It’s always good to have choice.

I’m not sure what better MS compatibility really means. I’ve been using MS software since before Excel, Word etc even existed and taught a lot of people how spreadsheets, word processors, databases, DTP and the rest work in a former life (do you know what a decimal tab stop is, or how to control leading and kerning?)

I generate, by far, the most complicated documents within my company and I have been using LO since way before before it forked from OO. All software has bugs and peccadilloes.

As I said: it’s good to have choice.

I don’t understand what you mean by “epic pile of hacks”. Proxmox is just a Linux distribution, with a particular focus. All the software is the usual stuff with integration scripts and binaries and a webby front end. They start off with stock Debian and work up from there which is the way many distros work.

I’m not sure what Proxmox switching to Incus would really mean. They are both Linux distributions that focus on providing a VM and container wrangling system.

I happen to be porting rather a lot of VMware to Proxmox. My little company has a lot of VMware customers and I am rather busy moving them over. I picked Proxmox (Hyper-V? No thanks) about 18 months ago when the Broadcom thing came about and did my own home system first and then rather a lot of testing. I then sold the idea to the rest of my company and we made some plans and are now carrying those plan out.

Now, if Proxmox becomes toxic, I still have projects like Incus to fall back on. I … WE … have choice, and that is important. You can be sure that if Proxmox drops the ball, Veeam will suddenly support Incus or whatever the world decides is the next best thing in Linux VMs and container land.

I was a VMware consultant for 25 odd years. No longer (well I am still but only under mild protest!) I also have to wrangle a few Hyper-V clusters too. All of these bloody monolithic monstrosities work at the whim of massive corporations who really don’t have your best interests at heart. They bleed you dry.

I like to have choice. Proxmox and Incus are both examples of choice. You start off with "I’d like to run VMs and containers on my hardware with software that is “open” and you have more than one option. You do not start off with: “I’d like a HyperV or VMware”, nail your colours to the mast and live in a rather rubbish monoculture.

Sorry, I seem to have gone on a bit 8)

Add the Collabra online built in CODE server and Nextcloud Office apps. Link them up and you have Libre Office in your browser on your Nextcloud. You can get more complicated: https://collabora-online-for-nextcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install/

https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

I put one in at work. It sat idle for a while until a member of my admin staff asked me how to do a job involving pay slips. We discovered the pipeline tool in Stirling. It is now a permanent system with an SLA!

Each tool has a nice big icon or you can create desktop or browser shortcuts to the ones of interest - ideal for keeping it simple.

KDE since I hand compiled a 2.0 beta.

about 10 q5vyrs ago

Have you been distracted and typed a password/PSK in the wrong field 8)

rsync was written by one of the original Samba developers. I wonder if Tridge and co have any idea about how to shuffle data from A to B safely?

CIFS/SMB will only indicate received and not received and written. This is unlikely to be an issue.

I would start by proving that my network works properly, especially that dodgy cable with only wires 1,2,3,7 connected - because that’s all 100Mb/s needs, or the solid core cable that runs for 150m with plugs at each end instead of sockets and drop leads.

“Is this a common issue with samba” - no.

Samba shuffles rather a lot of data, quite happily. You have not given us an exhaustive description of the shoddy wiring, dodgy switches and wonky configuration that makes up your network. If it was perfect, you would not be posting here.

There is one snag with CIFS (Samba follows MS’s standards and ironically, I think that CIFS is now renamed back to SMB) that I am aware of, so SMB … snag: SMB will indicate that a chunk of data has been received successfully but not that it has been written to disc successfully. NFS will notify that a chunk of data has been written to disc.

The difference is subtle but if there is not a battery backed RAID involved then SMB/CIFS can lose data if the system restarts part way through a write.

Your issue is probably hardware related. Test your network with say iperf3. Have a look at network stats. Don’t rely on cargo cult bollocks - do some investigations. Nowadays we have nearly all the tools as open source to do the entire job - we did not have that 30 years ago. Grab wireshark, nmap, mtr and the rest and get nerdy (or hire me to do it - don’t do that please!)

If I give you a free beer, you have one beer. If I give you the recipe, you can make your own beer. You do have to make your own open source beer or you can hire someone to do it for you or perhaps take you through the steps a few times until you’ve got it. With luck there will be a community of open source beer brewers with whom you can interact and improve those recipes.

Free software is free until it isn’t! The illicit drugs industry works in a similar way (the first hit is for free).

You have loads of options but you need to also start from … “what if”. Work out how important your data really is. Take another look and ask the kids and others if they give a toss. You might find that no one cares about your photo collection in which case if your phone dies … who cares? If you do care then sync them to a PC or laptop.

Perhaps take a look at this - https://www.veeam.com/products/free/linux.html its free for a few systems.

My family tree (bush, thicket) is the ongoing effort of my uncle, started roughly 30 years ago. There are nearly 130,000 individuals in it.

We are migrating his data from The Master Genealogist (TMG) to Geneweb. That is quite a long story 8)

You might like to look into Webtrees.

In Australia, it’s the other way around and the clock will try to eat you or at least sting you to death.

So where do you put the rest of your helices on a cylinder or cone, in 2D? In Flatland a screw or bolt becomes a circle with a short hair. The whole point of “leftie loosy” is to try to help with reality as we perceive it.

Try it the next time you are underneath a car wielding a socket spanner with a taped on extension thingie that you jury rigged whilst trying to shift a hex nut at 45 degrees to reality that you cannot see, with oil dripping in your eye. Obviously the oil is a mix of the 30 year old native stuff loosened up with the WD40 that might break the rust lock.

I suggest you do think abut things in 3D and don’t forget the other dimension (time). That WD40 needs time to break the rust lock.

“Leftie loosy” isn’t for keyboard worriers - its for engineers and technicians, plumbers, and the rest and obviously for DiYers.

When you are knackered and pissed off and you need to shift a fucking nut or bolt or whatever, you need incantations to get you back on track.

Apple: User - you are holding it wrong!

The spanner is always at 12 o’clock. Either turn yourself or the spanner or your point of view to make it so and then the rule holds. The last option require imagination.

Take the piss after you have tried to thread a nut on a bolt that you cannot see and tightening it is towards you, at an angle. The nut has to cross a hack sawed thread and will try to cross thread 75% of the time unless the moon is in Venus.

Have a chat with some plumbers, builders, chippies, sparkys or engineers - assuming you are not one already. I think “leftie loosey …” is well known in the UK.

“warm up the sauna”

I get slapped when I try that sort of thing on with Sauna.

They are not a circle unless you have some really odd bolts or screws! I suppose a bolt looks like a circle in “Flatland” but we live in 3D space with time as a fourth dimension that we can directly perceive.

A screw or bolt and the rest are, roughly speaking, a cylinder with a helical thread on it. They also have a “head” or similar which acts a stopper. You can model all of them as a bolt. We use a spanner, wrench, fingers, screw drivers, drill drivers, scissors, whatever to do the tightening or loosening. You can model all those tools as a spanner (wrench). We need some final mental contortions to make this slightly rigorous: The spanner (wrench) is always considered as being at 12:00 on an imaginary clock and we have to assume that our bolt moves away from us for “tighten” and towards us for “loosen” and I suppose we should also require that we are looking at the “face” of the notional clock and not its obverse!

Now it should be obvious how the rule works. Turn the spanner to the right and you tighten the bolt, turn it to the left and you loosen it.

OK that lot is not very helpful when you are under a sink or in a roofing void performing strange contortions. Try holding up one of your hands and pretend you are holding a bolt or the head of a screw. Clockwise turns will tighten and anti clockwise will loosen. You might use “leftie loosey …” to bootstrap: “clockwise tighten”. It becomes even more interesting when you are trying to work out which way to turn a bolt or whatever when you can only feel it and when tightening actually moves it towards you.

Think about a bolt running through a wheel with the head towards us, say on a very simplified bicycle. Move the bike to the right, and hence the wheels turn clockwise. Friction should cause the bolt to tighten. If you change the design and put the bolt in on the other side and now forwards for the bike is to the left then you will loosen the bolt and that will be dangerous. Now change the design to a bolt with a nut and washers etc and it rapidly gets complicated!

Also, please note that some bolts have reverse threads to the norm. On a garden strimmer the tightening knob that holds the spool on is often a reverse threaded bolt. That’s for similar reasons to the bicycle wheel thing I mentioned earlier.

I’ve just spent ages and a lot of words to try and persuade you that this has bugger all to do with autism. I think that your error was really to do with not thinking too deeply about the real issue and focusing on the wrong thing. We all do that, extremely often, regardless of where we are on the spectrum.

I hope that you see that considerations with regarding helical threads on a cylinder or a tapering cone (but not circles) can be quite complicated and that’s why sometimes we all need some silly rules to get us through the every day ordeal of dealing with them.

Now, would you like a chat about circles … 8)

La derecha oprime y la izquierda libera

I just knew that would be Spanish, without being able to speak more than a few words. It works far better than our effort and is both a sardonic and satirical political comment.

Well played Spanish if that really is the equivalent in common usage. Our effort sounds like it was invented by a young child whilst responding to a BBC quiz.

What are they?

I ditched Windows roughly 15 years ago and I run a MS Silver partner shop.

I daily drive Kubuntu (was Arch but I need to tick boxes). I used to teach DTP, WP, spreadsheets etc and Libre Office is fine as a replacement for MSO. Email - Exchange and Evolution EWS. I create the most complicated docs in my firm and MSO works with them OK.

I 3D print stuff and use LibreCAD and OpenSCAD. All good. Also note that there are lots of other CAD apps on Linux for free/libre and of course we have

As far as I am aware, games is the only area that Linux might fail and that issue is shrinking rapidly.

I doubt it. They make a hell of a noise and print at a rate of characters per second not pages per second. The ribbons suffered from similar issues as cassette tapes (the other ribbons that we had to deal with). The ribbon would dry out if not used for a few days and you’d waste paper and a lot of time.

DM printers were ideal in the guise of “line printers” - the big old IBM jobbies that munched through A3 landscape fan fold at ridiculous speeds. Home printers like the Epson FX80 or RX80 were at least affordable. I still remember the manual of our RX80 congratulating us on buying it and exhorting me to hug the printer on unpacking it. I suspect the Japanese to English translation might not have been the best.

We had to get a Centronics interface board stuffed into our C64 and get it working (sacrifice a chicken on a waxing gibbous moon night, etc)

It worked better on my 80286 box, some years later. I had to set it up in each application - Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect, Super Calc.

In around 1991 I was able to buy a 80486 based beastie, thanks to gift from granddad. In around 1993 I was given a HP LJ 4P so I could print out proofs for a Plymouth (Devon) tourist tat thing.

Nowadays I have a fairly elderly HPE MFP five toner humming away at home. Its on a VLAN that doesn’t get to see the internet. It just works. I won’t be “upgrading” it for the foreseeable future.