Quazatron

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Look, I’m doing my best, ok? Back off!

Lenovo ThinkPads are quite compatible.

They are also easy to get into, just undo some screws and you’re in. Just make sure the insides have expandability in case you want to plug in another SSD or more RAM (in this economy?! 😉).

Use whatever feels comfortable. Both are fine. People are complaining about micro annoyances that should not really affect you at first.

When you get comfortable with Linux, you’ll also get to pick sides in micro battles like KDE vs Gnome, vi vs emacs, systemd vs sysv, flatpak vs snap and all the other wonderful my-side-is-better-than-yours fights.

I’m using Pi-hole for the DNS stuff and Nginx Proxy Manager for the proxying. Super easy to setup as docker containers, with lovely web GUIs for configuration. Works great.

I mostly backup /home and /etc on my home machines. Anything else I can recreate with configuration-as-code tools like Ansible.

I can, I’m just lazy.

I respectfully disagree. XFCE having the same experience is its main appeal.

AFAIK it’s a project that does not have many developers, so the pace is quite slow, but the reverse side is that there are no surprises. When running production systems you do not want surprises. You want a desktop that lets you work and gets out of the way. That is the reason why XFCE doesn’t get much press but has quite a few satisfied users.

You have much to learn about how things work in FLOSS.

Projects don’t die because you and your cool friends decided that they are old news. They will live on as long as there are users and developers interested in keeping them going. There are countless examples, I’m sure you can find some if you get past your short sightedness.

My main server is a puny Raspberry Pi 5 with no disks that still packs a lot of services for my home.

My other server is an ancient 4 core box with an equally old graphics card and a bunch of disks (some spinning, some solid state) arranged in a ZFS array. It handles backups and running a local nasty tempered LLM modelled after GlaDOS.

You can have all the opinions you want. In the end, the ecosystem (Linux is an ecosystem, not an OS) evolves by people with different drives trying different things, some aspects are successful and are kept, some are developed for a while and dropped, some are brilliant but never reach critical mass.

It’s a somewhat chaotic mix of engineering and tinkering that ultimately works while embracing widely opposing opinions. This quirky nature provides it with strength and flexibility.

Bottom line: we need strong opinions and people who act on those opinions to build the vision they want.

Linux will run on a potato, and it doesn’t even have to have hardware memory management.

Turns out that you have to explicitly mount btrfs with the option compress=zstd (or compress=lzo as you prefer) to get any compression done, and I was not doing that. Also, to apply compression to existing data, you have to defragment with compression enabled. Alternatively, you can create a subvolume and set the compression property.

This explains it quite well.

I’ll be away for a while, but I’ll get some stats, because now I’m also curious.

My main goals are efficient space usage and portability, so I’ve never measured anything. I’ll get some stats for you.

This is how I do it. I put my Steam directory in an external BTRFS drive with compression turned on. Works great, and allows me to take my library between computers.

If you know what you’re doing, no. If you don’t know what you are doing, yes.

The difference is the knowledge you gain from traditional learning and experience.

I agree that books are much better resources to learn in a structured way. This builds a solid foundation where you can then use LLMs to fill the boring gaps.

You’re doing it right, using it as a tool to learn.

I’m doing the same to get a handle on Python. I question the steps, compare it with other sources, and try to get comfortable coding it myself. I then use it to review my code, and get further insights.

It’s a tool. Just another tool.

Please, do elaborate.