No problem! Glad I could be of help, and best of luck on your project.
No problem! Glad I could be of help, and best of luck on your project.
I am using lftp and mirror. One server functions as the “main” server, which mirrors the backup server to itself once per day at a specific time (they both run 24/7 so I set it to run very early in the morning when it is unlikely to be accessed).
In my crontab I have:
# * * * /usr/bin/lftp -e "mirror -eRv [folder path on main server] [folder path on backup server]; quit;" sftp://[user]@[address of backup server]:[port number]
Two old HP thin client PCs configured as 4TB SFTP file servers using vsftpd on Debian. Each one uses software RAID 1 with both an NVMe and SATA SSD internally, and are in two separate locations with a cron job which syncs one to the other every 24 hours.
People who actually know what they are doing will probably find this silly, but I had fun and learned a lot setting it up.
I am not sure, then. If you are on a laptop, you might try one or the other of those utilities regardless simply because they can improve battery life, but that is a separate issue.
Interesting. Do you use Powertop or TLP, by any chance? Some power utilities will turn on USB power saving if there is no activity on a USB port for a while, which can cause issues with USB mice. Generally I turn off that specific setting, or I believe there might be some way to whitelist certain USB devices to not have this sleep behavior.
Are there mice which are not supported in Linux? Everything I have used from a junky unbranded wireless mouse to a high end Logitech gaming mouse have all been plug and play for me. Even the RGB settings can be configured in openRGB.
Comfort should always be an important factor in a mouse for any OS, I would think. In terms of build quality, I have had the rubber on some mice start to degrade over time, but that is about it. Even the cheapest mice that are hard plastic can last for decades with no problem.
I would say that switchable DPI would be a must-have feature for me with modern displays. As someone with a 4k monitor, some junky office mice do not have enough sensitivity for me on high resolution monitors even with the setting cranked to max in the settings menu.
For wireless mice, I prefer AA battery mice over USB rechargeable mice, but that is a matter of personal preference. If my mouse battery dies in a AA mouse, I can swap the rechargeable NiMH battery in a minute and continue using it. However, if a USB rechargeable mouse is dead, I either have to use it on a tether for a while or remember to constantly keep recharging it. Also, having an integrated li-ion battery will give any mouse a limited lifespan unless you are willing to open up and solder in a new battery when it wears out, whereas I have some AA-powered mice which are going strong probably a decade later, so long I have had to open them up and re-solder them with new microswitches instead of new batteries.
I think you would need to provide more detail to know what you have. Does it have a model number on it anywhere?
I cannot say that I have done extensive testing, but the Acer Swift 315-51G and Gigabyte Aero WV8 that I have both worked fine with Linux with zero prior research on my part. No issues with any drivers, even the SD card readers, although I have not checked the fingerprint sensor on the Acer. Maybe I have just been lucky.
Both have hybrid Nvidia graphics, though, and 10-series and prior hybrid graphics especially, as I understand, have issues with high idle power usage unless you manually disable the dGPU when not gaming, which I had to do using envycontrol and nearly doubled my battery life on both. I might avoid hybrid dGPUs and especially older ones unless you need that.
Used laptop-wise, I agree with others that a used business laptop like a Dell would probably be your best bet.
No problem! Mint XFCE sounds perfect to me.
That covers a pretty wide range of hardware, but that era would be around 2009-2015, give or take, so you would be looking at around Intel 1st gen to 6th gen most likely (Let’s be honest, there is nearly zero chance institutions would be using anything but Intel in that era). Pentium-branded CPUs from that time range, unfortunately, likely means low-end dual core CPUs with no hyperthreading, so 2C/2T, but I have run Linux on Core2-era machines without issue, so hopefully the CPU specs will be okay.
2-8GB of DDR3 RAM is most likely for that era, and as others point out, will be your biggest issue for running browsers. If the RAM is anything like the CPUs, I am assuming you will be looking at the lower end with 2-4GB depending on how old the oldest machines you have are, so I second the recommendation of maybe consolidating the RAM into fewer machines, or if you can get any kind of budget at all, DDR3 sticks on ebay are going to be dirt cheap. A quick look and I see bulk listings of 20x4GB sticks for $26.
In terms of distro/DE, I second anything with XFCE, but if you could bump them up to around 8GB RAM, then I think any DE would be feasible.
Hard drives shouldn’t be an issue I think, since desktop hard drives in the 320GB-1TB range would have been standard by then. Also, you are most likely outside of the “capacitor plague” era, so I would not expect motherboard issues, but you might open them up and dust them out so the fans aren’t struggling. Re-pasting the CPUs would also probably be a good idea, so maybe consider adding a couple $5 tubes of thermal paste to a possible budget. Polysynthetic thermal compounds which do not dry out easily would be preferable, and something like Arctic Silver 5 would also be an era-appropriate choice, lol.
I am not sure that I can really call what I did distrohopping, but
Mint w/ Cinnamon (several years ago on an old junker laptop and never ended up using it as a daily driver) -> Manjaro w/ KDE Plasma (daily driver for ~1 year) -> Arch w/ KDE Plasma (~2 years and counting).
I have also used Debian with no DE on a file server I made out of an old thin client PC and I have used Rasbian on a raspberry pi.
Oh no, I’ve been caught, haha. Good memory!
To my defense, the story seemed relevant to OP’s question, and the post that it was originally in has been deleted, apparently.
The Arch installation tutorial I followed originally advised using LVM to have separate root and user logical volumes. However, after some time my root volume started getting full, so I figured I would take 10GB off of my home volume and add it to the root one. Simple, right?
It turns out that lvreduce --size 10G volgroup0/lv_home
doesn’t reduce the size by 10GB, it sets the absolute size to 10GB, and since I had way more than 10GB in that volume, it corrupted my entire system.
There was a warning message, but it seems my past years of Windows use still have me trained to reflexively ignore dire warnings, and so I did it anyway.
Since then I have learned enough to know that I really don’t do anything with LVM, nor do I see much benefit to separate root/home partitions for desktop Linux use, so I reinstalled my system without LVM the next time around. This is, to date, the first and only time I have irreparably broken my Linux install.
I have not played CS2, sorry.
Arch gamer here. I can confirm that it works well.
What is your use case? For me, something like a fileserver which I am mainly SSH-ing into anyway, I may not install a DE at all, but if this is going to be a general-use desktop, I see no reason not to install the DE right from the beginning, and selecting a DE will be part of the install process of most Linux distros, or some distros have different install disk images that you can download with any given DE which it supports.
If you are very concerned about keeping your system lean and want full control of what gets installed, you might want to look up guides for installing Arch Linux. The initial setup process is more involved than other distros, but once you have it installed, I think its reputation for being difficult is overblown.
Sorry for the late reply. It sounds like it could be due to the dGPU if your battery life is terrible. I don’t know if that method would work or not. I had to try a couple different things before I eventually settled on envycontrol.
I am not sure what graphics you have, but I have an older-ish laptop with hybrid 10-series Nvidia graphics which do not fully power down even with TLP installed. I was finding that it continued to draw a continuous 7W even in an idle state. I installed envycontrol so that I can manually turn off/on hybrid graphics or force the use of integrated graphics. I noticed my battery life jumped from 2-3 hours to 4-5 hours after I did this, and unless I am gaming (which I rarely do on this laptop) I hardly ever need the dgpu in this.
I also use TLP. I have tried auto-cpufreq and powertop, and I found TLP offered the most granular control and worked the best for my system/needs.
I have a laptop with integrated Intel graphics and a desktop with Nvidia graphics. I use Wayland on the former right now as of KDE 6. I have noticed some odd behaviors, but overall it has been fine. The latter, however, just boots to a black screen. I have neither the time nor the desire to debug that right now, so I will adopt Wayland on that machine when it works with Nvidia to a reasonable degree of stability.
I am only a few pages in, but speaking as a Linux user in the 2020s, I am skeptical of the claim that Linux in 1999 would “never, ever break down.”