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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I see. The word lie is strong, and it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that you never had any issues arise with your install. I see your point, and apologize for perhaps a bit of grandstanding on my behalf. I was more focused on the pros/cons of different types of distros, and missed the reason why you were acting defensively.

    I feel this kind of conversation still isn’t super helpful though (for either of you). I mean it clearly can be true that one person (or one chunk of the community) has no issues, while another person (and maybe another good chunk of the community) does have issues. Though perhaps in getting involved, I haven’t really helped either.


  • Dempf@lemmy.ziptolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldDistro Focuses
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    5 days ago

    I’ve had my own issues with two different laptops over the years, and in that time I’ve seen multiple packaging/dependency issues hit a majority of Arch users. My own issues are often caused by bugs on the bleeding edge that users on a non-rolling distro dodge altogether. For me these have mostly been easy to resolve, but it’s a much different experience compared with “stable” distros, where similar changes that require manual intervention (ideally) happen at a predictable cadence, and are well-documented in release notes.

    I still strongly prefer Arch, as I’ve hit showstoppers and annoyances with “stable” distros as well. I guess I’m saying I don’t really understand your responses, and why you seem so critical of user anecdotes in this space, when your original comment was a (perfectly fine) anecdote about how everything’s working for you. That’s great! But we can also point to many examples caused directly by bugs or dependency issues that only crop up in a rolling release. Taking all these data together, good and bad, pros and cons, working and not working, can help us learn and form a more complete picture of reality.


  • What you’ve said is true, though it’s a bit of a trade-off – over the years I’ve wasted so many hours with those “user friendly” distros because I need a newer version of a dependency, or I need to install something that isn’t in the repos. Worst case I have to figure out how to compile it myself.

    It’s very rare to find something that isn’t in the Arch official repos or the AUR. Personally I’ve found that being on the bleeding edge tends to save me time in the long run, as there’s almost no barriers to getting the packages that I need.


  • Yes, what you’re saying is the idea, and why I went with this setup.

    I am running raidz2 on all my arrays, so I can pull any 2 disks from an array and my data is still there.

    Currently I have 3 arrays of 8 disks each, organized into a single pool.

    You can set similar up with any raid system, but so far Truenas has been rock solid and intuitive to me. My gripes are mostly around the (long) journey to “just Docker” for services. The parts of the UI / system that deals with storage seems to have a high focus on reliability / durability.

    Latest version of Truenas supports Docker as “apps” where you can input all config through the UI. I prefer editing the config as yaml, so the only “app” I installed is Dockge. It lets me add Docker compose stacks, so I edit the compose files and run everything through Dockge. Useful as most arrs have example Docker compose files.

    For hardware I went with just an off-the-shelf desktop motherboard, and a case with 8 hot swap bays. I also have an HBA expansion card connected via PCI, with two additional 8 bay enclosures on the backplane. You can start with what you need now (just the single case/drive bays), and expand later (raidz expansion makes this easier, since it’s now possible to add disks to an existing array).

    If I was going to start over, I might consider a proper rack with a disk tray enclosure.

    You do want a good amount of RAM for zfs.

    For boot, I recommend a mirror at least two of the cheapest SSD you can find each in an enclosure connected via USB. Boot doesn’t need to be that fast. Do not use thumb drives unless you’re fine with replacing them every few months.

    For docker services, I recommend a mirror of two reasonable size SSDs. Jellyfin/Plex in particular benefit from an SSD for loading metadata. And back up the entire services partition (dataset) to your pool regularly. If you don’t splurge for a mirror, at least do the backups. (Can you tell who previously had the single SSD running all of his services fail on him?)

    For torrents I am considering a cache SSD that will simply exist for incoming, incomplete torrents. They will get moved to the pool upon completion. This reduces fragmentation in the pool, since ZFS cannot defragment. Currently I’m using the services mirror SSDs for that purpose. This is really a long-term concern. I’ve run my pool for almost 10 years now, and most of the time wrote incomplete torrents directly to the pool. Performance still seems fine.



  • Seems like people have been doing this enough that companies have started to disable the functionality. Comcast will just hang up on you nowadays if you spam zero.

    My trick lately to speed things up with Comcast is just go straight to cancellations. I always immediately get a human on the phone. I them tell them what I’m actually calling about, and they will then transfer me to the correct department.





  • Could be they want to hit a certain category (groceries) on the card. Maybe they are also trying to meet minimum spend on a new card.

    For those who shop a lot on Amazon, the Chase Amazon Visa is probably worth it since it always gets 5-6%, but if you don’t have that card, using gift cards to hit a grocery category seems reasonable. Slightly more hassle, but at least you can split purchases on Amazon.



  • Even with a free forum host, it’s difficult to keep things running for a long time.

    Awhile back I was unsatisfied with how quickly my (new) furniture was degrading, and found a furniture forum run by a guy in the biz. So much knowledge on there about different furniture and how to actually find quality stuff that will last decades.

    The owner retired this week, and he had been paying for an IT contract to do basic maintenance / upgrades on the forum (I think he started on a free host, but as it got bigger he eventually had to move it). He needed IT help basically to apply security patches and do upgrades. He’s stated that he no longer plans to pay for the maintenance contract. I’m guessing the forum will disappear soon.





  • Oxidation in the fab process. They have simultaneously claimed that oxidation isn’t causing any issues, and that it’s caused only “some” crashing issues. Because they’ve been so wishy washy, it’s probably safe to assume that any 13th or 14th gen CPU that experiences any kind of crash or BSOD is degraded and should be RMA’ed immediately, otherwise you risk getting stuck with a permanently physically degraded CPU.

    Intel says they identified the issue sometime in 2023 and fixed the fab process. So the good news is that any newly manufactured Raptor Lake CPU shouldn’t have this issue. The bad news is that Intel won’t give a date range of when the fab issue occurred, or exactly what CPUs it affected (by date code), so really the only choice consumers have at this point (before we get to the inevitable class action lawsuit) is to RMA at the slightest sign of instability.

    Intel is also planning to release a microcode update in August, but there’s a lot of doubt that this can be fixed via microcode.

    This was affecting 50% of Raptor Lake CPUs in data centers, and it’s become clear via video game telemetry that it has also affected a significant number of consumer chips.

    https://youtu.be/OVdmK1UGzGs





  • Just going to address your first paragraph: I sincerely doubt that the devs are receiving money from a fascist government. I simply don’t think Lemmy is big enough yet to be on the radar of e.g., the Chinese government. Yes, maybe there are some Wumaos on here. My understanding is they get better training and autonomy these days, so it’s certainly possible. But most of the comments look more homegrown. I just doubt the Chinese government (or any similar government) would care to the point of trying to pay off devs, and it’s not their MO anyways.