mead

Do you really drink a honey based brew?

There is almost certainly a binary version of gcc in Gentoo. I ran Gentoo for 20 odd years and also generally insisted on compiling everything. I recall gcc going from v3 to 4. My laptop ran for over a week on a glass table with a prop to keep the fan vent unobstructed.

I probably should have learned back then that I didn’t really understand exactly how the toolchain worked and how to get from ebuilds to binary code really works. I’m a sysadmin and not a programmer.

With hindsight, I suggest that you pick your fights with care. Use the bin versions of entire packages where available and enjoy the flexibility of USE when it will make a difference.

gcc is not the biggest lump you will compile but it does take a while. It was rather slower 20 years ago.

Mint has managed to become a meme and that’s no bad thing, per se, but it can look a bit odd to the cognoscenti. Anyone doing research by search engine looking to escape MS towards Linux will find Mint as the outstanding suggestion.

That’s just the way it is at the moment: Mint is the gateway to Linux. Embrace that fact and you are on the way to enlightenment.

I am the MD of a small IT company in the UK. I’ve run Gentoo and then Arch on my daily drivers for around 25 years. The rest of my company insist on Windows or Apples. Obviously, I was never going to entice anyone over with Gentoo or even Arch, although my wife rocks Arch on her laptop but I manage that and she doesn’t care what I call Facebook and email.

We are now at an inflection point - MS are shuffling everyone over to Azure with increasing desperation: Outlook/Exchange and MS Office will be severely off prem. by around 2026. So if you are going to move towards the light, now is a good time to get your arse in gear.

I now have Kubuntu on my work desktop and laptop. You get secure boot out of the box, along with full disc encryption and you can also run a full endpoint suite (ESET for us). That scores a series of ticks on the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation and that is required in my world.

AD etc: CID - https://cid-doc.github.io/ pretty nifty. I’ve defined the equivalent of Windows drive letters as mounts under home, eg: ~/H: - that works really well.

Email - Gnome Evolution with EWS. Just works. Used it for years.

Office - Libre Office. I used to teach people how to use spreadsheets, word processors, databases and so on. LO is fine. Anyone attempting to tell me that LO can’t deal with … something … often gets … educated. All software has bugs - fine, we can deal with that. I recently showed someone how decimal alignment works. I also had to explain that it is standard and not a feature of LO.

For my company the year of Linux on the desktop has to be 2025 (with options on 2026). I have two employees who insist on it now and I have to cobble together something that will do the trick. I get one attempt at it and I’ve been doing application integration and systems and all that stuff for quite a while.

Linux has so much to give as an ecosystem but we do need to tick some boxes to go properly mainstream on the desktop and that needs to happen sooner rather than later.

Rustdesk is pretty decent and being developed quite fast. Why not look at MeshCentral too. Choice is good and MC has been around for a fair old while.

My company replaced Teamviewer with MC and we have thousands of client machines across the UK.

Files are files and filesystems are filesystems. You keep your files on filesystems.

NTFS and ext4 are non convertible - you cannot turn one into the other directly, in place. However you can take files from one and put them on another.

Yes, moving TBs does take time, sorry it is unbearable.

My wife’s laptop absolutely has to work. For some mad reason I decided on Arch for it. Actually a rolling distro is not so mad. You get the latest stuff and in general issues are fixed as quickly as a LTS jobbie or you get a work around in the forums or you dig out the source and a compiler. It’s no accident that the Arch wiki is an oft cited resource. Its not for everyone!

I’ve been looking at a similar thing for my company and Kubuntu so far is my choice and I’ve already ditched the LTS bit. I need to run AV and the usual corporate bollocks to pass silly tick box exercises, so my options are rather limited.

There is no perfect one size fits all distro, that’s what we have rather a lot of them to choose from - they rise and fall according to natural selection and not artifice. Imagine if all computers were sold with a free/libre OS or none at all and Windows or Apples were a paid for add on. Monolithic OSs are completely deluded about being able to cater for all, without some dreadful contortions.

Anyway, back to the job in hand! If you want a LTS then you must accept older software or you use an LTS as a base and add newer stuff yourself. Most Linux distros allow you to run your own add-ons formally or informally. Gentoo has a rather nifty user patching mechanism for distro ebuilds and you can have your own ebuilds take over entirely. RPM and pkg distros can handle user packages and Ubuntu has PPAs too. I could go on. Also you can go off piste and put stuff into /opt and/or /usr/local!

Please reconsider your use of the term “unstable”. I suggest you write down a list of your requirements and score them according to importance. Then grab a list of OSs and distros - all of them, don’t preclude Windows and Apples: they have their uses. Then score the OSs/distros against your requirements. The scoring might be in the form of a matrix (table). I suggest keeping it simple with a score of -1 to 1 for each item (-1=dislike, 0=neutral/whatevs, +1=like)

Do a pilot project and see how that goes. Take your time. If it is for personal use then run your tests in a VM. Most modern hardware can easily run a VM or two. Virtualbox or VMware Worskstation or KVM (libvirt is a good effort)

The choice is yours. Note that word “choice” - its very important.

“I understand that Canonical has every right to make the decision about their product.”

That seems fair. There are loads of distros available so why not try something else if you don’t like Ubuntu?

Linux and other mainstream Unices such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD int al (that’s not something I ever thought I’d be able to say a few decades back) are not Windows or Apples or whatevs. You do you and not them!

If Ubuntu fails to scratch your itch then move on. Debian is the upstream for Ubuntu so you’ll probably be fine with that instead. There is loads of documentation for Debian via the wiki etc and of course most Ubuntu docs will apply as well.

I feel like I’m the only person who can’t make heads or tails of

It doesn’t matter if you get the result you want. The important thing is you have choice and that what you have chosen … works!

They don’t need a new distro, unless they hire a lot of highly skilled packagers. I’d take say Ubuntu or OpenSuSE … but it would be RedHat with Oracle for the NHS - they just can’t help losing money.

For my tiny company, I’m going Kubuntu … bear with … Ubuntu means:

• Multiple “enterprise AV” are available (ESET and others)
• Secure Boot
• Full disc encryption is available

Those boxes ticked gets you on the way in the rather naff enterprise security word of tick boxes. Without those - give up now.

The K(DE) bit gets you a lot of configurability and its reasonably easy to get an environment out of the box that Windows users can get to grips with. Besides, I like KDE/Plasma.

I then tack on this rather fine project: https://cid-doc.github.io/ for AD, SYSVOL, “Drive letter” etc integration. Evolution with EWS does email.

My test machine is my desktop (it used to run Arch (actually), my laptop still does) - I started off with Kubuntu 22.04 and wired up all the above and then whilst in a Teams meeting kicked off the upgrade to 23.04 for a laugh. Sound stopped after a while because the kernel modules switched out. Anyway, all good after a reboot.

Seeing as I am competing with something that has GPO, I’ll allow myself to use Ansible.

PS - I should point out that an Arch box can run one of the ESET for Linux products OK (I have). You can get it to do secure boot and it can do FDE. So can Gentoo but I spent 15 years constantly fixing my Gentoo pets too.

I (my little company) employ a bloke to support https://www.uzerp.com/ - we use it ourselves and ditched Sage (yay!)

If you fancy it then give us a shout - it is open source - you get it for free but our time is costed if you need assistance.

That is the Open Source Covenant

I do use it quite a lot. The pfSense package for ACME can run scripts, which might use scp. Modern Windows boxes can run OpenSSH daemons and obviously, all Unix boxes can too. They all have systems like Task Scheduler or cron to pick up the certs and deploy them.

I do IT security for a living. It is quite complicated but not unrealistic for you to DIY.

Do a risk assessment first off - how important is your data to you and a hostile someone else? Outputs from the risk assessment might be fixing up backups first. Think about which data might be attractive to someone else and what you do not want to lose. Your photos are probably irreplaceable and your password spreadsheet should probably be a Keepass database. This is personal stuff, work out what is important.

After you’ve thought about what is important, then you start to look at technologies.

Decide how you need to access your data, when off site. I’ll give you a clue: VPN always until you feel proficient to expose your services directly on the internet. IPSEC or OpenVPN or whatevs.

After sorting all that out, why not look into monitoring?

Errm, Wireshark. Please bear with me.

Wireshark is a shining example of an open source project completely and utterly crapping on the closed source competition. As a result we all benefit. I recall spending a lot of someone else’s money on buying a sort of ruggedized laptop with two ethernet ports to do the job back in the day.

Nowdays, I can run up a tcpdump session on a firewall remotely with some carefully chosen timings and filters and download it to my PC and analyse it with Wireshark.

OK, all so convenient but is it any use?

Say you have a VoIP issue of some sort. The PCAP from tcpdump that you pass to Wireshark can analyse it to the nth degree. Wireshark knows all about SIP and RTP (and IAX) and you can even play back the voice streams or have them graphed so you can see what is wrong or whatever. That’s just VoIP, it has loads of other dissectors and decorators built in.

So what?

The UK (for example) will be dispensing with boring old, but reliable, POTS (Plain Old Telephony System) by 2025. Our entire copper telephony and things like RedCare (defunct soon) will go away.

We are swapping out circuit switching for packet switching. To be fair, a lot of the backend is already TCP/UDP/IP that is shielded away from us proles. When SoGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) really kicks in then the old school electric end to end connection will be lost in favour of packet switching, which never fails (honest guv).

If you are an IT bod of any sort, you really should be conversant with Wireshark.

9th Jan …

“A hell of an improvement especially for the AMD EPYC servers”

Look closely at the stats in the headers of those three tables of test results. The NICs have different line speeds and the L3 cache sizes are different too. IPv4 and 6 for one and only IPv6 for the other.

Not exactly like for like!

Mmm first releases! Working from home, its nearly close of play. I know … I’ll update my work laptop.

OK I now have LXDE for a fall back WM so I can read stuff rather more easily than using links in a TTY and switched out SDDM for LightDM - I needed sddm-git to get LXDE to start up. SDDM now simply crashes and dumps core - no idea why. Oh and I have switched to Wayland because X11 no longer works for me. I might put off updating the wife’s laptop for a while, at least until I’ve done my work desktop 8)

I must say its all rather pretty and smooth. Scrolling now has drag and acceleration, which is nice. I’m sure I’ll get KRDC to talk to the sodding wallet so my 100s of RDP connections will work again. For now I’ll call xfreerdp from the konsole. Perhaps I’ll get around to configuring KeePassXC and get around to using that instead. I share several rather large .kdbx with the rest of the firm.

atop and htop and glances and several others 8)

It’s been around for a very long time. It used to be Gentoo based.

The logical replacement for Ubuntu is probably Debian. I have quite a lot of Ubuntu servers at work. I am quite seriously considering going upstream. I do like the LTS to LTS promise and that fits well for my customers who like to see enterprisey features without going RedHat or Oracle. You may not have had to deal with “enterprise grade” stuff which loosely translates to bloody expensive and often horrible.

I’m an Arch fan too - actually I’m a Linux fan. I used to do Gentoo (10+ years) but I got tired of my lap overheating. Before that Slackware, Mandrake (Mandriva), RH, Yggdrassil oh and a fair bit of SuSE, not to mention everything Novell did since NetWare 3.1. Whoops, sorry, mind wandering 8)

Wayland and Pipewire will probably do everything eventually but for now, you have functionality gaps. Pipewire is quite amazing and being developed at nearly indecent haste. It might be worth diving in to their community. At worst you will find a lot of like minded people to you.

Use whatever you are comfortable with and works for you. At the moment it sounds like Windows might be the path of least resistance. Fine, go with that.

For me, I finally ditched Windows altogether around 15 years ago. Well, I say ditched - my customers and staff … haven’t.

The list of stuff you have problems with might be tricky on Linux simply because the vendors of music gear are unlikely to give a shit. Nvidia should be fine. I have a VMware VM at home which runs Zoneminder on Ubuntu, with a passed through Nvidia GPU. Surely it should be easier on physical hardware. I wrote this: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/GPU_passthrough_in_VMWare

You mention gaming so you’ll probably not be bothered with CUDA. You’ll need https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA If that doesn’t do it for you, hit the Arch forums …

The forums can be a bit intimidating but if you keep your query concise and show some evidence of effort, someone will probably get you over the line.

Nextcloud is simply software that runs on something. You might use DNS to find the something that your Nextcloud runs on … or not. A domain can cost as little as say £10/year (no details given - loose costing provided!) but you say you don’t want one.

You could do some weird stuff involving something like this: Your clients update a database on the server with their current IP address(es) and the server reciprocates in kind regularly.

For an internets conversation, both sides need to know IP address, protocol, and optionally port; for both ends. For example, a webby conversation might involve:

My end: 192.168.100.20/24, tcp port 2399 -> NAT -> 33.22.4.66, tcp port 2245 Remote web server: 99.22.33.44/37, tcp port 443

Now, provided both sides are warned off about changes to addresses and port numbers on a regular basis, then comms will still work.

Say, your home external IP address changes, then your browser writes that new address to the remote server and comms continue. Provided one end knows all the details of the other end at any point in time and can communicate local changes then we are good.

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Maybe not. Lookup: Dynamic DNS.

My phone is on 23. Nextcloud is on 27.

I’m Arch and so is my wife (actually) and it doesn’t have a version. We just roll … and today my dongled, wireless mouse has stopped moving. The buttons still work and my laptop touchpad works fine.

wtf!