Especially when the maintainer gets upset about answering the same questions repeatedly in Discord but doesn’t offer a non-discord support stream

My local video rental store (family video) hung on by a thread until the pandemic and finally went out of business. The property now holds an adult video store

On this subject, the freaking Windows Mail to Outlook (new) transition that Microsoft foisted upon users sent me deep into the “troubleshooting windows store problems” rabbit hole way too many times. Usually because something broke horrendously with the email account authentication and it would be stuck in an authentication loop without prompting for credentials

Why does this just make me think of this banger?

My wife and I use that one pretty regularly

I have no clue what MultiPlex theaters are

So back in the earlier days of cinema, you’d go to the Cineplex to see a movie. A Cineplex would only have a single screen for viewing movies while the multiplex would have multiple screens for seeing movies on. This started with the first duplex theatre in 1915 and later the first triplex in 1966, shortly followed by theatres with 6+ screens which is around when the term “multiplex” started being used. Basically for anyone born after the 80s (therefore anyone under the age of about 40) the term is largely obsolete since most theatres have at least 4 screens and qualify as multiplexes, plus the industry has seen so much consolidation that smaller independent theatres with 1-2 screens are pretty uncommon now

I’ve never tried the Proxmox over Debian method, I just know it is an officially supported install method. Good on you for getting that far though!

A hale storm earlier this year and the power outage it caused created some bizarre issue with my home server I have yet to diagnose. All of my containers and VMs corrupted in some way, so I had to restore from backup, but my file server container has some sort of permissions issue on top of that.

Honestly the brownout before the outage is almost definitely what did it, but the cost of a UPS that also protects against brownouts is well outside of my usual hobby budget so it’s hard to justify on ewaste hardware that I got a pallet of for less than what the UPS would cost used

Realistically, comfort comes from experience. The more you use it the more you’ll feel comfortable.

If you want to get a lot of exposure without dedicating too much time to it and limit the risk, I would say, spin up a Debian VM and try to configure it into the server you want the old school way. Setup ssh keys, raid pool and samba share all via ssh. Try to do it like you’re actually deploying it. This will give you real world exposure to the command line and the commands you’d run. Next maintain that server like it’s production, ssh in every couple of weeks to run updates and reboot. Just that muscle memory of logging in and reviewing updates will help you feel more comfortable. Do it again with another service (a VPN server would be an easy choice, a Minecraft server is also a fun one but requires a lot more memory. DNS would be good if you’re feeling brave, but that’s really just because DNS architecture is more complex than most realize) and maintain those servers too

Once you’ve setup a couple of servers and spent a couple of months monitoring and updating them your comfort level should be much higher and you might feel ready to setup some actually home production servers on Debian or the like.

You mentioned running Trunas and wanting to learn Debian and other FLOSS software, the easy button answer is to run Proxmox. Its free and open source with paid enterprise support plans available and has been rapidly improving just in the handful of years I’ve been running it. Proxmox is really just a modified version of Debian. They have some tweaks and custom kernels over stock Debian but impressively actually have a supported install method of installing overtop of an existing Debian install and apparently some Proxmox employees actually run it as their workstation operating system

With an uptime of greater than 5 years I’m going to be concerned about the system potentially not coming back up after a reboot/power outage, especially for physical hardware

At a bank I worked at, we had an old IBM Power server which was at that point purely used for historical data. It had multiple years of uptime and was of course a good 10+ years old. When we went to take it offline, we actually just disabled the nic on the switch so we could reduce the number of powercycles it would see in fear that it would not power on anymore. Theoretically the data on it is purely historical, backed up and not needed, but there was enough question marks on each of those fronts we just played it safe

So honest question, what is everyone’s hopes with the increase in Linux desktop use?

Like when I think about it the only thing I really care about is that I have decent hardware/driver support and holdouts for anti-cheat give up on requiring other operating systems (mostly so that my wife and eldest child stop complaining that I can’t play Fortnite with them) as well as other random stuff that flat-out blocks use with Linux and requires either extra configuration or to keep a spare computer around with Windows.

Basically I hope that Linux can be where MacOS was about a decade ago, a second platform that vendors are aware of and will put in some amount of effort in to support (and will be clear about limitations/lack of support otherwise) and it won’t be as weird to employers or schools if you have a preference for the platform

Is it really “running natively” if it requires running through a translation layer? WINE is not an emulator, but it also isn’t a native runtime library with a stable API, it’s a translation layer translating a reverse engineered, unstable third party’s API

But that’s always a good sign that you’ve dug into the part that actually still works consistently! Once you pop some Windows 2000 era UI you know you’ve struck gold and need to note the path for next time (until Microsoft rearranges their settings for the 5th time this year of course)

I’d ask if you’re at my work, but this is an amount of organizational improvement that they haven’t yet been able to begin

Oh that’s what it’s called! I didn’t know it was an actual thing so that’s cool!

Real talk, on the subject of lasagna, my wife recently found an alternate recipe where instead of layering the lasagna you roll the lasagna in the noodles, so you end up with a pan full of rolls of lasagna and it’s kinda like a calzone or tortilini but not at the same time. Its really good

Jesus it’s not even like it just ran rmdir from the current directory and got lost, it just flat out explicitly deleted everything from the root of the drive

Yeah as an admin I love that I can run familiar Linuxy commands in powershell but I also hate that they can’t just use/fork the real userland utilities so everything works just similarly enough to completely throw you off when you stumble across a difference

I love reading this as the backups have never succeeded

Its all creepy until you realize it was all just a chat with an LLM and not actually an agentic machine learning model or chain of models hooked into some custom APIs

LLMs famously collapse into rediculousness once a conversation goes on too long. They’re now at the point where that takes more than a couple of paragraphs of text at least