DigitalDilemma

I moved my wife’s laptop to Debian with Cinnamon as a desktop. She loves it and is as technophobic a person as I know…

Auto login, automated-updates set up, remote backups. She just has to open the lid and firefox is there, which is 95% of what she wants. Libre office is around for the remaining 5%.

This is someone who used to get angry at Windows forced updates and reboots, so not having any of that improved her quality of life.

No one said ‘different bad’,

Plenty of people did. “What’s the point of change?” “I’m happy with Sys-V” “I don’t like Poettering”, “Lennart is too powerfull” and a lot more irrelevant and personal attacks.

Please don’t accuse me of gaslighting whilst gaslighting me in return. I was there, I lived through the worst of the Debian wars and saw some great people leave the project, and a side of some friends that I really didn’t like. But that war is done and I have zero interest in continuing it so I’ll leave this here.

Fair, and representative of some opinions certainly.

But change, change is constant. Resist it and end up poorer and more bitter.

Two groups of people went to war over a difference of opinion.

1. New! Bad! Different! Change!

2. Hey, this works better than the old way. Let’s use this instead.

Hard disagree. Resizing partitions is dangerous and difficult for most computer users.

(I’m a sysadmin who does this stuff multiple times a day, so this isn’t negative bias)

Symlinking is quick, easy, totally safe. It’s one of the best things about linux filesystems. Use it.

It’s fine, I’m don’t know why you’re trying to generate shade with this post and comments.

The other commenter is right, my work desktop has access to my home server so I can remotely monitor on my breaks, as well as my password manager.

Well, that’s your own fault and poor opsec. That’s also a likely breach of your employer’s acceptable use policy in using their equipment for your personal things.

I know you’re going to say “They don’t care” and that’s probably true - right up until the point when they suddenly do care, or are looking for reasons. It doesn’t matter if your IT are in-house or a MSP, they’re still paid by your employers and so answer to them.

I started unplugging the Ethernet cable when I leave for work so IT can’t do any behind the scenes when I’m away.

It’s not your computer, why do you care?

All that’s going to do is make you an annoyance and potentially end up with you being called into a special meeting.

Back up everything before you start playing with partitions.

No, seriously, do it.

I work four days a week on a remote windows vm. It has everything I need, and I remote from /that/ onto whatever other vm I might need. I connect over a vpn using, well, anything. As you’ve pointed out, the local machine doesn’t need much in the way of specs, although in my case I have three monitors - all given over to the remote, and it’s a clean way to separate work’s environment and network from my own and it’s a very common work pattern. The hypervisor there is vmware, but that doesn’t matter.

But… Gaming is a different. There is latency over the conn, and audio/graphic lag would make FPS and gpu-heavy games particularly poor. I don’t know of a way to totally overcome that, although game-streaming services exist, so presumably it is possible.

Great tool. It’s also leveraged by pinchflat, where you add Youtube channels via a webui and it downloads their videos and adds them to Jellyfin.

You need to make your own plan about what’s important to you. Don’t waste time backing up stuff you can quickly download again - like docker images. Just know where the stuff is that you care about (such as any mounted volumes in docker with your own data on) and back that up, and make everything automated. If you do it manually, chances are you’ll gradually stop doing them.

I wrote some things about properly backing up data that may be of use.

Pack it into a json or CSV oneline string and shove it in a CLI password manager you can access in a scriptable way from both users. (I use the linux tool, ‘pass’ for this).

Alternatively, save it to a dropfile that only both users can access.

No idea, but ArchWiki has some of the best linux documentation around.

For a server os, do things like consider stability and ease of upgrading between major versions.

Debian does both of those things extremely well.

If you’re playing around with changing distros and your data is valuable, I’d try and find somewhere to back it up to, myself.

Ok - and what sort of cpu load do they have?

htop will also show the cpu bars and the breakdown of that - whether it’s pure cpu or iowait, which is when the cpu can’t do anything because it’s waiting on disk or network.

And how’s your memory usage looking?

I’m guessing you’ve already turned it off and on again. If not, seriously, do that. It works more time than it doesn’t for random weirdness.

Run ‘htop’ and sort by CPU (it’s a friendlier and better version of ‘top’. That’ll show you what processes are using the most CPU

Whilst you’re in there, check the free memory. If that’s low, or swap usage is high, then use htop to sort by memory usage to find what’s using the most.

If you see processes you don’t recognise, hit google and find out why. It’s very unlikely they’re malicious, but it’s far less common on linux than Windows to have random processes doing unknown stuff. If it’s using a lot of cpu or memory, there’ll be a reason. It might be a dumb reason, but you will be able to find it out.

And then when you know what the guilty process is, if it is that, and it’s not critical - you can stop it with systemctl and narrow down what’s afoot.

They’re often having to juggle with very low budgets, old equipment, low skill and zero support. And that’s before you add children…

I don’t doubt they jumped at the chance of someone helping out.

You’re talking as if “The linux community” was one single bunch of people.

Reddit isn’t Linux HQ and nor is Lemmy, nor is Facebook. #linux still active on IRC too, but not there either.

Recent convert to immich and hugely impressed by the software and project - one of FOSS’s shining stars. Good work everyone.