I have a cheap Acer laptop with AMD and it works great. I’m dual booting with Windows. I do remember having to struggle with the install though. I had to turn off secure boot and can’t remember what else. Good luck.
In my experience, Acer build quality has been shoddy. There’s a reason everyone recommends used Thinkpads. They have great build quality so you can get more years out of a used one than a new cheap consumer laptop.
With that budget you should be able to get your hands on a machine with plenty of power. My recomendation would go to a lenovo t480/t480s. I was planning to buy one of those for myself but my current laptop is still good enough. Regardless of the device you choose, I would recomend portability over power: power efficient i5 4 cores, 8gb (idealy 16gb) ram, ssd storage, lightweight and good battery.
To answer your last question, you shouldn’t be concerned about performance. Linux can give life to old hardware, but you’re not really looking at old hardware.
As a cybersec student myself, I would suggest starting out with a generic linux distro and just install the tools you need as you go. If you really need kali, install it in a vm. I say this because I expect you’ll use Linux as your daily driver, and Kali is NOT mean to be a daily driver, but a tool for when you need it. And “when you need it” will come with experience I guess.
Thanks, I’ll have to look into installing Kali in a vm. I’ve seen distros such as Linux Mint being discussed. Would that be a good daily driver to use?
NixOS allows me to back up all the configuration for my entire complex hypervisor server by just saving one folder, since it centralizes all system configuration in /etc/nixos. That is an absolute godsend.
And that’s just one example, practically any NixOS installation is easily reproducible by just grabbing the configuration files from that folder. It makes configuring a new install a breeze.
I second this! If all you need is low end and Linux compatible laptop, Thinkpads are, almost annoyingly, regarded as the tinkerer/hacker Laptop. After some research (one search on ebay) they are going for very cheap, far within your budget.
I did a little research and found this which states that for the graphical installation, it will take “at least 2 GB of RAM and 20 GB of disk space” and in some cases certain apps/programs recommend 8 GB of RAM.
I recommend 8 GB of RAM for now and a 128 GB hard drive. If you can get a smaller drive go for it, but just stick with the main brands like Crucial or Western Digital when it comes to drives. I recently had my SSD corrupted in my thinkpad because the previous owner bought a cheap drive that randomly disconnected at times.
I believe RAM is replaceable and upgradeable in most thinkpads, but verify that before purchase, it’ll save you the disappointment of being stuck with 8 GB of RAM.
It used to be common, did a lot of work on aarch64 as it was basically coming up, a lot of work was ad-hoc using codesourcery and later rolling my own tool chain for cross compiles.
Once the platform became semi-stable we tried to build everything locally, libraries are the real nightmare, you just can’t deal with them long term. If you’re at the bottom of the stack with 1-2 dependencies it’s definitely doable, it’s as you climb up higher that things fall apart.
I wonder if you can offer a glimpse of what you’re hoping will be different about yours Vs other existing options? Don’t get me wrong, more options is good, but I wonder if you’re focusing development with a specific niche in mind?
I feel like there’s a gap between very simple players like Amberol and more complete ones like Tauon.
I hope to fill the gap by having something with a very simple UI, that at the same time can display your music library in an organized fashion.
You know why reinstalling Linux is annoying? Because you have to remember (or write down) every piece of config you ever changed. Dark mode in KDE? Change it in settings. Some systemd unit tweak? Change it in /etc/systemd. Want to run some commands at boot? Use systemd (see above), or write an initrd hook (distro-specific). Need a specific version of an app? Need some files in /opt? Need certain packages installed? You better remember to do that!
In NixOS, you “reinstall” your OS every time you change a single setting, because reinstalling NixOS isn’t scary at all - everything that needs to be changed is configured in your configuration - just make sure /home and /var/lib are saved (and perhaps some other dirs, I have root on tmpfsand bind mount all persistent files I need to ensure I know what needs to be preserved on clean reinstall and what doesn’t).
Want to move it to a different PC? No problem, copy the files in /home and /var/lib and simply install NixOS using the configuration you already have on the new PC. Want to create a boot option with slightly different kernel or kernel options, or maybe even another DE? No problem, specializations got you covered.
And of course, this also means it’s easy to share configurations for specific use cases. Want to run on some specific hardware that doesn’t work out of the box? Perhaps nixos-hardware got you covered. Want a certain program set up? Maybe there’s already a NixOS option for system-level config or a home-manager option for user-level config, worst case you can write it yourself and share for everyone else in the community using flakes, and maybe open a PR to nixpkgs/home-manager. Want to share configuration between systems? That’s easy, put them in the same flake and write a common module shared between all of your systems.
Basically, if you’re fine with whatever comes out of the box in any Linux distro, you don’t need NixOS, but if you need configuration, if you run servers, it is a lifesaver. I switched from Arch, no regrets. I run my personal laptop, my server, which I effortlessly migrated from Oracle Cloud when they quit Russia, and my router on it, here’s my NixOS/home-manager config.
The only downsides are the learning curve and the fact that you can’t “just” run programs that expect a FHS layout. You can do it with workarounds like steam-run or appimage-run anyway, but overall be prepared to learn to package stuff for NixOS. Also if you have no experience with functional programming, the Nix language may be hard to understand at first.
kinda, preinstall/postinstall scripts expect to run on a clean system, while NixOS can be changed without a full system wipe, you don’t need to redownload/rebuild anything you’ve already downloaded/built.
Want to move it to a different PC? No problem, copy the files in /home and /var/lib and simply install NixOS using the configuration you already have on the new PC.
How/can one separate some changes from others? I don’t want my server to be identical to my laptop. How does one install a package which won’t be installed on a different machine at a later time?
You are able to have different configurations spun up from the one file by using machine names. My main machine is pretty barebones with minimal applications, but my laptop is even more minimal.
I can’t move away from Proxmox right now for my servers but the option is there if I want to spin up some containers using similar Configs and such.
Those slides look like they’re written by someone who doesn’t understand Linux. Though Boeing and safety don’t seem to go hand in hand nowadays if that documentary about their safety standards and engineering is to believed. Blaming foreign pilots that got killed because of engineering changes that pilots weren’t fully trained on was low. Especially given how many airlines actually insisted on training for these systems but seemed to be fobbed off.
The reason I really like NixOS is it’s by nature very robust. Your config is the almost universal truth about what’s installed on your machine and if it works
For example, if I make some change that breaks my whole system, I simply boot off the last working build, then revert my config to the previous version in git
Also, if there’s a package in the nix package manager you can say with 99% certainty it will just work out of the box, and if it doesn’t there’ll be a config option you can enable to get it to work
Also also if you move to a new machine you can copy over your config and the machine is built up just how you like it right out of the gate
Also also also if you do software dev you can have development environments that have all the packages you need for that project and only those packages
Also also also also you’re not gonna run into the issue later down the line of having loads of random shit installed on your system in 3 different package managers and 9 different places, cleaning up your machine is as simple as just removing the entries from your application list
Stupidly easy to install things too. If you want to install gnome desktop as an example it’s as simple as adding
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