• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

help-circle


  • TIL about Fedora, last I knew it was a rolling bleeding edge OS. Clearly lots of movement in the Red Hat camp.

    As for gaming, drivers were not the problem for me. Getting games to run with ease was. On OpenSUSE, I just install Steam, enable Proton and basically go at that point. Red Hat was non-trivial to do this. Could be a skill issue, but I had a better time getting going with OpenSUSE TW.


  • Sort of, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I started on OpenSUSE Leap but had issues getting things like GPU and Steam working. Red Hat was also a non-starter because of the lack of gaming functionality.

    TW works great for gaming and the enterprise features I care about (like domain joining) work out of the box. Its certainly harder to set up than something more geared towards home use (typically one of the various the downstreams of Debian or Arch) but that doesn’t bother me.


  • Servers are a different story but for Desktop, OpenSUSE.

    Because:

    • It’s stable even on their rolling OS (Tumbleweed)
    • Gaming works exceptionally well
    • CUDA works with little effort
    • RPM-based (personal preference)
    • zypper is an excellent package manager and my experience has been better than that of yum/dnf
    • Extensive native packages and 3rd party repos
    • No covert advertising in the OS
    • Minimal (no?) Telemetry
    • Easy to bind to active directory
    • it feels polished and well built
    • I do not have to mess with it to make it work

    Part of my transition from Windows to Linux was that basic tasks like installing software or even the OS itself shouldn’t be a high effort endeavour. I should be able to point to a package file or run a package manager and be able to go about my day without running “make” and working my way through dependency hell.

    I say this as a Linux user of all different flavours for well over 15 years who has a deep love for what it brings to the table. If we want it to be common place with non-IT folks, it needs to work and it needs to be simple to use.


  • Jumping on the OpenSUSE bandwagon. I use it daily, have been running the same install of Tumbleweed for years without issue. I’m using KDE Plasma which it let’s you choose as part of the installation which fulfils that requirement for you as well.

    If you’re familiar with Redhat you’ll feel at home on it. Zypper is the package manager instead of yum/dnf and works really well (particularly when coping with dependency issues.

    I’ve worked with heaps of distros over the years (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, RHEL, old school Red Hat, CentOS, Rocky, Oracle, even a bit of Alpine and some BSD variants) and OpenSUSE is definitely my favourite for a workstation.






  • Whilst I agree and sympathise with people on how difficult it is to change your primary email address (been there), the outcome will be better for them. They are no longer wedded to an ISP purely because all their mail goes there.

    To liken it to something more tangible; when you move house, you need to change your mailing address. For renters, that can be often and is just as painful. Or when your phone number changes and you have to update your contacts. The difference here is who is pulling the trigger; the end user vs the provider.

    Gmail is a great option, as is Proton Mail for the security conscious and tech savvy.

    This isn’t to excuse the ISPs; it’s a shitty move on their part and the people using these mail accounts will likely be older technically challenged folks, but it is a logical one from a technical perspective. They may have also inadvertently taken the only thing away that’s creating stickiness between them and their customer and driven them into the arms of another ISP.




  • Sure, I’ve used it both in Server and NAS scenarios. The NAS was where we had most issues. If the maintenance tasks for BTRFS weren’t scheduled to run (balance, defrag, scrub and another one i can’t recall), the disk could become “full” without actually being full. If I recall correctly it’s to do with how it handles metadata. There’s space, but you can’t save, delete or modify anything.

    On a VM, its easy enough to buy time by growing the disk and running the maintenance. On a NAS or physical machine however, you’re royally screwed without adding more disks (if its even an option). This “need to have space to make space” thing was pretty suboptimal.

    Granted now I know better and am aware of the maintenance tasks, I simply schedule them (with cron or similar). But I still have a bit of a sour taste from it, lol. Overall I don’t think it’s a bad FS as long as you look after it.


  • This for sure. As a general rule of thumb, I use XFS for RPM-based distros like Red Hat and SuSE, EXT4 for Debian-based.

    I use ZFS if I need to do software RAID and I avoid BTRFS like the plague. BTRFS requires a lot of hand holding in the form of maintenance which is far from intuitive and I expect better from a modern filesystem (especially when there are others that do the same job hassle free). I have had FS-related issues on BTRFS systems more than any other purely because of issues with how it handles data and metadata.

    In saying all that, if your data is valuable then ensure you do back it up and you won’t need to worry about failures so much.


  • I’m the admin of krabb.org, honestly I’m loving it. There is a learning curve, particularly for non-technical folks, but that will get easier as time goes on.

    As an admin, it is far easier to “jump start” an empty Lemmy instance with content from other instances than it is to do with Mastodon and Pixelfed.

    Where we need to improve is the mobile apps, documentation and providing ways to make it easier for small instances to get new users. These are all very much in the spotlight and improving every day (especially the apps), so I’m confident we can get there

    Tldr: it good, do like