GNU Stow, backed up to a git repo.

For those who might not see the purpose, it’s for keeping your profiles on different machines in sync, especially if you use the terminal a lot.

We can choose what we want to run at work. I work as with Solution Architecture and Platform Engineering mainly with Azure, PaaS and dotnet solutions. It’s atypical I suppose but surprisingly seamless.

Doing this in Linux is pretty straightforward and my choice of distro is Ubuntu since last year. I have modified Gnome getting it sorta close to Omakub (the precursor to Omarchy).

The stack, including Dotnet, C#, PowerShell, Bicep, Terraform and Azure CLI works well. I’m midway in my setup of Neovim and have it working with PowerShell and Bicep as well as an assortment of other LSP’s. Additional tools such as JetBrains Rider, Draw.io and Obsidian with Excalidraw are native and so is LibreOffice. For the few workloads I can’t run natively (basically Visual Studio and Office) I have a VM.

The major issue I have found in a lot of workplaces with Windows since forever, disregarding the increasing mess in Windows 11, has been group policy lockdowns. IT tend to look at everyone including devs as office workers (assuming Office is the most advanced tools needed), meaning no admin access and blocked apps.

The whole site is kinda suspect.

Yes, although MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL are the more robust options.

For personal use. As someone who has all my non-trivial creations, including dot-files and scripts I replicate between machines, in repos since CVS has a thing it’s a habit. Version control. This stuff is mostly private but not secret, why should I have it public?

Edit after spell check.

For source code or any project - a folder Projects (on my personal setups) or Documents/Projects/PersonalRepo (more customer specific folders under the Projects sub-folder)

• Anything under ~/Projects that isn’t just a throwaway will be a git repo.
• Anything under ~/Documents/Project/*Repo will be a git repo.

Without knowing what ypu plan is in detail, here’s one example of a plan for a NAS…

• Flash your SAS card or get an LSI card you can flash to IT mode.
• Install TrueNAS Scale and set up your ZFS volume with your existing SAS drives
• If any drive fails, exchange it for a SATA with at least the same size and re-silver.

You wouldn’t need to exchange all of them at the same time as long as the one you are swapping in can hold all the blocks the old one did.

This is the way we did things back in the day in manufacturing. Zebra printers connected to serial connections or via dumb terminals via serial ports being sent ZPL from OpenVMS based applications.

Switzerland is contradictory in many ways. At the same time as they go for on-prem or sovereign cloud (laudable), they are passing laws that chase away privacy first companies such as Proton (less than optimal).

Yeah, your data is taken hostage. When cancelling the subscription it’s a good idea to delete everything manually before the account expires. Even if you can’t guarantee Dropbox haven’t just flagged the files as deleted, it signals intention. I did this when migrating to pCloud and haven’t received any reminders from Dropbox.

It’s a good idea to use what you know. I don’t have much experience with btrfs but if it does what it says on the tin then it should be safe to use.

Copying the contents at the target is a good strategy. If the drives are to be put into 27/7 use later I would probably consider wiping them and run an integrity test before putting them to use, as once they start being used it will be too late (and stay as a doubt in the back of my mind).

From a position of handling corporate data on a daily basis, I am pretty confident that data integrity is top of mind.

How do you ensure that is doesn’t happen? If this is corporate data that can be key.

It could very well be that the package got updated. I did the change once and let it be.

Will the disks be permanently in-place there or are they just a means of transport? Either way, traveling with that much spinning rust there is always a good chance for bit-flips or damage.

ZFS is up to the task if you can connect all the disks at the same time at the target location. You don’t really have to keep track of the order of the disks - ZFS will figure it out when mounting the pool. The act of copying the data from the disks will effectively perform a scrub at the same time.

If you will only attach one disk at a time, it is a bit more of a coin toss. Although - ZFS single disk volumes do support scrubbing as well.

Thinking about disk corruption in transit would be one of my worries - X-ray scans, vibration and just handling can do stuff with the bits. Tgz, zip or rar files with low or no compression can provide error detection, although low recovery. Checksum files can also help with detection. Any failed files can perhaps be transferred over the network for recovery.

Serious games hardware testing channels like Gamers Nexus is a great progression. It brings Linux more into the mainstream while also putting a spotlight on driver deficiencies as well as weaknesses in the OS. How far we have come since the PopOS DE being removed by LTT.

I have X-Plane 12 on Linux and am re-building an approximation of my MSFS setup. The main issues are

• Head-tracking is proving challenging.
• Streamdeck integration is a work in progress
• Navigraph integration is a non-starter. AIRAC updates are completely manual where there are apps on Windows.
• Many 3rd party addons for Garmin navigation are only available on Windows as they rely on the official Garmin trainer software.

The list goes on, but at least X-Plane is a first class citizen on Linux. My controllers work out of the box with only minor deficiencies (drivers for announciator lights are missing).

The work is proceeding, but as the license for X-Plane is valid in Windows as well it’s too easy to just have everything work there.

Signal on flatpak works well, and I agree. The only thing I had to do was edit it with flatseal to let it access my home directory - sending files and pictures didn’t work properly until I did that.

Flatpak can be confusing when you try to access the file system without the rights until you realize it’s the sandbox config.

I suppose I am one of those, although the process has been gradual over the last years.

Do I still use Windows? Yes - I earn a living designing and developing solutions in the ecosystem, although it is mostly on the corp server side of things. Azure can be easily managed on any of the three big OS’s.

Do I dual boot? Yes, but less and less. For gaming, flight sims are still not supported enough on Linux - to many extensions and add-ons are just not there yet. I am primarily on Linux though and all of my non-sim gaming on Linux nowadays. On my work laptop the Windows partition is bricked (as in Windows Update said bye-bye to it), so next re-install of Ubuntu LTS next year will see the Windows partition wiped.

Am I nostalgic about Windows? Not yet, after 1-2 years of Linux practically full time. Win11 is still on a downward trajectory. Linux is getting better with every distro release.

Have I gone more hard core in my Linux journey? I dabble in EndeavorOS, but mostly run Ubuntu. I am happy that it works. I am comfortable in the terminal so any DE works as long as it leaves me be.

Will I go back to Windows? Microsoft have a lot of work in front of them to regain my trust. It will be a harder switch with the Linux experience being as good as it is.

Do I have any sympathy for those who try and revert? Sure - change is difficult for many.

It’s an interesting article. Spoon feeding doesn’t come easy for an engineer, but from what the article conveys a little can go a long way. It’s hard to overestimate the reach of mainstream publications.