I don’t think your distro choice matters for your desktop ease of use… If I were to choose distros, I’d choose NixOS… but that’s because I’m a NixOS user :P
I mean if it’s a big hassle to research how to do every single little thing in the nixos config file I think it would affect ease of use. If it’s easier than doing it manually that’s great. Another part of it is whether the distro runs into problems that it creates or makes more likely, which happens in Manjaro.
I am using Borg for years. So far, the tool has not let me down. I store the backups on external hard drives that are only used for backups. In addition, I save really important data at rsync.net and at Hetzer in a storage box. Which is not a problem because Borg automatically encrypts locally and for decryption in my case you need a password and a key file.
Generally speaking, you should always test whether you can restore data from a backup. No matter which tool you use. Only then you have a real backup. And an up-to-date backup should always additionally be stored off-site (cloud, at a friend’s or relative’s house, etc.). Because if the house burns down, the external hard drive with the backups next to the computer is not much use.
By the way, I would advise against using just rsync because, as the name suggests, rsync only synchronizes, so you don’t have multiple versions of a file. Which can be useful if you only notice later that a file has become defective at some point.
IPFS has a ton of potential behind it, as it makes publishing, accessing and retaining content drastically easier than HTTP. The content-addressing also means you can basically sidesteps the whole act of “downloading”, no more need to download a file, extract a file, etc. You just access it directly in your file system by a unique name.
That said, I am also very pessimistic on it. IPFS suffer from “underspecification”. The protocol is completely focused on just moving bytes around. It doesn’t care about copyright or authorship, which becomes a huge problem due to content no longer having a real home in IPFS, everybody can pin, cache or share content on IPFS. It’s very much like Bittorrent in this regard, but worse as even Open Source licenses don’t help here. IPFS, unlike Bittorrent, doesn’t even guarantee that content will stay together, e.g. you can pin and reshare your favorite icon, without a hint of what license it is under or what icon theme you picked it from. For the time being everybody seems to just ignore the problem, but I think it will kill it if it gets popular before this problem is solved.
Another problem is that it’s just buggy and slow, especially when it comes to the fuse daemon that provides the /ipfs and /ipns directories. Though that at least is fixable on the client side. The copyright problem might not without some fundamental changes to the protocol itself.
It doesn’t care about copyright or authorship, which becomes a huge problem due to content no longer having a real home in IPFS, everybody can pin, cache or share content on IPFS.
No it doesn’t. Maybe in some places? But not in most. You can break copyright laws with pen and paper, which don’t have any protection against it and are perfectly legal
With IPFS every single website you look at becomes cached by your node and redistricted by your node, that’s the whole point of it. Redistribution is illegal by default, unless explicitly allowed or public domain. The problem is even if it is allowed, say Open Source software, that often comes with conditions such as “you must include the license when you redistribute it”. With IPFS even that doesn’t work, as each file or even subsections of a file will get redistributed independently, so if the license is in another file than the one you are redistributing, you are in violation of that license. With Bittorrent in contrast you redistributed whole directories at once, so that’s fine.
Unless you want to use IPFS exclusively with only 90+ year old works with expired copyright, I just don’t see it working. At the moment nobody really cares, since it is small enough, but that can quickly change.
ISPs and sites like Youtube have exceptions that allow them to redistribute illegal stuff, if they remove it when they are notified. No such exception exists for regular users and I’ll doubt that we’ll ever get one, as with IPFS there is no origin of a piece of content that you can shift the blame to.
I think that would go against the philosophy of ipfs. Sticking drm on top of it would crash with the intended self-archiving capabilities and censorship resistance, as well as with the whole point of a decentralized network since some entity or entities would have the power to block or delete content from it
For desktop Linux, I use Arch. It’s a community driven base distribution, so the needs of the community are what drives development and there are no financial decisions of a company that get priority, which is refreshing. It also has access to the latest and greatest that Linux has to offer.
They have a philosophy of expecting basic effort from users and to have a tinkering mindset. Historically, Arch devs and users have a reputation of being grumpy greybeards, but many of the rough edges have been rounded off in the last few years. If you are willing to do a bit of reading or watching some YouTube videos, it’s not really that hard.
You can really build a lean and powerful machine that has just the software you want on the system with Arch. All it takes is a little effort and willingness to ask for help from the community after you have tried and failed to solve problems yourself. It’s really not the badge of elitism to use Arch in 2023. It’s never been easier to use and doesn’t blow up on you nearly as often as the reputation implies. Just use good hygiene and make snapshots so if you blow it up, it’s only a 5 minute recovery.
When I was about 12 I had a computer nerd friend who used linux almost exclusively. I used various linux distros at his house. I don’t know what they were.
He gave me a knopix CD so I could use linux too and that was the easiest way.
I thought I’d try linux myself so I burned Ubuntu to a cd and tried to install it on a family computer as a dual boot. I did it wrong and deleted everything. My dad is a computer network specialist so he understood what happened and wasn’t mad. He made a backup of the family computer a while ago and restored it. We still lost some things, but not everything.
My friend got me a desktop computer for free and put SUSE on it. My parents wouldn’t allow me to have internet in my bedroom so I just played games and made stuff on blender with it.
My friend also got me a free laptop at this computer nerd conference we went to. We listened to a bunch of people talk about computer stuff. They also had free stuff we could grab. I got myself a laptop. It didn’t have an operating system so my friend installed Ubuntu on it for me.
Eventually that laptop and my desktop stopped working and I never used linux again. After reading about linux here I started to miss my Ubuntu laptop and I’d like to try it again, but I don’t want ruin my current laptop like I did with the family computer.
Tried NixOS. As a nonprogrammer, trying to have what I wanted was frustrating. There’s no clear documentation on anything, because everything is experimental. Went back to Arch but will try Guix
Don’t get me wrong Guix is hard too, you’ll have to package things yourself, or use flatpak, or use distrobox or maybe nix itself just to get all the things you need. BUT if you can grasp the language and packaging guidelines, it’s much more clearly laid out. The CLI tools are clearer, the methods are too. It’s not this confusing split mess that seems to be with NixOS. And there is still not a clear plasma desktop. But I’m trying to fix that perhaps. 😁
linux
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.