You’ve gotten a lot of good replies, so I’ll give you an example:
My wife and I set up a Minecraft server on an old work computer of hers. We would SSH in, start the server, and play. However, if the host lost the SSH session, the entire server would crash because the session would close.
With tmux, we could attach, start the server, and unattach. I could start the server and later my wife could attach to close it. I could SSH on my phone via iSH, attach, start the server, unattach, and close the app. We could troubleshoot mods together, since we could both see everything that happened in the session on our screens.
It offered a level of flexibility a traditional SSH session doesn’t give.
Minecraft is a procedurally generated open world video game.
For multiplayer, the computer hosting the game has to be able to load the portion of the world for each player. Having a dedicated computer hosting the server allows for much smoother gameplay experience then trying to have a single PC both run the server and client.
The machine we used for the server was literally one of my wife’s old work PCs and we just use it to host these types of games. We previously ran an ARC: Survival Evolved server on it.
I had a sheevaplug or something like that (I can’t remember the exact name, but it was around 2010). That thing was hot and it actually stopped too much times. Then the raspberry pi 1 (the original). Too slow. I’ve upgraded to a Raspberry Pi 3, that I used a couple of times as a desktop when my laptop broke. That wasn’t fun, it was slow too. During COVID I sold that and bought a Pi 4 from an authorized seller, so it was the official price. I bought an SSD and an Argon One case. The fan broke after a few month of usage, so I sold the whole thing. Finally I went to eBay and bought a Dell Optiplex Micro. That thing is the best. Used as a desktop, also as a server. It’s fast, smallish (not that small as a RPi, but it’s close. It can go to a backpack), and upgradable. It can have two monitors, two ram sticks, an SSD Nvme and also an SSD SATA. It’s a little beast.
I second LinuxMint. When I first got in to linux I was (shamefully 😅) looking for something that was as close as possible to Windows and a turn key experience with both installation and app compatibility. Linux mint was what I settled on personally.
Fedora is a bit more complicated to install and configure, but once that’s done it’s not a difficult distro to use. And Silverblue makes it even easier to maintain than Mint as it’s immutable.
They’re for me to test. I’ve got an SSD in a USB3.2 enclosure, so the live ISOs run fast enough that there’s no noticeable difference to an installation on my main PC.
I’ve been using Xubuntu on my server for years, and Mint on my laptop for the last few years, and have been trying to switch to Mint on my PC, so I thought it’s about time to try some other distros before I fully commit.
I’ve got all the main distros, so will be distro hopping for a while to see how I get on, and if any of them jump out at me. I’ve always used Debian based distros, so I can see me sticking with one, but I’ve added the others to see if they’ve changed much in the last 20 years, and if I like the way they do things :)
Are you familiar with Fedora Silverblue or Universal Blue? It’s, in some ways, a halfway point between nix and Fedora. Another way to put it is that it builds on existing paradigms to create a declarative system based on Fedora.
I would choose Fedora + ansible for this. NixOS have configuration ansible-like that can be transfered and reproducable to every installation, but Ansible can’t replace it, and for me it matters because I love ansible so much…
You’ve basically identified the advantages and disadvantages of Nix properly.
When you learn Nix and how it works, it is incredibly powerful. Being able to version your entire OS with one configuration is incredible. Old software that messes things up just doesn’t exist. It’s easy to explore new software, configurations, and upgrades and roll back to your old state seamlessly. No more “well I deleted an environment variable and now my performance is 50% worse and I don’t even remember what that environment variable was named or where it should live.” With Nix, you can switch from i3 to Hyprland, try it out for a day, and then switch back to your old configuration seamlessly and easily.
The disadvantages are that you need to know Nix (the programming language and configuration file syntax) to do it, and they are complicated. Worth it in my opinion but it’s not easy.
Every other distro is basically different from Nix because of this, as you will be configuring them manually to a greater or lesser extent. I find that manual configuration to be annoying and I always had to create tools to help version my configs properly before Nix. But it is certainly easier to do since you just have to understand the software you’re installing and how to configure it. In Nix, you have to understand both that, and Nix.
I think it’s totally worth it. But only you can make that call for you.
Just disable score in your profile settings, man. That’s what I did. Score has no point, really. If someone disagrees with you, they can either ignore you or expose their reasoning. Votes are useless.
Have a ready Qemu image of a Windows install. Have a live distro that has (or can install to RAM) Qemu. Boot Windows using Qemu in the live environment, and VFIO-passthrough your NVME as a PCI device. Install and run the official Windows-based update tool, which now has raw access to the SSD.
I'll never buy Western Digital. I've given them too many chances and owned many over the last 20 years and they consistently fail. Even the more expensive ones I've owned had something stop working in them.
I thought that the trick with exposing the raw hardware to a VM was the coolest thing ever, since it negates this entire “do their special tools support Linux” issue. And you do it once every 6 months, maybe 4 times in total, until releases taper off.
But I don’t want to deal with Windows at all. Something like this may be acceptable for existing “pre Linux” hardware to have a solution after migration.
But I need new hardware in an environment where no Windows is left.
Prefer using Wayland over Xorg. Xorg’s design predates modern security practices and is considered insecure by many. For example, Xorg applications may record keystrokes while inactive.
If you must run Xorg, it is recommended to avoid running it as root. Within Wayland, the Xwayland compatibility layer will automatically use rootless Xorg.
linux
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.