Arch everywhere. LTS kernel on servers and zen kernel on desktop and laptop. I love the idea of nixos but in practice it felt like more work than it was worth (to me).
I originally did Debian on servers but after using arch for long enough and never having stability problems, it was easier to move to the same distro.
Not so much to the content of your post but to your title:
Their web interface is nice, reasonably priced (not cheap) prosumer sort of gear. I have 2 APs and 1 router, 1 AP is flaky, it’s the 7 XGS which should be a high end AP. It gets pretty bad coverage with it and it’s flaky, randomly going offline once a week. RMAed it, replaced Ethernet cable, poe injector (ubiquity branded) and tried tweaking settings. Still happening
So to the subject, some good in the web interface but I will not buy again. That said, most network gear has some sort of jank in my experience, flaky, or just bad management interface, etc…
+1 here. I always felt some draw to a tiling or scrolling window manager but they were always a lot of work to set up and I never quite clicked with one. Niri with Dank Material Shell is pretty amazing.
Pinta is pretty decent for some things, like a paint.net for Linux.
I just bought some UniFi gear for the first time. Cloud gateway fiber, u7 pro xgs and u7 long range.
Really like the dashboard, configuration, vlan.
Really dislike the WiFi APs, they’re AWFUL on range/speed. Updated, tweaked settings, Ethernet backhaul… I had better and more reliable coverage with a single ASUS router (but the asus firmware was terrible). A synology mesh worked pretty reliably too but no >2.5gbps wan port.
I also wish their DNS was more full featured. I haven’t dug into this much, maybe it is something I can do by SSHing into router, been too busy trying to get the WiFi improved.
Not annoyed enough to return the gear but really disappointed with WiFi performance.
Apple computers ARE really well put together, maybe no other maker exactly as good. But I’d say the Microsoft Surface line is a similar quality. Razer too though they’re pretty expensive.
Asus zephyrus laptops are pretty great build quality, close to Apple but without the same kind of pricing and markup gouging we get from Apple
Im not an apple hater, they make some great stuff. My point above was just that they don’t have competition in the “I need a Mac” space so their hardware isn’t competitively priced. And their build quality is great, but not every laptop needs to be built like a tank with top of the line components.
It’s good, a lot of good work going on, what they already have is impressive and the development seems pretty active and progressing well.
But if you’re buying a laptop to run Linux and don’t plan to use macOS, I really think there are a lot of better options out there (depending on what’s important to you). You’re going to pay the Apple premium price for a computer, and though apple computers are good hardware, they’re expensive and largely overpriced for small upgrades. Whatever price you find for a refurbished M2, take that money and go find a laptop known to be well supported on Linux, it’ll just be a better experience and you’ll probably get more for your money.
I haven’t run Asahi in 6+ months but thunderbolt/usb4 wasn’t working when I last used it so I couldn’t use my usb dock. Video was OK but I think Audio was sketchy (don’t remember specifics). It’s stuff that will get fixed at some point but right now it feels like a handful of minor annoyances or inconveniences
Even in 1-2 years when Asahi gets some updates and is in a better spot (I really do expect it to be) I still don’t think I’d lean towards a macbook with Asahi over something else if Linux is the only OS you’re going to run. Of course, if you’re looking to dabble with some iOS development or something else you need a mac for, but don’t want to live in MacOS, then Asahi’s a great option to get you back to Linux.
Ah, good to know. I haven’t really used that save configuration and reuse process, I just do the install directly at the end of configuring everything. But I can see the draw for using that, a shame it doesn’t seem to work that well.
archinstall’s default btrfs layout has I think 4-5 separate subvolumes (I’m not running btrfs anymore so can’t check) but at the very least I remember it has:
being separate subvolumes and mountpoints, you can just use a previous snapshot from 1 without rolling back others
Related to the snapshotting stuff, timeshift-autosnap is pretty helpful, hooks into pacman and takes a snapshot before installing/updating packages.
Personally I found btrfs and the snapshots helpful when starting to use arch, but now that I know how not to blow things up, it has been stable enough for me I just felt ext4 was easier.
Ollama and openwebui for a nice web interface.
Similar to previous reply about MATE with font size changes, I do that with plasma. I hadn’t seen plasma big screen you linked, I’ll definitely try that one out. I’ve wondered about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_Mobile? Like these sort of niche projects don’t always get a lot of attention, if the bigscreen project doesn’t work out, I’d bet the plasma mobile project is fairly active and given the way it scales for displays might work really well on a tv
Speaking of scaling since you mentioned it. I have noticed scaling in general feels a lot better in Wayland. If you’d only tried it in X11 before, might want to see if Wayland works better for you.
Behind a traefik reverse proxy with lets encrypt for ssl even though the services aren’t exposed to the internet?