What distros have you been testing recently?

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crosscourt
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

I own some older Dell Optiplex with dvd drives but my recent desktops dont have optical drives. I use dvd usb external drives when needed,particularly for installing older games its a must for me. I also use it to distribute Linux distros to many users, particularly with older hardware like laptops in particular. I know many people who still use cd/dvd drives of various types Many still watch dvd movies they already own. You live in the land of really recent hardware but most people dont and some as you can see on many forums, hang onto older hardware as long as they can.
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tlmiller
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

I mean, lack of optical dirves is hardly recent. Most people I know simply only own laptops, and laptops (true laptops, not netbooks which GENERALLY never had optical drives) started appearing with no optical dirve nearly a decade ago. They didn't disappear overnight, but they got rarer and rare in laptops, so by 2017 it was EXTREMELY rare for laptops to still have optical media. I do still keep a USB 3.0 blu-ray drive around for ripping cd's, watching DVD's, watching blu-rays (on windows, at least) when I need it, as do many people I know, but having a machine with optical drive built in, that's uncommon anymore.
wove
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

A couple weeks back I was asked if I could transfer some old home videos on VHS to DVD. I can actually do that easily because we have a combo VHS/DVD writer, hooked to the TV. We have kept the VHS and DVD movies we picked up over the years and use that machine to watch them. I have transferred most of the movies we really to digital. And at yard sales we find DVD movies cheaper than they are to rent. We never did have a blu ray player, but many used DVDs we find do include both DVD and BluRay media.

Some of my laptops have a DVD drive either in the laptop or part the docking statio, All my desktops have an optical drive. I can not remember the last time I used any optical media on a computer.
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crosscourt
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by crosscourt »

As far as my laptops are concerned half have a dvd drive the other half none. Being a gamer I own quite a few games on cd/dvd and I can install them onto Windows with no issues in most cases. I dont intend to buy games I can install for free. Ive also got a decent number of dvds I like to watch so i either use my laptop or I still have an older Xbox which works great for watching on the living room tv. I also use USB sticks all the time as well asd other forms of external storage. Im a bit more retro than some due to my gaming.
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tlmiller
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

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I ATTEMPTED to install the latest Devuan today. Wow, that is a steaming pile of suck. Go into the installer. Oh, you have to already have set up your partitions. OK, go into the partitioner, create a EFI partition and a / partition. Go back into the installer. "Can't find an EFI paritition". Go back into the partitioner, verify there's an efi partition. Back to the installer. Same. It's 2022, how can you have an installer that can't properly recognize a fat32 partition w/ the boot flag is EFI? Doubly so when Debian includes the ability to format it AS ESP (EFI system partition), but Devuans partitioner you have to choose fat32 since there's no ESP or EFI. That image was quickly flushed to the bitbucket.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

I have paid no attention to the whole systemd brouhaha. I know that the BSDs did not embrace it saying that the systemV they use works just fine and there is no need to change. I was never clear on what problems systemd was meant to solve and the downsides that come with its use. It does generate strong feelings among users. Those who are against it are quite vocal about it, but are not very articulate about the specifics of their aversion.
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tlmiller
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

I totally get why people hate it. It's trying to be an OS to load your OS. Systemd isn't just an init, it also now tires to do networking, filesystem management, dns, etc. But personally, as long as it works well (systemd mount doesn't work for me) I really don't care, if it's what the OS chooses to use, I'm fine with it. My only MAJOR gripe is having the system journal be binary instead of text is, IMO, a gargantuan step down in terms of ease of use. But ultimately it's one I can live with, so I don't complain.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

tlmiller wrote:My only MAJOR gripe is having the system journal be binary instead of text is, IMO, a gargantuan step down in terms of ease of use.
I did not know that about logs and I would agree with that. Early messing with Linux and BSDs got me into the habit of looking at the logs when something is the systems goes a bit peculiar. Sometimes things go right past me. I had assumed that Gnome-logs was introduced as an application to make it easier to find all the logs and read them, and it does make them easier to find and explore. So I look through the logs using that. It had not occurred to me that it was needed because without it the logs would be hard/impossible to read. So if my GUI failed for some reason, I would be at a loss as to how to read the logs, since I have grown use to just using the app.
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tlmiller
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by tlmiller »

journalctl isn't too bad to use honestly, and over the years I've actually gotten moderately proficient with it. However, I still think it's a bad choice.
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Re: What distros have you been testing recently?

Post by wove »

I cloned the drive in my 2010 17" Macbook Pro, moving from a 256GB SSD to a 500GB SSD. The new drive was a Team Brand, which I think is the in house brand for Newegg. Not sure how good the specs are on the drive, but it was very inexpensive, and the laptop is fairly old and not well speced to begin with.

MacOS X picked up any hardware change, and makes you jump through lots of hoops to make sure it is you. It was an encrypted drive and needed that that long key key entered rather than just a password. Then it deletes your keychain, so your passwords are gone, but you can recover those from your iCloud drive, which also need a huge long key entered to prove that it is you.

It then proceeds to delete all the file indexes and all the caches. It creates a new hard drive encryption key and re-encrypts the hard drive with the new key. All that involves using just about all the system resources, so for the next several hours of operation the computer is barely crawling along.

The good news is that by the second day all that is done and things are back to going well and there is 250GB more space than I had before I started. The cloning software is called Carbon Copy Cloner. It is written in AppleScript and uses rsync. The drive is formatted APFS which is Apple's new file system, created specifically for solid state storage. It seems like LVM or ZFS in that storage devices ar seen as a pool, so you can just add new storage to that pool. It also allows for snapshots, what can be created whenever you wish and you can roll back to an earlier snapshot just as quickly.
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