Printers are always horrible to administer. Brother are typically the best on Linux. I wrote a massive instructional blog a few weeks ago because it took so much work to get my HL-3150CDN working over USB. I had to repackage a Frankenstein’s monster of a driver because my printer never got 64-bit CUPS filters.

Yep. It’s your car to do with it what you want. The ADRs (Australian Design Rules) only apply at point of sale. Once it’s yours, it merely needs meet roadworthy requirements. As long as you keep a functioning speedo, wipers and lights, you can rip out every bit of electronics in the car.

Vortex is written in .Net, so, yeah.

You’ve just said your 5 biggest problems with Linux are things that Microsoft did.

The longest outage I’ve had in a decade is when my primary SSD died a 2 months ago and I had to reinstall using config backups. It was down for around a day.

I’ve thrown a UPS on it and flown overseas for a week or two. It’s basically just email for me and the kids.

I’ve had longer outages on hosted services, TBH.

I host my own mail. When it’s down, the mail just gets delivered after I get online again. Almost all mail servers are configured to retry over a period of several days before giving up.

Once my health insurer sent me mail by post to tell me that my mail server was down. That was kinda funny.

TightVNC. Use TightVNC.

The train ride home just kills it. I eat. I clean. I sleep.

Xiph have always produced the best stuff. Competition is great and all, but at the end of the day, Xiph’s codecs beat everyone at everything.

I wrote a blog about it last year with my method of deduplicating. I really need to update that bit because steam keeps writing files that don’t uphold the group permissions, and others get permission errors that need to be fixed by admin. Steam also failed to determine free space on a drive when symlinks were involved.

I even found recently that steam would write files in /tmp/ as one user, and fail when you logged in as another user and tried to write the same file. Multi-user breaks even without messing around.

My current solution doesn’t use symlinks. I just add two libraries for each user. One in their respective home directory, and another shared in /mnt/steam. It means that any user can update a game in /mnt/steam, and it cleanly updates for all users at once.

OK I just measured mine. I have 459GiB of games on the drive, consuming 368GiB of space. That’s about 25% compression. I’m using compress=zstd:9.

I should try deduplication. I have 4 steam users and I’ve created an ACL hell to prevent the same game being downloaded and installed twice.

Btrfs is amazing for a steam library. The single best feature is the compression. Games tend to have lot of unoptimized assets which compress really well. Because decompression is typically faster than your disk, it can potentially make games load faster too.

I put a second dedicated nvme drive in my PC just for steam. It’s only 512GB but it holds a surprisingly large library.

And I can’t immediately do the thing, I snooze the alarm.

I bet a ton of it is Nvidia and AMD junk.

do not choose something copyrighted.

Is that with a “nudge, nudge, wink, wink”? It would be such a shame if the whole project were jeopardised by such things.

I used to eat a biscuit every time I was waiting for my PC to reboot. It was hard to stay thin while running Windows 98.

I have a second laptop next to me so I can do something completely unrelated while waiting for my code to compile. If I watch my code compile, I’ll start reading the logs and I WILL start investigating one of the 243 linting errors I inherited from the other devs.

By the end of the week, I’m sometimes switching between 3 different branches and raising a 5-line pull request for the one thing I was asked to do. I then have a 100+ line PR because I refactored some trash module to shave 200ms off the program startup time.

Back to your question of how I manage waiting. I don’t manage. I have a dream that one day my codebase won’t be trash and I can make a change without invoking an 8 minute wait.

At least now that I have stims, I don’t feel the urge to snack every time my mind idles.

And half the time you’ll find it in the registry too. Linux has proven quite well that an OS doesn’t need a registry.

Oh, and what’s with ProgramData and AppData being two completely different things. I understand the difference between the two directories, but there is no difference between a program and an app. Everywhere else it’s Machine/User.

I’m on the Ubuntu 24.04 beta and this is what I get in a day.

The internet is full of bad advice.

Man pages are never wrong.

I did have LUKS and a USB flash drive with a key to be inserted on boot. It was definitely difficult and caused performance issues. It was particularly difficult to add/remove drives from the array. These days I only encrypt my off-site backups that sit at the office where my coworkers potentially have physical access.

There have been recent advancements in TPM so disk encryption is easier to maintain and doesn’t affect performance. I’ll need to investigate this one day. My server/NAS is a 4th-gen i5, so it may not support the functions I would need. Full disk encryption will land in Ubuntu soon. I’m hanging out for that.