APU board? They are going EOL soon, but these devices are built like a tank. Full Linux x86_64 support, coreboot bios. https://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm A few sellers in the EU still have them.

Do not expect you can offer this service for a competive price against cloud prices. Caring for a company IT system is a big challenge and requires more work the more users there are.

For a company this size: make a clear contract. Consider how much time you need for setup/installation, monthly hours for maintenance, monitoring and at least daily(!) backups. Let them choose if they want it with a failover and charge for the required hours and material. Also put in the contract when they can expect support from you, including a clause for a holiday substitute admin (if needed). Then put a pricetag on support hours for holding people’s hands when they “can’t find that file they uploaded a week ago and it is surely a server issue” and put a pricetag on engineering hours for any modifications they might want, like installing any plugins they deem useful for themselves. Hardware prices, traffic, rack space and power should be included as well. Have a good plan for updates, choose your distro wisely, do not rely on autoupdates.

Play all this through in your head, add up the hours, choose a fair rate and then you have your pricetag.

Cloud will always be cheaper, because they have their infrastructure already deployed. Building from the ground up is more expensive, but I think it is worth it. Will they?

But…isn’t unsupervised backfeeding the same as simply overtraining the same dataset? We already know overtraining causes broken models.

Besides, the next AI models will be fed with the interactions from humans with AI, not just it’s own content. ChatGPT already works like this, it learns with every interaction, every chat.

And the generative image models will be fed with AI-assisted images where humans will have fixed flaws like anatomy (the famous hands) or other glitches.

So as interesting as this is, as long as humans interact with AI the hybrid output used for training will contain enough new “input” to keep the models on track. There are already refined image generators trained with their own but human-assisted output that are better than their predecessor.

Well, NASA trusts Linux enough to send it to Mars. They build rockets, so it should be good enough for flying busses. Unless you don’t trust your software engineers, but then having them build a custom microkernel OS instead sounds not much better.

Nothing wrong with building your own iso, but you can also simply put the required packages on the original install stick (unless you just dd the iso, then you need another) and then install the drivers once booted.

base is not a package but a meta package for the 28 chosen bare metal neccessities. Those packages have dependencies of their own. So it will never be just 3 packages.

If you find something you do not need, remove it.

I still like reading manga on the kindle paperwhite, the eink display is much more easy on the eyes and the weight and battery life are far better than any full blown tablet. Calibre can easily transfer/encode the comics to it, so no proprietary software needed.

i never knew! fantastic!

I see no advantage in switching to VanillaOS (from Archlinux), and Ubuntu’s tendendcy to ship everything in snaps does not make it better. Arch is swift and clean, snapshots (LVM) protect from broken updates, the archive allows rollbacks way into the past, the additional LTS Kernel bridges bugs in mainline. Rebuilding packages is easy with the available toolchain, and you can be sure every package is as vanilla as possible conpared to upstream.

Hiding complexity from the user just builds another layer of complexity that can break. I can fix an Arch or a Debian, but Vanilla sounds like it will break once you want to add a few sprinkles of chocolate.

systemd-path is the cleanest and most portable solution. You define a path service to watch your directory for changes and trigger another service to perform certain actions then. It uses inotify.

https://man.archlinux.org/man/systemd.path.5.en

Here is a full example from our currently so beloved redhat: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/introduction-path-units

Set it to airplane mode the day it arrives and never let it go online with the stock firmware if you value privacy - these beasts even send amazon the page you are reading currently on. Calibre is the best tool, it autoconverts anything if needed. It also has an RSS-to-newspaper feature that can create a custom newspaperlike magazine from your favorite feeds for you. Reading manga on Kindle is really fun.

smoked bell pepper powder, chilli powder, MSG, salt and maybe some powdered onion/garlic.

tortilla flavoured popcorn, low on calories if made with a hot air popcorn machine.

Regardless of the distro, unless you use Kernel live patching (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_live_patching) you should boot a new Kernel when it is released by your distro with a security warning. Running unpatched old Kernels just for 100% uptime is not safe.

Oh and, I never had issues with Arch changing spontaneously - what event are you speaking of?

We use Ansible as well, it keeps all servers happily upgraded and all packages in working order - even the weirdest custom software instances. Nodjs is available as lts packages im arch and it, again, just works.

I have zero issues with upgrades on desktop and server except once last year when my old Core2Duo notebook I use in the kitchen did not suspend correctly for a whole week until the Kernel bug was fixed. (I ran linux-lts for a week, it was… smooth sailing).

During that time we had 3 failed migrations of old PHP software to the new Ubuntu LTS and were fighting almightly RHEL because it simply did not provide the packages the customer required - we are now running an Arch container on the RHEL box…

I know this discussion is a little bit like religion, and obviously luck and good circumstances play a role. We both speak from experience and OP can make their own decision.

Once a year there is a manual intervention. Last one was the repo merge, and that did not even break then. Before that… hmmm… I dont even remember.

On Desktop with nvidia and a lot of other AUR stuff it is more work, but the servers run smooth as butter.

Disappointing that 2/3 of the remaining users seem to vote for reopening.

I have a GPD micro running Archlinux just fine. HDMI was flaky, but I havent tested it in a while.

if you enjoy this, there are various CTF “crackme” challenges available - the most famous one being the radare2 tutorial crackmes. The have different diffuculties from really easy to mind-bendingly difficult.

My vote is Archlinux. Debian is sometimes a little too “optimisitic” when backporting security fixes and upgrading from oldstable to stable always comes with manual intervention.

Release-based distros tend to be deployed and left to fend on their own for years - when it is finally time to upgrade it is often a large manual migration process depending on the deployed software. A rolling release does not have those issues, you just keep upgrading continuously.

Archlinux performs excellent as a lightweight server distro. Kernel updates do not affect VM hardware the same they do your laptop, so no issues with that. Same for drivers. It just, works.

Bonus: it is extremely easy to build and maintain your own packages, so administration of many instances with customized software is very convenient.

May I suggest to get a foldable potty instead? They are super light and the size of an original Gameboy when folded. Combined with plastic bags and silicapowder (do not eat) it will help you stay healthy instead of dehydrated and constipated. If amazon is not fast enough, check the nearest baby mart. If you are just shy, there are also foldable privacy shields (camping section) available to let you do your business with privacy.

Don’t know about that app, but it is very easy to create a file that contains malicious code that is not flagged on virustotal at all.

‘joe sandbox’ and ‘hybrid analysis’ offer online services where the file gets executed to test it for malicious behaviour. Of course a seasoned malware developer can detect sandboxes and make the malware hide itself while inside the default sandboxes.

Just avoid running random binaries from untrusted sources; prefer open source or, if you must, use a hardened sandbox VM yourself to run untrusted code.