I just want you to know, I appreciated your deez nuts joke.

But it’s not ready because insert niche use case that only applies to me and no, I will not seek out open source alternatives to insert closed source software

That’s super cool! I’ve been wanting to setup an offsite backup rig at my parents place and using an old phone to run it would be super ideal but I just don’t have any hardware that’s compatible with postmarketOS. Maybe one day ill bite the bullet and just buy a compatible used phone to do it with.

Exactly. I was about to rip my hair out before I thought to check my UEFI settings.

Reminds me of that time I updated my UEFI firmware which automatically re-enabled secure boot which caused my Nvidia driver to fail to load on boot because Nvidia doesn’t sign them so I was stuck with the noveau(spelling?) driver which would crash when I tried to log into my DE. What an adventure figuring that out was. Oh, and the cherry on top: updating the firmware didn’t fix the initial issue I was troubleshooting.

Runs Debian Bookworm

Hosting:

• DNS server
• DHCP server
• web server (just some internal pages)
• print server
• file server (24TB RAID 5 managed with OMV)
• immich
• jellyfin

Probably some more stuff I’m forgetting. It’s basically my everything box.

Meh, I just use Google Docs. Libre office is also usable in a pinch, but it’s a little… clunky.

Two PiHole servers. One is hosted via docker on my primary file server and the other is hosted in a Hyper-V VM on my sole windows box. The VM one is also my DHCP server.

There are a not insignificant number of people in the Linux community who feel that the more user friendly focused distros are for “beginners” and the distros that less so are for “experts” and there is a lot of elitism and gatekeeping that goes along with that sentiment. In reality they’re all running the Linux kernel so they’re all equally valid options. Use what works best for you and ignore the chuds who try to tell you otherwise.

It’s literally not though. For anyone dipping their toes into Linux for the first time Ubuntu is by far and large the best place for them to start. Cononical has made a continuous concerted effort over all these years to make Linux more accessible to the layperson and it certainly shows in Ubuntu’s user friendly-ness. It might not be the right choice for someone with more knowledge of the inner-workings of Linux, or maybe not the right choice for someone who is concerned with the issues around SNAP, but the average user and especially a new Linux user does not care about these things.

Honestly, it’s way more convoluted and frustrating than it has any right to be. The only tools I found were cursor-toolbox which allows you to convert SVG templates to the correct set of PNGs and xcursorgen which converts the PNGs to actual cursor files. It took me several tries just get a working cursor set. Then I spent much much longer actually drawing and tweaking my theme using inkscape. It was certainly rewarding to get it working though. Now I smile every time I see the little “busy” animation.

I’m in the same boat so I started getting my “tweaking” fix by making my own themes. Just got my first cursor theme working and it’s awesome!

I just recently went through some linux printer woes. When my toner cartridge got down below 25% documents spooled from my Linux machine would fail with an out of toner error. Files from windows and the diagnostic pages from the printer itself printed just fine. Turned out I had been using a slightly incorrect print driver on my Linux machine this entire time. After a TON of digging I managed to find the correct driver and was able to print again. Only wasted most of a morning figuring it out. Lol!

I dicked around with the VM route for a while and could never really get it working 100% to my liking. There was always a trade-off. I ended up just getting a second PC and tucking it in a cabinet out of sight. When I need Windows I just use remote desktop to connect to it.

I’d laugh if this wasn’t affecting me directly.

Meanwhile Windows regularly gets hung up for several minutes on the “shutting down…” screen for no fucking reason. Only happens when I’m in a hurry too.

That’s it exactly. Most consumer camera gear uses H.264/H.265 for video and AAC for audio in an MP4 container and the free version of Davinci Resolve just doesn’t support that on Linux. (But does on Windows)

Unfortunately the free version on Linux doesn’t support H.264/H.265 and even the paid version doesn’t support AAC so using Resolve requires you to transcode if you’re using any normal consumer camera.

Do your friend a favor and install Windows back on his laptop for him.

Worth noting that the free version of Davinci Resolve doesn’t support H.264/H.265 under Linux. You will need to use another format or pay for the full version. ($295)