IMO a lot of what makes nice self-hostable software is clean and sane software in general. A lot of stuff tend to end up trying to be too easy and you can’t scale up, or stuff so unbelievably complicated you can’t scale it down. Don’t make me install an email server and API keys to services needed by features I won’t even use.

I don’t particularly mind needing a database and Redis and the likes, but if you need MySQL and PostgreSQL and Redis and memcached and an ElasticSearch cluster and some of it is Go, some of it is Ruby and some of it is Java with a sprinkle of someone’s erlang phase, … no, just no, screw that.

What really sucks is when Docker is used as a bandaid to hide all that insanity under the guise of easy self-hosting. It works but it’s still a pain to maintain and debug, and it often uses way more resources than it really need. Well written software is flexible and sane.

My stuff at work runs equally fine locally in under a gig of RAM and barely any CPU at idle, and yet spans dozens of servers and microservices in production. That’s sane software.

My experience has been quite the opposite: Windows is the one that’s constant problems for me, with no obvious way to fix and if I were to follow the common advice on the Internet I’d be reinstalling it more than I use it.

Linux has been very reliable for me. Sometimes I look at my uptime and I’m like, maybe I should reboot soon.

They’re always some initial problems just like Windows but usually once it’s all fixed up it stays that way. My install is 13 years old and still going strong.

I’ve got 6.5 years before I finally locked myself out and had to reboot it, which was entirely my fault.

~Not really. All the features of that tool are basic functions we’ve had before LibreOffice was still OpenOffice.~

~Since this converts to Markdown, it’s inherently a very lossy conversion. What’s hard to pull off is preserve the full formatting when converting to an odt or something.~

Someone pointed out it doesn’t just convert word documents to Markdown, it can also transcribe and OCR, so I guess it does have some usefulness!

Bazzite drive me nuts. It’s pretty good out of the box but I had to do some crazy shit to make stuff work for my friend that’s just starting on Linux.

I measured it, I was able to install like 2GB worth of Arch updates in the time it took to rpm-ostree kargs --append. Waiting 5 minutes to install a tiny <1MB utility package gets annoying fast. It’s nice to be able to just tell my friend to boot the last generation though. Tradeoffs.

It runs great otherwise though, I see the appeal especially for new users and fixed hardware like the handhelds. Just works.

Yeah there’s those situations, fairly rare. Most of the ones I see coming here are the free speech kind that are mad they got banned for harassing people and generally being major assholes.

Welcome to Lemmy then! The mods aren’t perfect either but at least you have choices in instances.

Fedora is usually pretty good at being up to date while still user friendly and still operate like a classic distro. The immutable ones are also pretty nice if you’re into that. Otherwise you could consider Arch or Endeavour. If you’ve been using Linux since 2012, an Arch distro’s probably easier than you think.

I switched to Arch in 2011 after being on Ubuntu since 7.04 and the Unity disaster… and I’m still running that install to this day. I’m typing this from it!

In practice I’ve found Arch’s always up to date packages to be less of a hassle than dealing with dependency hell of carefully pulling newer dependencies when you inevitably need a newer feature of a package. Worst case there’s containers for the few stubborn “only works on this exact version of Ubuntu” cases but it’s pretty rare.

There’s a few, and they proceed to get downvoted to hell and banned from here as well because people are even less tolerant to those that love to test the rules here.

I use systemd-boot so it was pretty easy, and it should be similar in GRUB:

title My boot entry that starts the VM
linux /vmlinuz-linux-zen
initrd /amd-ucode.img
initrd /initramfs-linux-zen.img
options quiet splash root=ZSystem/linux/archlinux rw pcie_aspm=off iommu=on systemd.unit=qemu-vms.target

What you want is that part: systemd.unit=qemu-vms.target which tells systemd which target to boot to. I launch my VMs with scripts so I have the qemu-vms.target and it depends on the VMs I want to autostart. A target is a set of services to run for a desired system state, the default usually being graphical or multi-user, but really it can be anything, and use whatever set of services you want: start network, don’t start network, mount drives, don’t mount drives, entirely up to you.

https://man.archlinux.org/man/systemd.target.5.en

You can also see if there’s a predefined rescue target that fits your need and just goes to a local console: https://man.archlinux.org/man/systemd.special.7.en

How’s the disk encrypted? I’ve never heard of anyone setting up an encrypted drive such that you can’t manually mount it with the password. It’s possible but you’d have to go out of your way to do that and only encrypt the drive with a TPM-managed key. It’s kind of a bad idea because if you lock yourself out your data’s gone.

I just have a boot entry that doesn’t do the passthrough, doesn’t bind to vfio-pci and doesn’t start the VMs on boot so I can inspect and troubleshoot.

Seems a bit harsh considering single user instances or very small ones. I can be away for a week but not dead.

Yes, definitely is. Just assuming here OP doesn’t want to configure a bootloader manually, so it’s easier to just jump into whichever distro’s default GRUB.

It’s not like you need a bootloader anyway, you can just add direct boot entries with efibootmgr and not use a bootloader at all.

Fair enough, another one for the NVIDIA woes list!

Audacious can still load Winamp themes and is native!

Did you set the DPI in your RDP client? I had this too with my Windows VM, and it would just reset whenever I’d change it in Windows. Changed it in the FreeRDP flags and now the scale is correct, Windows applies 150% whenever I RDP in.

EDIT: My exact command

wlfreerdp /u:Max-P /v:192.168.1.149 +fonts -aero +clipboard +decorations +window-drag +async-channels +async-input +async-update -compression /dynamic-resolution /rfx /t:"Windows 10" /w:2560 /h:1440 /sound /scale-desktop:150 /scale:100

/scale-desktop is the one that controls the Windows side, whereas /scale controls the local side, so in this case Windows scales and I display it as-is, but you can also do the reverse and save some bandwith if the legacy app would just bitmap scale anyway.

Central package management.

When you install a package, it keeps track of all the files so when you uninstall it, it removes them all. There’s various ways to scan and remove untracked files, but on a Linux system you can basically be ask it “where does this file comes from?” and it’ll just tell you “oh, that’s from mpg123, and you have it installed because VLC and Firefox need it to decode some AVIs”. And if you really don’t want it for some reason, it can also go uninstall everything that needs it too.

It makes it pretty hard to corrupt a system or uninstall important stuff. In the reverse, it also knows what is needed, so if you install VLC, it will also install all the codecs with it, and those are also automatically available to other apps too usually.

Been on Linux since 2007, so for me it’s kind of the opposite. You just get settled with your OS after a while, you’re used to how it works.

For me the immediately missing features is customizability in window management. I’m not a tiling fan, but I still miss basic convenience features like middle click paste, press alt and drag windows around or press alt and right click to resize windows from whichever side is the closest to the cursor. The different way it arranges windows (Linux tries hard to make them fit in unused space whereas Windows just opens it in the middle of the screen). Another big one is if you have a window focused and try to scroll another window in the background with your mouse cursor over it, it’ll still scroll the focused window even though the mouse cursor isn’t on it. Focus steal prevention is non-existent so if you’re typing and another window pops open, it steals your keyboard input. The search bar is like, utterly useless, so is the Microsoft Store. The start menu doesn’t open instantly like it has to load it every time. When you uninstall something there’s still leftover crap of it everywhere.

Thankfully when it comes to Linux apps, their open nature means the majority of them just have Windows builds anyway, and what doesn’t would work in WSL. So really all I can miss is the inherent flexibility and openness Linux gives me.

The key there is the check for compliance. They probably have an MDM or enterprise thing that ensures only approved apps are installed and all, and only then it issues a short lived certificate used to log into stuff.

The protocol itself is likely supported by OpenConnect but you’d have to actively circumvent IT’s systems to make it work and thus a very bad idea.

Pretty “swapping” VRAM to system RAM has been supported for a very long time too. My GPUs can use up to 16GB each of system memory (AMD), and I’d be really shocked if NVIDIA’s proprietary driver doesn’t either because I’m sure the AI workloads need it.

Of course the Steam Deck is a prime example of dynamic CPU/GPU memory allocation as well.