TechnicallyColors

TechnicallyColors , 22 hours ago

For normal desktop users, yeah Debian Stable + Flatpaks is a winning combo for picking the software that you want to be cutting-edge and leaving the rest to rock-solid stability. Normally Linux distros keep a full ecosystem of packages that interop and depend on each other, but solutions like Flatpak have their own little microcosm of dependencies that can be used independently of the host distro. There are also Debian Backports for when you want native Debian packages that are more cutting-edge but still compiled to work with your older base system. Backports are not available for most packages but sometimes the important ones are available, like the Linux kernel itself. You can also try to compile your own backports, but you’ll be responsible for updating it.

TechnicallyColors , 1 day ago (edited 23 hours ago)

I used Proxmox for a couple years and it’s good if you run a lot of VMs or LXCs, but I found that I’m not really the target audience. I ended up only running one Debian VM for my Docker containers. It was fine, but I eventually felt that Proxmox added no value for me, and the end result was sacrificing some memory and performance from using virtio emulations for CPU/GPU/RAM/filesystems. If your machines only have 8-16GB of RAM I don’t think it would be a good idea, as I’ve seen the rule of thumb is to dedicate 2GB for Proxmox’s usage, which is in addition to any guest OS’s requirements. Meanwhile I have a Debian install on a VPS that takes about 450MB of RAM.

For me, pros:

• Native ZFS support - invaluable, ZFS is terrific. MergerFS+SnapRAID is a decent replacement but the dodgy tooling and laundry list of footguns makes me nervous to use it on important data. ZFS is idiot-proof, as long as you know what you’re doing during the initial setup. RAIDZ expansion is coming this year and you can still use mixed-size disks in a RAIDZ as long as you accept that all disks are equivalent to the smallest one, so I personally feel ZFS is acceptable for grab-bag disk usage now
• Separation of bare metal and server environment, which means you can spin up another server VM from scratch without impacting the previous one, then switch with zero downtime. In the end, I replaced Proxmox with Debian on ZFS root (ZFSBootMenu) and wrote a few hundred lines of bash to automate the installation, so when I switched it only took about 30 minutes of downtime start to finish.
• Isolation of different environments. If my VM gets hacked, it will have a harder time reaching my Proxmox host etc. I run all services in isolated Docker environments anyway so this isn’t that big of a perk for my threat profile.

Cons:

• Partitioning RAM for ZFS ARC, Proxmox, and VM leads to inherent inefficiencies at the margins.
• I usually give my VM n-1 CPU cores, which is still less power than if I had just used the CPU natively.
• GPU passthroughs to VM can be less efficient, depending on the GPU and how it handles it. My iGPU is less performant when using its ~SR-IOV feature
• Learning requirement - not a huge learning curve but it’s a lot of knowledge that I will not use now that I’ve stopped using Proxmox
• Hosting your data pool on the Proxmox host or a dedicated data VM means that your server VM needs to use NFS to access its data, which lacks a handful of features (e.g. inotify) and is a pain
• Need to maintain two systems for updates, downtimes, etc
• More points of failure
• Extra startup time
• Run by a company that thinks it’s okay to use winrar-style nag popups every time you load the console, and requires you to manually dig through the source to disable that. I understand it’s their business model, it doesn’t change how it affects me the end user who lacks $120/year to spend on disabling a popup

TechnicallyColors , 23 hours ago

Yeah it’s €110/year here: shop.proxmox.com/index.php?rp=/store/proxmox-ve-c…

I remember evaluating the price a long time ago and thinking it was too much for disabling a pop-up, and on writing my post I navigated to their site and saw the standard subscription and thought that’s what I had looked at a few years back: shop.proxmox.com/index.php?rp=/store/proxmox-ve-s…

TechnicallyColors , 2 days ago

Here are the super special keywords if you know what you’re doing with Wine: Wine 9.0+ (otherwise the newest MO2 doesn’t work), winetricks vcrun2022 dotnet48 faudio, install .NET 7.0 SDK manually with the exe. Set up a prefix with those components and you can run all the modding tools. Don’t bother with the convoluted MO2 installer script.

Synthesis was having issues compiling patches using the latest Kron4ek wine builds, so I started using the latest Proton-GE and that resolved it. I’m not sure if Wine-GE would have fixed the same problem, but Wine-GE is no longer being updated, and we need at least 9.0+. Install Proton-GE for Steam through e.g. ProtonUp-Qt, and then Lutris can select it as a runner option and will run it through the new UMU project.

I use Lutris to create and run the prefix, and I have an isolated copy of Skyrim that is patched with Goldberg emulator because I find that easier to manage so it’s not at risk of being auto-updated by Steam. If you use a Steam copy directly you probably just need Protontricks and do the same thing.

To capture NexusMods links to MO2, I made an application in my start menu and told Firefox to use it to handle nxm links:

Env Variables: WINEESYNC=1 WINEFSYNC=1 ‘WINEPREFIX=/mnt/Games/The Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim/Prefix/’

Program: /home/user/.steam/steam/compatibilitytools.d/GE-Proton9-7/files/bin/wine

Arguments: ‘/mnt/Games/The Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim/Prefix/drive_c/Games/ModOrganizer2/nxmhandler.exe’ %u

Note that allowing the nxmhandler.exe call to start MO2 is bad because it won’t start with the special UMU launcher framework, but if MO2 is already running it’s fine.

Performance is great, and everything “just works” with MO2. My only issue is that Pandora and Synthesis (at least) sometimes do not seem to end their process appropriately after running, so I sometimes need to manually stop them via a process manager.