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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I don’t keep a Swiss army knife set of distros anymore. I put tumbleweed on a USB. It’s rolling so I update it when I plug it in, then do what I need to do.

    I used to have a USB with Ubuntu LTS and whatever the newest Ubuntu was. Then another would get something else that I needed/wanted. I always ended up wiping the drive and adding the newest release every single time. I was always out of date by the time I needed one of them for boot repair or something. This was also a time when persistence… Wasn’t very persistent. With tumbleweed I can install whatever I need and it’s there next time. I’m sure you can do the same with any other rolling release, but tumbleweed is in my opinion on par stability-wise with incremental distros. It’s my first grab whenever I need to check a PC. If I need another distro or boot USB, I can make it from this one with a second USB. I suppose the only thing I can’t do is make a bootable USB if the computer I’m on can’t access the Internet





  • I used both tumbleweed and leap for a bit and they really are good. I’m actually using tumbleweed on a home server right now and it’s been a champ. But…

    1. My biggest gripe is opensuse seems to use different package names than any of the other distros for basic packages. I had to install a package that used capitals in the package name, and coming from mostly debian based distros, that made me rationally angry when trying to find the package I needed. I think it was network-manager or something that’s usually installed by default and I wanted something familiar.

    2. Online directions for setting something up usually has deb and/or fedora rpm directions, which is usually just some difference in package names and the equivalent install command, searching the base package will let you figure it out. I had very few issues following debian/Ubuntu directions and translating them for fedora. Opensuse is always non-existent so you always need to translate those directions for opensuse, which is usually like doing it for fedora until you run into point (1).



  • I really like my synology DS216j. Pretty much all I use it for is as a file server and storage, mostly because it can’t really do much beyond that these days, but it sure does handle that like a champ. I’m not trying to run a business with multiple users on it, just me and the family, which means mostly just me and my projects. It was super easy to set up in my early days of home networking knowing that I wanted a central location for storing my files from different devices and holding my expanding media collection. I think I saw that it had been running for over a year (would have been several years, but we get power outages occasionally and it’s not on a UPS) without a restart when I increased my storage, and it’s been running without issue since 2017. I’m planning on upgrading to a device that has 4+ drives sometime soon to make expanding and redundancy easier to handle, but it’s a hard sell when this one is still chugging along.

    I think it helps that I’ve always had a raspberry pi or other computer do the tasky things, so I never got entrenched in trying to make it do anything other than be a dlna/upnp server for media and shared file jockey for everything else.





  • I’ve had a basic DLNA server running for over 5 years and just set up jellyfin about a month ago and it’s an absolute game changer. It has the functionality of a good streaming service except using your own media. It searches databases and matches it to your files so you get some really good images with the interface and information about the media. Plus it remembers what you’ve watched and how far you are into episodes and movies. Which is perfect if you have two or more TVs or devices you watch on.

    It’s changed my partners preferences on how they watch shows. They hated watching anything on my server because they have ADHD and it’s impossible for them to figure out what they were watching and where they were in it, not to mention trying to navigate my lack of organizing anything. Jellyfin fixes that. Now I just plop a show into the shows folder, or a movie in the movie folder and it’s dealt with.





  • I recall jaunty jackalope being the Ubuntu version that became my full time os. It was that version that my IBM x31 had everything taken care of on install with the third party drivers checked. I feel like the LTS version following that was where you could buy a generation previous of any hardware and it’d work without much fuss.





  • I’m driving a Nissan leaf, and it’s costing me about $180 to drive 10,000 miles (4.2ish mi/kwh average over the past year), compared to about that same amount for under 1,000 miles on my Tacoma. I charge 99% at home using a 120v charger and I back calculated using my average mi/kwh and electricity cost. There’s basically no maintenance, so the only extra cost of ownership is basically tires and brakes. My best guess at the battery degradation so far is about 2.5% per year, but the previous owner went extra lengths to keep the battery in good shape, as do I.

    So far it looks like every 4-5 years I can replace the battery at the highest estimate and break even compared to my Tacoma. This is the original battery, still at about 80% capacity from 2016 and almost 50,000 miles.