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gerdesj

@ gerdesj @lemmy.ml

Posts
0
Comments
107
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Ending support for Windows 10 could send 240 million computers to the landfill. Why not install Linux on them?

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  • My laptop is a cast off from a member of my staff who said it was too slow - a (dmidecode) - Product Name: HP 255 G6 Notebook PC. It now runs Arch (actually).

    It previously slogged along with Win 10, Outlook n O365 n that. Now it does Libre Office, Evolution and much more. I use KDE, which isn't known for a light touch on the resources. I also do light CAD and other stuff.

    My office desktop is even older - it was a customer cast off, due to be skipped around six years ago. I did slap a SSD into it and I think I upped the RAM to 8GB. Its a (ssh, dmidecode): Product Name: Lenovo H330 and the BIOS is dated from 2012! I run two 23" screens off it and again, it runs Arch (actually) and KDE for pretty stuff. I run containers on it - at the moment a test Vikunja instance. I have apache, nginx and caddy fronting various experiments backed up with postgres and mariadb.

    Both devices are "domain joined" and I auth to Exchange via Kerberos, via Samba winbind. File access (drive letters for the Windows mindset) is currently via autofs. I have a project on at a member of staff's request to switch from Windows to Linux. I'm going to take my time and get it right. My current thinking is the Fedora KDE spin and this: Closed In Directory

  • Just about every Windows and Linux device vulnerable to new LogoFAIL firmware attack

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  • Did anyone really think that making UEFI systems the equivalent of a mini OS was a good idea

    UEFI and Secure Boot were pushed forcibly by MS. That's why FAT32 is the ESP filesystem.

    If I had to guess, a brief was drafted at MS to improve on BIOS, which is pretty shit, it has to be said. It was probably engineering led and not an embrace, extinguish thing. A budget and dev team and a crack team of lawyers would have been whistled up and given a couple of years to deliver. The other usual suspects (Intel and co) would be strong armed in to take whatever was produced and off we trot. No doubt the best and brightest would have been employed but they only had a couple of years and they were only a few people.

    UEFI and its flaws are testament to the sheer arrogance of a huge company that thinks it can put a man on the moon with a Clapham omnibus style budget and approach. Management identify a snag and say "fiat" (let it be). Well it was and is and it has a few problems.

    The fundamental problem with UEFI is it was largely designed by one team. The wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI is hilarious in describing it as open. Yes it is open ... per se ... provided you decide that FAT32 (patent encumbered) is a suitable file system for the foundations of an open standard.

    I love open, me.

  • Any experience with teaching kids Linux?

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  • A discarded Windows laptop is ideal for use with Linux. That's what this Managing Director of an IT company has been doing for over a decade. My desktop PC is a customer cast off from a good five years ago. I slapped in an ageing Nvidia el cheapo card to get two monitors running. My laptop is a cast off from one of my employees - I simply opened it up and moved my M.2 card into it.

    I do run ESET on my Linux gear to show solidarity and to show that Linux really is rather more resource friendly than Windows. I login to AD and I use Evolution with Kerb to access Exchange for email. I have the same "drive mappings" to the same file servers too and so on and so forth.

    I used to teach word processing, spreadsheeting and databases n that for UK govt funded courses, I've written a Finite Capacity planner for a factory in Excel (note the lack of In-). I still find people who have no idea how decimal tab stops work or how to efficiently use styles. I can confidently inform you that Libre Office is just as good as MSO. They both have their ... issues but both work pretty well.

    Kids are easy. Adults are a pain! KDE has a lot of educational games ready to go out of the box.

  • Dotfiles matter! Please stop dumping files in users’ $HOME directories.

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  • They will if enough people whine about it.

    In the old days (I'm 50+) tumbleweed drifted through ~/ apart from my drivel and I'd have a folder for that so /home/gerdesj/docs was the root of my stuff. I also had ~/tmp/ for not important stuff. I don't have too much imagination and ~/ was pretty clean. I was aware of dot files and there were a shit load of them but I didn't see them unless I wanted to.

    This really isn't the most important issue ever but it would be nice if apps dumped their shit in a consistently logical way. XDG is the standard.

  • I feel called out

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  • I've spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I've dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.

    Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.

    It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.

    Anyway, Arch is pretty stable.

  • I feel called out

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  • My wife uses Arch (actually). She calls it the internet, when she really means Facebook. She knows it isn't Apple but it gets a bit vague after that!

    The last time I had to fire up the Mesh Central client to sort something out on her desktop from work was around three months ago. Every couple of weeks I ssh into it, update it and schedule a reboot for 03:00.