Fragmentation is a big one on mechanical harddrives. If you have 1000 video files that all share half of their pieces with each other, the disk is going to seek like crazy between them instead of reading sequentially during playback.

I’m still not sure I fully understand what’s going on at the low-level, but there is a “How it works” section on the debcow github page that at least made an attempt to penetrate my skull.

Edit: I guess the main thing it’s doing is skipping the .tar archive extraction, and ref-linking the raw bytes from the .tar into new files? Extacting the .tar normally will create standard files, and those files would be reflink copied to the new location, but that still requires a more or less “normal file copy” during the .tar extraction. This really has greater implications for allowing generic reflinking from .tar archives, instead of just being limited to package installation. Could be interesting if it was handled automatically during .tar extraction. Or I could be misunderstanding, which is equally likely.

In my experience, installing Linux Mint onto just about anything is trivial. IMO, the learning curve is more about using a different operating system than it being pre-installed.

That said, as long as you have a preconfigured distro like Linux Mint I think it’s about as easy to use as Windows or Mac. The main difference is that people are already used to how Windows or Macs work, and have forgotten there’s plenty of jank that they’ve learned to avoid. There are still things Linux could improve on w/r/t new user experience but I think the gap is getting smaller every year.

Nice, I’ll have to watch this. A quick skim through the YT comments says that it’s AMD drivers which is the only thing I could think of. Linux Mint 21 actually has an “EDGE” iso which has a newer kernel version, and Linux Mint 22 is instead going to track the latest HWE kernels, so my understanding is this type of hardware problem should be a thing of the past at least in Linux Mint’s world. I don’t know if Ubuntu has their own plans or not.

Mint uses the same kernel version as Ubuntu, so that’s not really a point in favor of Ubuntu in any case. Do you remember what video it was?

Yes, almost certainly.

“Escape hatch” specifically refers to the speculation that Valve is positioning themselves in a way that they can’t be forced into paying fees for existing on the Windows platform, and that if push comes to shove they can say they only support Linux now. This hasn’t happened yet, but it’s a strategic stance which will likely prevent it from even beginning to happen. This doesn’t have to do with the Steam Deck specifically; it was also part of their intentions with the Steam Machine and etc.

Maybe it needs to be more obvious that there are many ways to do things in Linux, and give new users a short “learning to learn” primer on how things operate differently in Linux-land, and where/how to look online for help. There are always first-boot popups but I imagine most people are conditioned to click out of them without even reading; forcing people to confirm a couple times that they want to skip “very helpful reading” may cut down on people that play the search engine lottery on what information they use for their first steps.

Also semi-related, I hope that mainstream Linux eventually “un-stupids” computers for regular people again. I get the distinct feeling that Microsoft and Apple have, at least somewhat intentionally, imposed ‘learned helplessness’ onto average computer users. “Oh computers are magic no one knows how they work. We are the only wizards that could possibly understand them and we will sell you the solution.” Windows/OSX/iOS/etc are so locked down that people have rightfully learned over time that if they run into a problem, there really is no solution. I suspect that’s permeating into the new user experience on Linux where people will encounter one problem and throw their hands up and say “fucking computers” instead of using basic problem solving to try another approach.

Their rough new user experience is concerning though. From what they described I suspect many of their “problems” are not actually “real”, but it doesn’t really matter because they still ended up in a scenario where they thought there were problems. How did they end up thinking that everything must be done with terminal while using Ubuntu? I know in the last ~10 years there’s been a big focus on the new user experience, so what more can be done to prevent this? My gut says there are too many online resources that are confusing new users when they try to onboard themselves - especially resources that are old, written for other distros, or written for people who just want to find the command they can copy-paste to do something.

Gaming has been the only pathway to mainstream desktop since forever. I’ve been around for a hot minute and I remember that consistently, the “real Linux users” for years repeated “we don’t need gaming this is an adult OS go back to Windows and play with your toys” and then turned around and whined that no one wanted to use desktop Linux. Valve stepped in and casually created the year of the Linux desktop as a side-effect of just wanting an escape hatch for their business model. Now the casuals and elitists alike will have a better experience via the magic of Marketshare, and all it really took is not listening to people that don’t know what’s good for them.

So doesn’t that still mean that they think gender-neutral pronouns are political, i.e. they don’t accept them? I’ve also noticed the dev in question is Swedish, so I’m not sure where German language quirks came from?

I don’t understand how a German grammar situation would elicit the response from the PR. Are gender neutral pronouns “political” in Germany? Why did the dev say “personal politics” specifically?

That’s why I didn’t say “transphobia” anywhere in my comment. Real weird vibes is what I’m personally sticking with until I see more. The ‘transphobic’ and ‘misogynist’ claims are a leap without further evidence, but there’s a very strong clue about the type of person someone is when they say pronouns are “political”.

From last time. TL;DR real weird vibes. This is a PR where you say “oops, that makes sense”, click merge, and go on living your life. Not whatever this ended up being.

Maybe Amdahl’s Law is in consideration at this point? Either way, for most consumers there’s no need for more cores, and CPUs are made to be sold. I’m guessing at this point gaming performance is one of the most important metrics to differentiate a consumer CPU, so it makes sense that adding more cores is not a priority in that regard.

On a related note, I’ve found Dockge to be powerful enough for my usecases. Worth a try if you don’t like the adversarial relationship of Portainer.

I recommend a dead man’s switch like Healthchecks.io, which can be selfhosted for free. Whenever you have something that’s regularly occurring, add an extra callout to your unique Healthchecks callout UUID as part of the automation, and Healthchecks will send you a notification if something misses its callout schedule. You can also attach whatever data (e.g. a log) to the callout so you can look back through the run history. IIRC Borg will give you a non-zero return code if it detects problems, so you can send e.g. https://hc-ping.com/your-uuid-here/$? and a non-zero code will signal a notification as well (more examples here).

Also, Borgmatic is really easy to use for managing Borg repos. There’s a lot of configuration options (including Healthchecks.io integration) but you can delete like 90% of it for normal usecases.

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

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: https://shop.proxmox.com/index.php?rp=/store/proxmox-ve-standard

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