My usual suggestion: Get a generation-old business or workstation class machine from one of the major manufacturers, as a refurb. Mostly meaning keep an eye on Dell Refurbished or Lenovo Outlet - sometimes you can also get a deal on a refurb via woot - for something that appeals to you. The stock is always changing at those, and there are almost always sales/coupons for around 40% off at the first-party refurb stores, so +/- a week of patience can save you a bunch of money.
Business or workstation class machines (think Dell Latitude or Precision, especially the ones with models that start with a 7, or Thinkpad) are typically mechanically much better built than their consumer counterparts, and usually full of reputable components that are connected in standard ways - low end consumer stuff sometimes has issues where they got weird less-common components or connected things in stupid ways to save a few cents per unit that will cause driver issues.
Waiting a generation gives time for mainline kernel driver support to fully mature to minimize driver problems, and drastically cuts the price.
I’ve had several machines following that advice, and I think the only driver trouble I’ve had with them has been with unsupported fingerprint/smartcard readers, which I …don’t care about anyway.
Or, if you want a way cheap beater and don’t mind some hackin’, grab a used/refurbished AUE Chromebook that is on the Mr. Chromebox Supported List. AUE means they no longer receive ChromeOS updates, so their price craters to like $50, and you can flash a normal UEFI payload and use them as a (feeble, storage starved, low resolution) computer. Not a good main machine, but they make fun beaters for experimenting. There are often batches of them being dumped via woot.
…also, don’t buy anything with an Nvidia GPU unless you have a specific compelling reason, it’ll be a pain in your ass for the life of the machine.
I have said and will keep saying this, Snap continues to be one of the worst things Canonical has tried to pass off as “production ready” at least in recent times, and every time they push more for it makes me consider them even more of an untrustworthy distro vendor.
My personal experience with it is that I had to nuke it off the computers I maintain last time we updated Ubuntu to the new release (unfortunately I don’t control what OS we’re using, otherwise Ubuntu would have been gone faster than you could say “Snap”), because these computers have user homes on a network drive, which isn’t under /home, and snap just flat out refuses to work when that is the case.
It wouldn’t even be such a problem if they hadn’t removed Firefox among other things from their repositories, but as it is right now, there’s no way to run Firefox on Ubuntu without mucking around with PPAs if your user home is not under /home. This bug about that has been open for 7 years!
That said, I think this is fine considering Flatpak is still going to be available in the repositories, just not installed by default. I’m much more a fan of “install what you need”, anyway. (But then again, that’s not the style of distro Ubuntu wants to go for.)
I tried it like a year ago maybe and it was a very interesting concept, but I couldn’t find what it really brings to the table over Guix or Nix. I’ve used Guix quite a lot since then and found that the separation of packages was afaict very similar, with the added bonus of having a completely reproducible system. Maybe Gobo brings something that Guix/Nix does not, but in my time of testing it I couldn’t find anything.
I have been using Debian for about 20 years now. Server and desktop. But I recently migrated all my server stuff to FreeBSD and I don’t think I will move back. Jails are great and provide me a convenient way to isolate my apps. On the desktop side I will stay with Debian.
I wish there was a better way to judge the lightness of full desktop environements than just ram consumption, because speed and smoothness can vary greatly regardless of ram, so we know whether of not it runs well on shitty laptop, lxqt being no faster than xfce in my experience is pretty telling of that
In my opinion: Yay for people not tech savy, so they can’t bork their system, and it prevent most malware to do damages. Or for special devices, like the Steam Deck!
Nay for thinkerer like me, if I want to uninstall the boot loader, I need the option!!
The crash started apparently out-of-the-blue, hitting thousands of Argentinian users on a Debian-based distro called Huayra, and specifically on version 5 which was based on Debian 10.
Everybody seemed to crash while searching for images on Google.
Google’s code was allocating 20000 variables in a single frame.
Dedicate a set amount of time when you only use the cli to accomplish things. Pick simple, low risk things like cleaning up unneeded downloads in your downloads directory. Start with one file then try wildcards, brace expansion and regex.
View logs and grep to find specific events. Investigate (read only) what type of data is provided under different directories under /.
Use online resources to learn a scripting language, bash is convenient to start with, as it’s a common default shell and can be used for scripting. Learning bash can translate to one liners and eventually scripts.
This is a good resource, but I would recommend to not read it like a book, but maybe investigate sections of interest after you get a feel for some of the early topics: tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/
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