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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • cecilkorik@lemmy.catoLinux Gaming@lemmy.worldFedora
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    6 days ago

    That’s why we call them flavors. People like certain flavors. It doesn’t mean the nutrition is any different or that you need to always use only whatever flavor is somebody else’s favourite. The lovely thing about Linux is the freedom to choose and to try different things to find what works best for you personally. There’s no organization trying to shove certain tools and principles down your throat for profit. It’s literally just personal preferences and they’re all equally valid choices. We try to make recommendations on things that might be easier to grasp or might suit a person’s situation better but really they’re all just flavors and they’re all good for the people who like those flavors.


  • Pika OS is a gaming distro based on Debian which in my experience one of the most stable and reliable upstream distros that I trust, Pika adds all the gaming stuff you could possibly want and all the library and driver updates that you need to stay current and basically fixes what I consider Debian’s only flaw (that its stability can make non-security update and driver updates slow and unsuitable for the latest and greatest games and technologies). Overall I’m really enjoying it, I’m daily driving it and have it installed on several laptops with no hardware issues at all. Just be careful that you need to use the NVIDIA-specific install ISO if you have a recent NVIDIA card.

    I’ve also heard good things about CachyOS, personally it would take a lot to drag me over to the Arch ecosystem but if you already have a Steam Deck anyway it might be a great place to be.


  • Most game media/advertising/reviewing is garbage and cannot be trusted. I play games that look fun. I have a particular definition of fun specific to me alone. I’ll watch actual gameplay to decide if it looks fun to me. I might watch technical reviews and benchmarks that tell me if my hardware will be able to play it. IDGAF what culture war moralizing poop that some idiots want to headline it with and babble about to get views on their articles and channels.

    I don’t think Stellar Blade looks like the kind of fun I personally enjoy so I’m going to pass, but I’m not going to judge or shame anyone who’s enjoying the fuck out of it because there’s nothing to shame. It’s a game. It’s made to be played and be fun for people to play. Have fun. Don’t worry about the drama storms. They’re pointless and devoid of meaning.



  • “I don’t know, that’s just how we’ve always done it.”

    In my experience there often is a reason for it, it’s just that the person who knew the reason for it left the company and it was never properly documented, so now it’s just cargo-cult-policy without any understanding behind it. So you’re right, there’s no way to figure out why it’s done that way or if it should continue to be done that way without thorough reexamination and a pretty analytical approach, and when those reasons are old they can certainly turn out to be badly outdated, but I’d also caution against just blanket assuming that it probably isn’t necessary simply because it’s “the way we’ve always done it” and no one seems to know why. The erosion of institutional knowledge is relentless, but that doesn’t mean it was never known or never for a good reason either. It’s not braindead to follow a policy you don’t understand the reason for, it might be lazy and it might be putting too much trust in the people who made the policies, but it’s not always wrong. Sometimes the policies are written in blood, and you not knowing that doesn’t mean it’s not a good policy.


  • That’s why they put in the “debatably” part. Anyone can debate to their heart’s content that it is superior. And they’d still be wrong.

    (To be clear, I’m agreeing, you and Kolanaki are exactly right.)

    But it doesn’t even matter if it’s superior. There is value in seeing the steps of progress made to get to a superior edition. This is why we have version control for code. It’s not always just so you can do a revert or see the latest change, if it was we could just throw away commits older than a month or something. It’s valuable to be able to see the whole history. We can still learn from it and appreciate what it did for its time, even if it’s old.





  • For RAID that’s pretty much it as far as I know, but I’m pretty sure it can be a lot simpler and more flexible using some of these newfangled filesystems that are out nowadays like LVM and ZFS and maybe BTRFS? I can’t pretend I’m super up to date on all the latest technologies, I know they can do some really incredible stuff though. I’m not familiar enough to recommend it, but it might be worth looking into what they can do for you if your NAS supports it. From what I understand they don’t use RAID at all, although they might be able to simulate it, instead they treat disks as JBOD (just a bunch of disks) and use their own strategies to spread whole filesystems and partition structures across them in various safe and redundant ways that are way more flexible, that don’t care about disk size or anything like that, they’ll handle any shapes and sizes and I think they can be expanded and contracted pretty freely. I think ZFS in particular is really heavily used for this and supports some crazy complicated structures.


  • At the end of the day it doesn’t matter so much if they’re in 2x 2 bays or 1x 4 bay that’s backing itself up. It might give a little extra redundancy and safety to have them on separate NAS but the backup software is what’s going to be doing the heavy lifting here and it shouldn’t really matter whether it’s talking to two different disks/arrays on the same machine/NAS (as long as the NAS allows you to split the 4 drives into 2 different arrays which from my experience they do)


  • I don’t know what kind of data this is but when you say the whole household’s data is going to be on it, I want to take a moment to point out that while RAID1 is redundant, it is NOT a backup. Both drives will happily delete, overwrite, corrupt, or encrypt all your data as quickly as you can blink the moment they believe something has told them to, and will both do it simultaneously to both “redundant” copies of your data. It also won’t help if your powersupply blows up and nukes both drives at once. It only guards against individual hardware failure of a single disk, nothing else. While that failure mode is quite common (and using RAID actually increases the risk of it) it’s important to remember that it’s also not the only cause of data loss.

    If any of this data is important and irreplaceable, consider whether you’d be better off spending your additional future budget setting up another pair of drives to maintain continuous backups. There are a variety of simple tools that can create incremental, time-machine-like backups from hard-drive based storage to other hard-drive based storage while using a minimal amount of additional space (I use this rock-solid script based on rsync but literally there are dozens of backup tools that do almost exactly the same thing, often using rsync under the hood themselves). This still won’t help you if say, your house burns down with both drive arrays inside it, but it’s an improvement over a single huge RAID NAS and gives you the option to roll back from a known-good snapshot or restore a file that was deleted or corrupted long ago and you never noticed.

    To answer your original question, it generally isn’t possible to do what you’re asking. You might be able to get away with starting the RAID array as RAID1+0 and pretending that half the drives (the RAID1 mirror side) have failed, but that will mean your two existing disks are running in RAID0 striping mode with no RAID1 mirrors, and a failure of EITHER one will lose all your data until you get the second two drives installed. And that’s super sketchy and would be tricky to even set up. You cannot run a RAID1+0 with only two drives in mirror mode because they’ll both be missing their striped RAID0 volume. In fact, if this happens on a live array, you lose the whole array in that case too. Despite having 4 drives, RAID1+0 is technically still only singly-redundant. Any single failure can be tolerated, but two failures can make the whole array unrecoverable if they happen to be the wrong two failures (both failures from the same stripe, leaving only two working RAID1 mirrors of the other stripe), and due to striping it really is unrecoverable. Only small chunks of each file will be available on the surviving RAID1 mirrors.

    In almost all cases, changing the geometry of the array means rebuilding it from scratch, and you usually need some form of temporary storage to be able to do that. The good news is, if you decide to add 2 drives to an existing 2 drive RAID1 setup, you have 4 drives, each 4TB. and you cannot possibly have more than 4TB of data because your existing two drives are RAID1 and only have 4TB capacity between them. You can probably use 3 of those drives to set up a 4-drive RAID 1+0 with a missing drive, after copying all the data from your RAID1 array onto drive #4 temporarily. Then once the 3-drive array is up, copy it back onto the NAS array. Finally, you can slot drive #4 into the NAS as well, treating it as a “new” drive to replace the “failed” one, and the array should sync over all the stripes it needs and bring it into the array properly. This is all definitely possible with Linux’s built-in software RAID tools (I’ve done stupider things) however whether your specific NAS box will let you to do this successfully is something I can’t promise.

    It’s important to keep in mind this is all sketchy as hell (remember what I said about backups and asking whether this data was irreplaceable? yeah. don’t stop thinking about that), but technically it should work.

    Edit to add: Another perspective is, once you get your 2 additional drives, you can turn your NAS drive + backup drive into two RAID0s to extend them. A pair of 4 TB RAID0 drives gives you the 8 TB of storage you ultimately want. A second pair of RAID0 drives gives you 8 TB that you can use to make regular backups of the primary RAID0. Again you need to do some array rebuilding, but this time you have an already-existing backup so you don’t even have to worry about dancing around creating initially-broken arrays. Yes the risk of a RAID0 failure taking down one of the arrays is much higher, but that’s what your backups are for. If a single drive fails, you either lose the primary array (sucks, but you still have all your backups on the other RAID0 safe and sound) or you lose the backup (not a big deal because the primary’s still happy and healthy, and once you fix the backup array you can start making new backups again). Either way, you’re now relying on an actual backup strategy to ensure your data is safe instead of relying on RAID1, which is not a backup. The only thing you lose is the the continuous uptime if you do have a failure in the primary array, and the ability of RAID1 to read from both arrays at once and theoretically increase the read speed. But the advantages of gaining a proper scheduled backup outweigh that in my opinion.



  • It is, but it’s also necessary sometimes. If governments didn’t have any power and could just be ignored or openly defied without consequences, we wouldn’t have to care about what they want to censor. But they do have power, despite all our wishing that they didn’t, and we can’t organize a resistance to them without careful maneuvering and sometimes at least making an appearance of playing by their rules. Government censorship you can unsubscribe from is objectively better than censorship you can’t. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.


  • The fact that ESA doesn’t seem to have any interest or motivation to pursue (now commercially-proven and human-rated) rapidly reusable rockets is a big red flag for their entire attitude. Literally every other space program of any substantial size or credibility is pursuing them heavily if not exclusively as you’d have to be blind not to see the writing on the wall. The days of disposable rockets are numbered and rapidly dwindling. The Ariane 6 is an impressive machine, in the same way a supercar is… as a bold status symbol in an incredibly narrow niche with almost zero growth potential. I hope Macron’s challenge is a first step to changing that because they are in danger of falling very far behind if they don’t start to move very quickly to get back into the leader’s pack, who are going to be the group that decides who really “owns” space. And you’d better believe that despite any treaties to the contrary, someday, and maybe soon, people are going to start making rules, staking claims, and creating the weapons needed to defend such claims in space, from Low Earth Orbit to the rest of the solar system, it’s coming and only a fool would pretend it’s not after seeing the state of the art in launch technology and the geopolitics going on in the world right now. If you can’t innovate, you’d better start copying, because being stationary is a death sentence when things are evolving this rapidly.


  • It’s not Peertube, but as at least a step away from Youtube I’ve found a lot of my favourite creators immediately cross-post all their videos to Odysee (including electronics guys like Louis, Bigclive, GreatScott, etc) and I’ve also found some new channels to watch there. It’s not a great site, it’s marginally better than Youtube, which is not a high bar. For obvious reasons, I’m looking forward to finding recommendations in Peertube too though so I’ll be watching this thread.