TCB13

TCB13 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

You’re going into the small annoyances that make Linux unproductive and not suitable for desktop - at least when you want to get some job done. People will proceed to downvote you and tell you to try 1000x different distros and the end result will be essentially the same…

Because I’m no exception to this rule, I will advise you get Debian + GNOME and install all software via flatpack/flathub. This way you’ll have a very solid and stable system and all the latest software that can be installed, updated and removed without polluting your base system.

Now I’m gonna tell you what nobody talks about when moving to Linux:

1. The “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;
2. I hope you don’t require “professional” software such as MS Office, Adobe Apps, Autodesk, NI Circuit Design and whatnot. The alternatives wont cut it if you require serious collaboration and virtualization and wine may work but won’t be nice. Going for Linux kinda adds the same pains of going macOS but 10x. Once you open the virtualization door your productivity suffers greatly, your CPU/RAM requirements are higher and suddenly you’ve to deal with issues in two operating systems instead of just one. And… let’s face it, nothing with GPU acceleration will ever run decently unless big companies start fixing things - GPU passthroughs and getting video back into the main system are a pain and add delays;
3. Proprietary/non-Linux apps provide good features, support and have tons of hours of dev time and continuous updates that the FOSS alternatives can’t just match.
4. Linux was the worst track ever of supporting old software, even worse than Apple;
5. Half of the success of Windows and macOS is the fact that they provide solid and stable APIs and development tools that “make it easy” to develop for those platforms and Linux is very bad at that. The major pieces of Linux are constantly and ever changing requiring large and frequent re-works of apps. There aren’t distribution “sponsored” IDEs (like Visual Studio or Xcode), userland API documentation, frameworks etc.;
6. The beautiful desktop you see online are bullshit with a very few exceptions. Most are just carefully designed screenshots but once you install the theme you’ll find out visual inconsistencies all over the place, missing icons and all kinds of crap that makes Microsoft look good;
7. Be ready to spend A LOT of time to make basic things work. Have coffee and alcohol (preferably strong) at your disposal all the time.

(Wine for all the greatness it delivers still sucks and it hurts because it’s true).

If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow with performance. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.

Windows licenses are cheap and things work out of the box. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience.

It all comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

When you don’t have to spend weeks tweaking a system to have something that works… that’s considered cheap. Money doesn’t exist by itself, if you need a machine to work today, Windows is cheap. Even if you make 20€/hour in a day of work your Windows license will be payed of… the other alternative is spending weeks not being able to work because you’ve to configure things :)

TCB13 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Go ahead, enjoy your two minutes of fame.

Wine provides an API that is compatible with the ones found on Windows. Loosely speaking that’s an emulator, not the kind of emulation you’re thinking about but it is still trying to re-create an environment where applications written for Windows can run.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

What you said isn’t the truth, is just your own and personal perspective

What I said is the perspective of any other professional out there (with lots of examples) besides web developers. By the same logic what you said isn’t also true - it is just your own perspective as a developer.

Developers are just a percentage of potential Linux users, and some of them can’t even use it because of the tools they require. Regular people have other needs and don’t want to spend a week fixing something when they can get it out of the box somewhere else.

Eg. for a manager or some other office worker the slight incompatibly between MS Office and Libre Office isn’t tolerable because it has a negative impact on their productivity in the same way that KDE feature xyz delivers a better experience for programming. See? Just because it isn’t your perspective doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Obviously :P

TCB13 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Because it’s pointless.

• There’s no real need / use case for a new OS. Existing ones cover about everything;
• Operating systems nowadays are way more complex than they were, you can’t just pick and write a successful one in a few months, you’ve to support very complex protocols, hardware and lots of different architectures - even for Linux it’s hard to keep up with all the ARM CPUs;
• Contrary to popular belief (what the Linux people on Lemmy think) the success of an OS nowadays is tied to ecosystems and applications. Building the OS doesn’t lead to anything if you can’t get companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Autodesk, Google etc. to write the software that people use for it.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Web is nice and welcomed yes, but it isn’t native performance nor a native Adobe application.

TCB13 OP , 4 months ago

My understanding is that domains do expire unless you pay the fee to renew for another year.

The problem is that this isn’t what happens today. If you register a domain and never pay for it again then providers will often renew the domain and keep it to themselves and try resell it later. This is one of the biggest issues in the domain name market and GoDaddy is one of the worst offenders.

Regarding unused domain names, how would anyone know if a particular name is being unused?

Yes that’s a good question but I’m sure that ICANN with all it’s wisdom and infinite resources and teams could define something reasonable. I believe the first step could be to simply make sure registrars can’t do what I describe before.

TCB13 OP , 4 months ago

They’re a finite resource and should be limited to a fixed number per human being. And only transferred for free not resold.

While I don’t agree with the free transfer I agree with the the other part. ICANN should fine and obliterate registrars that keep domains for themselves and individual hoarders.

TCB13 OP , 4 months ago

I can’t see who owns it because they’re doing a private registration with the same registrar I used, so as far as whois is concerned it’s the same registration it’s always had.

Maybe it isn’t another person, it’s more likely to be your registrar holding the domain to sell on auction later on. This is the typical GoDaddy behaviour.

TCB13 OP , 4 months ago

Hey, I’m not the one who typed it… but it’s annoying to see when a name you want is taken on all the major tlds because registrars are holding domains in hopes of selling them.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

There seems to be a request to add this to the new Thunderbird CaldDAV features: connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/…/46295

TCB13 , 4 months ago

I will strip os and run standard Debian.

This is the problem, it seems to be very hardware do it because the UEFI is inaccessible and the OS is signed. Kobol was our one and true hope for an open and well designed NAS solutions however they quit.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Reduced System Footprint: By eliminating Python dependencies and merging the functionalities

Yes, I don’t get why people still insist on coding production grade stuff with a language that is effectively only suitable for educational purposes - maybe not even that because you would be brain damaging a generation of future developers.

Python is the modern equivalent of BASIC:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/71297698-fe08-449e-9e1f-16653b06eed8.png

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Personally I’ve found my home distro: Debian

Like someone who just wants a productive system.

TCB13 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

• HP EliteDesk 800 G6 Mini
• HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini
• HP Elite Mini 600 G9 Mini

All of those HP minis have 2 NVMe slots. If you’re looking for more bays maybe a QNAP TBS-h574TX (Core i3-1320PE) will bit your needs better. Or the Asustor Flashstor 6 FS6706T.

But I want 1 boot drive and 2 x storage drives in RAID

One other possible approach to this is to go with the 800 G4 or the 800 G6 as they also SATA port you can use for your boot drive.

You can also boot from a fast USB 3 flash drive, since it’s your boot drive it won’t be as bad as you think. Consider some servers boot from SD Cards and other low performance media with almost static images.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Unless you tune your install to redirect typical I/O to the durable drives (which is going to be a pain, having to find and reconfigure all those services), typical logging to disk and various temp files are going to wear it out pretty quickly.

Obviousy :)

TCB13 , 4 months ago

You can get those machines second hand for the price range you specified.

About the USB storage, just be careful about what OS you’re running. It is very important that you to manually configure the system not to write logs and other crap to the flash storage OR… you can pick something like Armbian (yes it does have a x86 version) that is already tweaked to run on SD card and other kinds of flash.

If cheap USB flash isn’t performant enough maybe a USB SSD of some kind (there are some that are NVMe) will most likely work you. Anyway don’t forget that USB may disconnect when pushed around and it can become a issue.

I frankly wouldn’t run anything over USB because it is painful but it is an option. Maybe make a solid case for your mini computer and the hard drive and bolt everything down into place.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

For minipcs, have a look at aliexpress. They tend to have the branded options much cheaper than amazon. Trigkey, minisforum, Beelink, etc.

The OP would be better serve with a second hand mini computer from HP or Dell than that crap. AliExpress brands (including Minisforum) are all fun an games until you run into some UEFI bug that will never get a fix and won’t you boot some system or have some feature, or your board doesn’t have proper ESD protection and randomly fries when a USB device is inserted.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Maybe but they also presumably consume much more power?

If you pick one of those machines with a “T” CPU you won’t even notice them. They’ll downscale on idle to probably around the same power the N100 would. The real difference is that they’ll use more power if you demand more resources but even that that point do you really care about a few watts?

Before anyone loses their minds, imagine you get the i3-8300T model that will peak at 25W, that’s about 0.375$ a month to run the thing assuming a constant 100% load that you’ll never have.

Even the most cheap ass cloud service out there will be more expensive than running that unit at 100% load. People like to freak about power consumption yet it’s not their small mini PC that ruins their power bill for sure.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Unlike some old second hand, new hardware is more powerful and energy efficient.

So… if I compare an N305 with an 8th gen i3 CPU it is about 2$/year in savings when it comes to power. Since a brand new N305-based machine will sell for at least 150$ more than a second hand HP Mini i3-8300T that means you’ve to run your N305 for 75 years to actually reach break even.

Look, I like the N305 but I would never get a cheap ass board when I can get a reliable machine with an older CPU like that i3 for a lot less money, it just doesn’t make sense. Power consumption is a nice metric to throw around, but once you run the math…

Besides, just google “minis forums uefi bug” and you’ll see. Those machines are about luck, you may have good results a few times but you’ll eventually get burned by some board with software or design issues.

CW p-5 (N305) as my router (opnsense)

Frankly, do you really need opnsense? If you were to remove that and just grab any decent router, even old hardware, like the R7800, and load it with OpenWrt you would be spending a lot less on power. Go ahead, name a opnsense feature that OpenWrt doesn’t have. :)

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Yes, I’m in Europe with this Ukrainian/Russian mess whatever you’re paying I can assure you I’m paying more than most people reading this and you don’t see me freaking out about a mini PC. Even if you multiply everything above by 4 (and that will certainly go over wtv someone is paying right now) you’ll sill be talking about a very little money compared to everything else you’re running in our houses.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Just used cpubenchmark.net.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

I think number of devices (drives etc) are more important than actual CPU idle power

Yes, or even the BIOS setup, some of those machines allow to disable CPU cores and un-used hardware.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Okay, you’re into something, they’re considering 8 hours / day at 0.25$ per kWh2 and 25% CPU by default. Still if we tweak that into reasonable numbers, or even consider your 60$/year it will still be cheaper than a cloud service… either way those machines won’t run at 25W on idle, more like 7W.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

openwrt is solid enough for potato hardware, whereas opnsense is not

OpenWrt is rock solid for every hardware out there, it has a x86 version as well and there are people running that for more serious stuff.

both operating systems run on the aliexpress hardware, counteracting your claim that some systems don’t boot.

Yes, they may run right now in your specific boards but it is a hit or miss. You’ve zero guarantee a future update update to your OS or UEFI won’t break things and that there will be fixes. There are plenty of online reports of people unable to boot on those cheap boards due to due to UEFI shenanigans, even on minisforum machines.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Sometimes it can actually make sense to replace some old hardware with newer stuff, simply because of the electricity cost savings of using newer hardware.

Yes and we usually see that with very old server grade hardware vs new-ish consumer hardware. Once the price difference is around 100$ or so, we’re talking about years before break-even and it may not make much sense.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

That’s because you had the luck of not hitting a BIOS with some bug or limitation. For instance on AMD it is common to see things like:

To run the AMD Ryzen 5 3600X on an Asus Prime B450M-A II motherboard, you will need to update the BIOS to the latest version available that supports the processor.

Because while electrically / socket compatible, when the board was originally released the CPU didn’t exist.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Okay. reddit.com/…/minisforum_um_series_fixes_megathrea… / archive.is/vwXsX

UM773 Noted Issues (unresolved): It has been observed that using multiple USB ports simultaneously or through a hub (consisting of one standard 500ma device and 2-4 ~150ma adapters) on UM773 can cause an overload of power draw. This overload can lead to the m.2 and USB controllers for the wifi/BT chip becoming unresponsive or unrecognizable.

I got one 2 weeks ago with pve installed, it was running for about 1 day and started to reboot itself constantly with some hardware error code, tried updating the bios, and changing the ssd with no luck. Contacted the miniforum for a return , but they are not that responding

Ey same issue with the 32/1tb UM690. All sorts of stupid errors. Really disappointed with the product.

I have a new Minisforum x500 microPC with odd boot issues. (…) A successful cold boot is a 50/50 gamble. (…) Getting a cold boot to work is a black-magic process of quick power cable plug-in and pressing the power button, in combination.

And so many others…

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Only if there was IPv6: docs.docker.com/config/daemon/ipv6/

Just run all your containers with IPv6 randomly generated prefixes and this won’t ever be a problem, you’ll also get more IP spacing than you’ll ever require. Then use your reverse proxy to convert between the “public” IPv4 space and the internal docker IPv6 networks.

Another option is to reduce the size of your IPv4 pools like this guy described.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

SBCs aren’t routers, while they’re great they might not be good for people who actually want to have WAN and LAN and decent networking performance. Routers usually include some switch chip that will do most of the heavy networking operations, handle VLANs and whatnot without adding CPU load.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

(powerful, modern (WiFi 6E etc)

wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R3

TCB13 , 4 months ago

I’m also running a few R7800 with OpenWrt units and they’re really nice.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

My biggest fear is that it borks itself and I sit there at 10 pm on movie night without a network or internet to troubleshoot.

If you pick decent hardware eg. Netgear R7800 you won’t have issues. I’ve units of those running OpenWrt at home and a few small offices running for years with a lot of clients and traffic and they’re rock solid.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Yes, the R4 is the next thing, I’m not sure the wifi board is selling already and what’s the current state of the software. However I happen to have deployed a bunch of R3 boards (with metal case) with OpenWrt and they work amazingly good.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Yes, sure:

• a.aliexpress.com/_EwWUvhL
• a.aliexpress.com/_EHVdllx

TCB13 , 4 months ago

This is what happens when the EU decides that your phone should be more open and you get around it with cleaver lawyers and tactics instead of actually doing what’s right.

TCB13 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

How much wifi and open-source do you really want?

If you are willing to go with commercial hardware + open source firmware (OpenWrt) you might want to check the table of hardware of OpenWrt at openwrt.org/toh/…/toh_available_16128_ax-wifi and openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_864_ac-wifi. One solid pick for the future might be the Netgear WAX2* line or the GL.iNet GL-MT6000. One of those models is now fully supported the others are on the way. If you don’t mind having older wifi a Netgear R7800 is solid.

For a full open-source hardware and software experience you need a more exotic brand like this www.banana-pi.org/en/bananapi-router/. The BananaPi BPi R3 and here is a very good option with a 4 core CPU, 2GB of RAM Wifi6 and two 2.5G SFP ports besides the 4 ethernet ports. There’s also an upcoming board the BPI-R4 with optional Wifi 7 and 10G SPF.

Both solutions will lead to OpenWRT when it comes to software, it is better than any commercial firmware but be aware that it only support wifi hardware with open-source drives such as MediaTek. While MediaTek is good and performs very well we can’t forget that the best performing wifi chips are Broadcom and they use hacks that go behind the published wifi standards and get it go a few megabytes/second faster and/or improve the range a bit.

DD-WRT is another “open-source” firmware that has a specific agreement with Broadcom to allow them to use their proprietary drivers and distribute them as blob with their firmware. While it works don’t expect compatibility with newer hardware nor a bug free solution like OpenWRT is.

There are also alternatives like OPNsense and pfSense that may make sense in some cases you most likely don’t require that. You’ve a small network and OpenWRT will provide you with a much cleaner open-source experience and also allow for all the customization you would like. Another great advantage of OpenWRT is that you’ve the ability to install 3rd party stuff in your router, you may even use qemu to virtualize stuff like your Pi-Hole on it or simply run docker containers.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

swear by custom hardware with opnsense

…which is completely unnecessary and overkill for most people, even those with home labs, since OpenWrt can do it all.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Think about it… with OpenWrt you can spend even more time tweaking around and doing things that may be more automation under OPNsense. :P But yes, fair point.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

I’ve no ideia what you’re rambling about. I can attest that the Ryzen 5 1600 and the Ryzen 5 2600 that aren’t even new CPUs run perfectly fine with Debian.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

The OP is concerned about stability and you’re suggesting an experimental CPU that is plagued by UEFI bugs and is overly expensive? From what I’ve been even a cheap Chinese SBC with a Rockchip CPU is more stable and reliable than that thing.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

What’s your router? Can you install OpenWrt on it? OpenWrt provides a GUI for the firewall where you can set that a specific device won’t be able to access the internet with a few clicks.

TCB13 , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Just a few notes:

1. What you’re describing is not what the OP is asking for. He simply wants a quick solution to block a couple of devices from accessing internet.
2. I don’t get your “note” as that’s precisely what I suggested the OP to do. And if you actually read the manual and pick a recommend model it can be as simple as uploading the firmware using the router’s firmware upgrade feature.
3. The scenario you described can be done with OpenWrt on a consumer router and it isn’t that complex to setup. Even older hardware like the Netgear R7800 will be able to handle that.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

I never said people shouldn’t use those platforms. What I said countless times is that while they make the life of newcomers easier they pose risks and the current state of things / general direction don’t seem very good.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Look this isn’t even about “drawing lines in the sand”, I do understand why use containers and I use them in certain circumstances, usually not Docker but that’s more due to the requirements in said circumstances and not about personal decision.

Do you object to software repositories that install dependencies precompiled? (…) but then claim that using systems that package all the dependencies into a single runnable unit is too much and cedes too much freedom?

No and I never claimed that. I’m perfectly happy to use a single-binary statically linked applications, in fact I use quite a few such as FileBrowser and Syncthing and they’re very good and reasonable software. Docker however isn’t one of those cases or, at least, not just that.

I agree that containers are allowing software projects to push release engineering and testing down stream and cut corners a bit

Docker is being used and abused for cutting corners and now we’ve developers that are just unable to deploy any piece of software without it. They’ve zero understanding of infrastructure and anything related to it and this has a big negative impact on the way they develop software. I’m not just talking about FOSS projects, we see this in the enterprise and bootcamps as well.

Docker is a powerful thing, so powerful it opens the door for poorly put together software to exist and succeed as it abstracts people from having to understand architectures, manually install and configure dependencies and things that anyone sane would be able to do in a lifetime. This is why we sometimes see “solutions” that run 10 instances of some database or some other abnormality.

Besides all that, it adds the half-open repository situation on top. While we can host repositories and use open ones the most common thing is to see everything on Docker Hub and that might turn into a CentOS style situation anytime.

TCB13 , 4 months ago

Yeah, those are another two big names that are hard to get into Linux.