“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • NTFS support is pretty solid on Linux these days, but just so you know, never use it as a root partition.

    I have generally used ext4. There’s ways to massage it to mount on Windows, as with btrfs. Ext4 is very likely what you should do if you’re installing Linux for the first time, as it has had decades of testing and is rather battle-tested

    I recently did my first btrfs install. For now, I’ve had no issues. Of course, some could happen, but I’ve generally heard btrfs is fine these days. One of its cool things is native compression support, although I forgot to enable it when I did that install.

    I’ve never used XFS.

    FAT32 should be rarely used these days due to file size limits and file name limits. The only place where it should still be used is for your EFI partition.

    Now exFAT really isn’t that unrecognizable. It’s supported by pretty much every operating system these days. It’s definitely not for root partitions, but should be your default for flash drives and portable hard drives.

    On another note, I recently tried Bcachefs on Debian Testing on a random old Chromebook. It is still in development, and not all distros support it yet, but I liked what I saw from my limited experience. It also supports snapshots, and unlike btrfs, has native encryption. For now, just ignore it, but like many in this post have said, keep an eye out for it.

    As for ZFS, I’ve never tried it. The main caveat is due to licensing incompatibility, it is not in the standard Linux kernel and you have to do some special stuff.




  • Software-wise, part of it is my fault for imposing Debian Stable on myself, rather than choosing a newer distro. Hardware-wise, though, I do imagine that X220 is quite a bit easier to bust open.

    In all fairness, though, besides a LUK2/Btrfs configuration that would have been annoying to do on any platform anyhow, this was probably the easiest Linux install I have ever done*. My previous main portable device was a first-gen Surface Go that (with the special linux-surface kernel) worked okay except for glitches surrounding sleep and wake that lead to lots of reboots. One day, the initramfs got borked and I didn’t use it frequently enough (as I had a work Chromebook I was forced to use and at home I could just use my desktop) to bother to chroot in and fix it. Server someday?

    Eventually, I received my work Chromebook, an AMD Stoney Ridge, when I left and it was decommissioned, which I installed Linux on and then proceeded to compile a custom kernel just to get audio working. (I eventually tried to automate this in Gitlab CI for fun, but found more important things to do.)

    I then tried an old Lenovo Yoga 710 15-IKB from circa 2016 I had sitting around, but it had a damaged digitizer that was getting to be a laceration hazard; it was literally cheaper to buy an entire working one on eBay than replace the wrong part. It also had a hardware defect where the camera would quit working until you gave the bezel a little pinch in the right spot. Thus, it mostly just sits around as a backup machine in case my Thinkpad were to suddenly explode, and maybe I’ll put it to server duty in the near future.

    Even my desktop was just a bit more effort to install, as it has been running Debian Testing since 2022 (my first daily driver Linux system) when Bookworm was still testing and before Debian started including non-free firmware in the installer by default, meaning I had to install several things to get it fully working. Tied with my desktop was a circa-2010 Fujitsu Lifebook that I threw Buster on that also needed Wi-Fi firmware.

    I’ll take one yeating of newer distribution kernel in comparison. 😂

    • Not including VMs or Raspberry Pis 😉

  • I have a cool background of just the station that I edited in GIMP to dither so it looks nice with Chicago95 (along with a similar Enterprise D for my second monitor), but I only use that on my desktop, as although I love Chicago95, unlike my desktop, this laptop needs to be low-frills manchine, so I can’t afford theme-related glitches as much as I love theming. (Not “no-frills”, however, as I did go through the extra trouble of a btrfs subvolume for home on a LUKS2 partition that auto-decrypts with Clevis)




  • Meanwhile on the USS Voyager:

    Tuvok and Chakatoy encounter each other in the hallway near Holodeck 1.

    Tuvok: Commander, I am concerned about the Captain’s continuous holodeck usage. She has not exited the room for the past three hours, and I believe it may be inhibiting the effective operation of the ship.

    Chakatoy: It’s been a rough week. I’m sure she’s just blowing off some steam.

    Suddenly, they heard muffled noises through the holodeck door.

    Tuvix: I have a right to live!

    (Excessive machine gun noises)

    Chakotay taps his combadge.

    Chakotay: Doctor, can you come to holodeck 1? I think something’s wrong with the captain.

    (No offense to Janeway. Just a fun caricature.)




  • Seat 9. I’d say Picard and Chakotay would be pretty mellow and level-headed unless Chakotay’s feeling extra resentful about Picard’s handling of Marquis/Cardassian Neutral Zone stuff. It’s then insulated from some of the crazier pairs with level-headed duos, or at least balanced duos (e.g Raffi and Spock or Kira and Progeny). The exception might be Sisko and Kirk, who would either get along quite well or drive each other to the brink of insanity. Either way, (1 assassinated Romulan senator later) I can live with it. Though maybe after the first hour, I’ll have seat 12 to myself after Riker and Kelvin Kirk go to sick bay for competitive chair-sitting-related injuries…😏












  • I’m excited at the update. However, I am experiencing a small issue. I use the i386 theme. However, the color scheme (and nothing else, like fonts or borders) has reverted from its usual blue to the default dark mode colors. I tried clearing my browser data to see if that would clear things up, but Shaka when the walls fell. I don’t know if this is an upstream issue (which is my guess) or something else, as I am inexperienced with Lemmy infrastructure.

    Otherwise, it’s all working fine. Thanks for your efforts, and glory to your house!