bear

joined 1 year ago
[–] bear@slrpnk.net 6 points 4 months ago

Incredibly funny story, incredibly awful website.

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

That's where you're wrong, buddy. It's actually very easy to blame Microsoft for holding a decades-long desktop monopoly by pushing manufacturers to include Windows on every PC out of the box.

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 16 points 4 months ago (4 children)

People really be out here preloading their computer with viruses to get around Microsoft's latest bullshit instead of just using Linux, we ain't never gonna have the Year of the Linux Desktop

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Whatever you get for your NAS, make sure it’s CMR and not SMR. SMR drives do not perform well in NAS arrays.

I just want to follow this up and stress how important it is. This isn't "oh, it kinda sucks but you can tolerate it" territory. It's actually unusable after a certain point. I inherited a Synology NAS at my current job which is used for backup storage, and my job was to figure out why it wasn't working anymore. After investigation, I found out the guy before me populated it with cheapo SMR drives, and after a certain point they just become literally unusable due to the ripple effect of rewrites inherent to shingled drives. I tried to format the array of five 6TB drives and start fresh, and it told me it would take 30 days to run whatever "optimization" process it performs after a format. After leaving it running for several days, I realized it wasn't joking. During this period, I was getting around 1MB/s throughput to the system.

Do not buy SMR drives for any parity RAID usage, ever. It is fundamentally incompatible with how parity RAID (RAID5/6, ZFS RAID-Z, etc) writes across multiple disks. SMR should only be used for write-once situations, and ideally only for cold storage.

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 months ago

I explained my reasoning and you made no attempt to engage with it and just asked a question I already answered in depth. I'm not sure what you want, but it's clearly not an answer.

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

Hard disagree. Everything you learn on Arch is transferable because Arch is vanilla almost to a fault. The deep understandings of components I learned from Arch have helped me more times than I can count. It's only non-transferable if you view each command as an arcane spell to be cast in that specific situation. I've fixed so many issues over the years using this knowledge, and it's literally what landed me my current job and promotions.

Arch is why I know how encryption and TPM works at a deeper level, which helped me find and fix the issue a Windows Dell PC was having that kept tripping into Bitlocker recovery. Knowledge of Grub and kernel parameters that I learned from Arch's install process is why I was able to effortlessly break into a vendor's DNS server whose root password was lost by the previous sysadmin before me when everybody else was panicking. Hell, it even helps in installing other distros, because advanced disk partitioning is a hot mess on a lot of distro GUI installers, so intimate knowledge of what I actually need helps me work around their failings. Plus all the countless other times that knowledge has helped me solve little problems instantly, because I knew how it worked from implementing it manually. When my coworkers falter because the GUI fails them and they know nothing else, I simply fix it with a command.

If you use Arch and actually make the effort to learn, not just copy and paste commands from the wiki, you will objectively learn a lot about how Linux works. If you seek a career in Linux, there's nothing I can recommend more than transitioning to using Arch (not Garuda, not Manjaro, Arch) full-time on your daily driver computer.

Anyways, after about a decade I've recently switched to NixOS. Now there's a distro where the skills you learn can't be transferred out, but the knowledge I gained from Arch absolutely transferred in and gave me a head start.

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'm gonna keep it real with you, I'll take "weirdo CEO and optional AI tools" over "corporate entity so powerful that society has literally warped around it, whose primary business model is psychological manipulation" any day of the week. The other search engines are so poor at what they do that they're not viable options.

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (10 children)

I've switched to Kagi recently and honestly it's better than Google ever was. You can assign weights to sites to see more or less of them in your results, it automatically cuts the listicle crap out, it has various built in filters for specific things like forums or scientific studies.

Downside: it's $10/mo. But I'm at the "I'd rather pay with money than data" stage of my life. Especially if it actually makes the experience fucking usable again.

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Have it just be form-fitted outside contacts, with magnetic adhesion to hold the plug in place.

I actually really like this idea. If we're breaking backwards compatibility anyways, let's do something useful with it. This form factor was invented in the 1950s. I'm sure we can do something better now.

We need to move away from everything having a battery anyways. Wireless headphones were a mistake. Now people are walking around with 4-6 batteries on them at all times. Phone, laptop, earbuds, earbud case, battery backup, smart watch. Batteries aren't great for the environment, not to mention they typically condemn something to being tech waste in a few short years. We need to significantly rethink this model.

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 49 points 5 months ago (5 children)

When people recognize they were wrong about something, as smugly satisfying as it may be it's not actually helpful to tell them that they should have been correct sooner.

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 2 points 5 months ago

I think they're just making fun of the bad font kerning in the app which causes a gap in the word Unmanaged

[–] bear@slrpnk.net 8 points 5 months ago

RETURN OF THE KING

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