Synestine

Right now I’m stuck on a Mac laptop. I hate it, but after our Network team could not manage to get Global Protect working on Linux, and my boss decided keeping them happy was easier than keeping me productive, I didn’t have much choice (Mac or Windows). I’ve worked in environments before where I was able to run Linux on my laptop/workstation, so long as I was able to support myself and do the required work. I used remote desktop (Or a Windows VM) for my Windows work; my browser and Java for most everything else. Now even Office is a shitty webapp for the most part, and Teams “works” on Linux (As much as Teams works at all).

Even here, I have to wait until Helpdesk manages to build out support for new Mac OS releases, so I’m still on 14.6.

I told them prior that I would be leaving the company if they forced me to migrate to Mac. I’m currently looking for a better position elsewhere and will tell them exactly why when I turn in my notice. Not that it will change anything, it’ll help me feel better.

Is there a way yet to in-place upgrade or is it still only “flash a new SD”?

I use Jellyfin as a backend for my Kodi boxes (I have 3, and JF keeps them in sync). I used to have a YouTube plugin, but YT broke that this year.

Personally, I use Kodi for that. It works very well with minimal keyboard and no mouse (though it can handle both), so much so that I’ve run it for years using only an IR remote.

If you’re willing to go that route, check out Zabbix and Icinga2 as well. They’re compatible with Nagios checks but the user interface is better.

I use ssmtp as well for a simple sendmail replacement. It takes over the sendmail command, doesn’t open any ports. You configure it for the domain you want and tell it what server to send everything to and it works.

Really? Such as?

True, but SQLite is not recommended in production settings, and is quite often the source of Nextcloud slowdowns, in my experience. A dedicated DB is the first thing I recommend for a production Nextcloud instance.

Oh and to be clear, in this instance, “production” means “people depend on this”, be that your family group, team/department, fraternal order, church group, etc. as opposed to “I’m just playing with this thing.”

Slackware 1.2, because it came on a CD in the back of a fat paperback manual I got at Barnes and Noble. It was only later that I learned what a distro is.

Currently on Fedora with a Frankenstein desktop of my own concoction.

It’s more because they provide an ONVIF interface or an RTSP stream that makes them self-hosting darlings. Them being Chinese white-labels and cheap is mainly a side-bonus.

What are your recommendations if not them?

Wait, you object to their feely-distributable firmware updates? Seriously? Without those, your CPU is vulnerable to exploits and known hacks.

Really? Which ones?

You mean besides Fedora?

‘dd’ works, but I prefer ‘shred’. It does a DoD multi-pass shred by default, so I usually use ‘shred -vn1z /dev/(drive)’. That gives output, does a one-pass random write followed by one-pass zero of the disk. More than that just wastes time, and this kinda thing takes hours on large spinners. I also use ‘smartmontools’ to run SMART tests against my drives regularly to check their health.

I haven’t had nine hours uninterrupted time in quite a while, but I’ve done six to seven with plenty left in the tank. I’ve kinda stopped measuring it because of that.

My daily driver is still a Dell XPS 13, 10th gen Intel i7, 16gb RAM and 500gb (nvm) SSD. I bought it referbed. I’m running Fedora 38 (Workstation) currently. Everything works but the fingerprint sensor (which I don’t care about). It runs for hours as long as I’m doing “normal” stuff like browsing and writing. It runs so long that I get tired before it does. The only time the runtime suffers is if I’m cranking the cores (encoding, compiling, etc). No voodoo required, it just runs this way out of the box. Even the onboard firmware gets updated by fwupd.

The only oddity (to me) is that it’s USB-C only (no A ports) so I carry a small dock if I need to plugin a normal USB device or network cable, but that’s rare for me.

A named volume for the config directory for one.

Take it off the charger and see if you get the claimed battery life. Maybe you will, or maybe your 3+ hours of battery time runs out in less than one.

I’ve used both APC (via apcupsd) and EATON (via nut), both work great.

Not really. Windows only supports FAT and NTFS filesystems natively. There was an old ext-fs driver back in the day, but I have not looked for one in a decade or more. There might be one out there already.

The deal with case-insensative support is likely from Windows users who are annoyed that Readme.md, readme.md, and README.MD are separate files on ext4 but the same file in FAT or NTFS. UNIX and Linux come from a school of thought that allowed you to do things like use different case in filenames.