I don’t know of one, just want to warn you that you’ll likely be collecting personal identifying information (PII), which requires careful storage and protection. You may want to seek some legal advice before going down this road.

I was using X and Y to refer to Windows/Linux.

I do currently dual boot, using UEFI + grub2 (and also macos bootloader+asahi linux), and yes, it definitely is a personal disdain. The various bootloaders themselves don’t really change the experience that much its that you have to choose your OS during the boot process that cause the UX friction.

It may be the same as a user login screen, but it doesn’t take the place of one. So you press the on button -> wait a bit -> choose your OS -> wait a bit more -> choose your user -> wait a bit more. That extra step in there just really gets on your nerves, especially if you just want to turn on the PC and get on with something. If there was a way to set the boot choice before pressing the on button (like a physical toggle switch or something), that would be slightly better, but afaik, that doesn’t exist.

I’m not telling you to shut up, but I would suggest caution, it only takes one bad experience to irreparably damage your families opinion of linux, sometimes its better to let them come to you when their ready. But USB to demo the experience is definitely a good way to go about it. But when they are ready, I’d go all in on the distro of choice and spend some time with them to iron out all the issues. A little hand holding early on will save you a lot of headache later.

People want to turn on their computer and have the OS boot and get out of the way. Adding a bootloader in between is just annoying. You either default it to autoboot X, and then find it frustrating that you need Y, or you set it to always pester you to choose, which is annoying in of itself. The UX experience really hasn’t improved ever and kinda can’t.

I’ve been dual booting since fedora 4, and whether it’s stock GRUB, or one of the flavours of the month GUI boot loaders, it’s the same lowsy experience. I can live with it, but I wouldn’t dare inflict it on a new user.

UEFI has somewhat changed it, as I now just default boot to Linux, but from Linux can run a script to set it to boot to Windows on next boot, and then reboot, but it’s still pretty gross to use.

USB boot is okay, but perhaps use a USB SSD, standard USBs can be very slow which will give a poor user experience. I also don’t think distro is that critical, as long as you stick to the mainstream ones. Make sure it’s one that you know well, as realistically, your gonna end up being called for support.

I can only imagine how their UX is declining day over day.

They are probably just fine. Most people are perfectly happy with Windows, we are a minority.

That said, don’t dual boot for noobs. It’s a pointless exercise in additional complexity. If you default it to Windows, they’ll never leave Windows. If you default it to Linux, they’ll be forever frustrated that it booted to the wrong OS.

Install Linux on a new disk, insert it on their box, and if they hate it and ask for Windows back, give it back. Forcing them into Linux land will just make them resent it.

Ah, I thought the timeline between the events and the slowdown were a lot closer, and that unplugging the monitor just gave it enough time to cool down.

The monitor part is definitely odd, is it a particularly high res/Hz monitor?

Otherwise I’m also leaning towards excessive swapping being the culprit, but that doesn’t explain the monitor part.

Heat? Could be overheating and throttling?

Annoyingly, disk discovery. It refused to use my disks, claiming they didn’t have serial numbers. I could see the serial numbers in the frontend and the console, but their middleware just hated them.

I am using a USB multi-disk drive thing, which didn’t work properly on an old kernel, but it should have been fine with the new kernel.

I reported the bug, which didn’t really get addressed, and then had to build my array using the command line tools (which aren’t documented).

I dunno about recommending FreeNAS (Known as truenas now). It is basically an appliance OS, and unless you are using enterprise level hardware, they want nothing to do with you.

I’m currently using it, but it was a very unpleasant experience setting it up.

You’re not wrong, but the only difference (and time will tell if its sufficient), is that they intentionally and explicitly use the free tier for advertisement, so killing that kills their reputation overnight.

But if all else fails and they try to enshitify, their apps are BSD licenced on github, and headscale is adequate, so the free tier would just shift to headscale and carry on.

Crowdsec does not provide DDOS protection in the same manner as Cloudflare. You can use crowdsec to block the traffic at your server, but it has already reached your server, and will be using up your ingress bandwidth regardless. So if you were DDOS’d, your site will go down.

Cloudflare prevents the traffic ever reaching your server, while allowing the legitimate traffic through. They block it on their servers, which have much higher bandwidth than any VPS provider has.

The beauty of game dev, is that you can make the most cursed codebase, and as long as it works, the only person itll impact is yourself.

Also, startup costs are basically zero, there is no need for a top end PC, whatever you have now is probably good enough to start.

Yes. Separate out each part out. You are currently publishing the equivalent of of a compiled binary. Split it up, and use a script to “compile” it back into the mega shell script.

It means that changes to each file can tracked (and audited) individually, you can conditionally compile bits in or out, and most usefully, you can write tests for the individual components.

Sorry, but a photo of a directory structure is not a source tree.

Your git repo consists of 4 files, a readme, a licence, and two packed shell scripts.

If you have an actual published source repo, link people to it.

I dont understand why people do this

Charitably: AI turbocharged dunning-kruger

Less charitable: Malware delivery.

There is no good reason why they couldn’t have a normal source tree, that they pack into a single shell script in CI.

I use a separate nuc, and even still, rebooting the router is a non-trivial exercise. The internet was wired into the top shelf of a cupboard, so need a step ladder to get to it.

Since getting a second pihole setup I haven’t had any issues, so I think I’m okay now. Hopefully it fails over the christmas break when I’m home :D

I dont think so, because everything else remains up and working. But it certainly could be.

I mostly like it, but over the last few months I’ve had my pihole die randomly during the day, which killed my home network, and I had to walk my partner through rebooting everything.

I’ve now got redundant pihole instances, but I’d really like to know what is going wrong with pihole. Its impossible to replicate, and very sporadic.

Packagekit (at least last I heard of it) was just a higher level package manager (wrapping around dnf/apt/etc), not anything specific to kernel patching. Maybe that has changed?

You can live patch a kernel, each distro has their own way of doing things, usually, you get a kernel module that is loaded that fixes the bug live, and there is a real fixed module to go with it that gets loaded next boot. The kernel patch module is just a hack to avoid rebooting. Ubuntu has some doco on their system LivePatch which is worth a read. I am not sure that kernel module signing is super commonly used, but there may be some distros that ship with it enabled. If it is enabled, then loading an unsigned kernel module should be impossible.

As for trust a modem, thats a tricky one. Firmware level hacks have been theorised for a long time, but there is very few examples of actual exploits. Its mostly security through obscurity.

Went through the local PC shop, so not too bad, but still frustrating.

I’ve seen a few posts on reddit while trying to solve it, but no idea how widespread the issue is. There certainly isnt a solution that I’ve found yet.

Other than this issue, I agree, protect is quite good, but there isnt much point having nice 4k cameras if they dont work correctly…

Oh, also, had 2 cloudkeys develop disk problems within weeks of owning them, so that was very annoying. 3rd one is going strong though.