaround for your issue, and to be clear it is unlikely to realistically cause you problems individually, but on a larger scale that becomes a massive issue. A better solution is required rather than recommend everybody create a hole in their security like yours in order to do this thing.

If this is something that unprivileged users reasonably want to control, then this control should be possible unprivileged, or at least with limited privilege, not by simply granting permanent total control of a root service.

This is ultimately an upstream issue more than anything else.

Refurbished drives get their SMART data reset during the process, they absolutely had more than that originally.

Recent NixOS convert, where has this work of art been all my life

Docker is open source, licensed under Apache-2.0. Not really sure what you’re talking about.

The games will still be designed by humans. Generative AI will only be used as a tool in the workflow for creating certain assets faster, or for creating certain kinds of interactivity on the fly. It’s not good enough to wholesale create large sets of matching assets, and despite what folks may think, it won’t be for a long time, if ever. Not to mention, people just don’t want that. People want art to have intentional meaning, not computer generated slop.

This is no different than anything else, we naturally appreciate the skill it takes to create something entirely by hand, even if mass production is available.

If you’re waiting for Jellyfin to run some kind of relay like Plex, you’ll be waiting a long time. That takes a lot of money to upkeep, and the demand for people who self-host FOSS and then want to depend on an external service is very minimal, certainly not enough to sustain such a service. I’d recommend just spending a weekend afternoon learning how to set up Nginx Proxy Manager and being done with it, the GUI makes it very easy.

If Linux was that easy, adoption would be higher

People use what comes on the computer. OS usage on the Steam Deck is overwhelmingly Linux because that’s what comes on it. This indicates that Linux is perfectly fine for the average person, it just needs to come pre-installed. Very few people install their own OS either way, Linux or Windows.

I assume doog is the opposite of good, in which case I agree

I chose Bookstack for the same situation. It’s dead simple in usage and maintenance. No issues yet!

You may already know this now, but I want to post it for those who don’t because it’s really cool and way ahead of its time.

That was for the VMU, the visual memory card. It stored your game saves but also some games had minigames you could play directly on it, often with bonuses in the main game. In the Sonic Adventure games you could take care of chao and such on it. That thing ate batteries like candy though.

I will have an OG Xiaomi Mi Box and it’s absurd how over the years it went from a purely functional media device to a complete shit show covered ads. Genuinely disgusted me every time I turned the TV on. I couldn’t stand it anymore, I had to tear out the launcher with ADB and replace it with FLauncher.

I wish Kodi wasn’t such a pain in the ass to deal with, especially for YouTube. We really need a new FOSS media center application. Until then, at least FLauncher works for now as a simple app switcher for a handful of Android apps.

Recently started using Tempo with Navidrome. Haven’t had more than a few days of use yet, but everything has worked exactly as expected! Can’t ask for much more than that.

If I were to list every FOSS project that has lasted longer, I’d have to spend all day writing the post. winRAR is unique in that it’s one of the only pieces of long-lasting proprietary software that didn’t die or turn to crap. Such things are not unique or even rare in FOSS.

WinRAR will either die, or be sold and squeezed by its new owners. Nobody lives forever and no asset goes unflipped in this market. You can say you won’t update, but that just leaves you vulnerable.

It’s not an opinion that proprietary for-profit software will betray you, it is an inevitability. It has happened every single time. If it was FOSS, we could salvage it. It’s proprietary, so we can’t. When it fails it must simply be abandoned. I just hope you learn the right lesson when this happens.