cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/47587175

My go to back in The Day was just Ubuntu because I was lazy. We're talking the 14.04/16.04 days. Ubuntu was simple and mostly just worked. I now find myself needing to de-spywareify as the coming administration is likely to force Microsoft into tracking "dissidents" so need to get back into weaning myself off the Windows teat.

I recently dualbooted my main desktop with Ubuntu 24.04 and have been... entirely underwhelmed. The whole separation between APT and snap packages doesn't work well together and is really the big problem I have, as a lot of standard deb packages just refuse to install properly now. the UI is hard to use and doesn't make me happy, and it's not been playing nice with my Zen 4 desktop when it comes to ACPI power states (no sleep, doesn't reliably turn the power off when i ask it to turn off, etc). So overall, I am just not terribly interested in using Ubuntu anymore.

What I primarily want is the sort of "mostly just works" like old 16.04 but still gave you the full ability to monkey under the hood- and is also something based on a normal distro that most people write guides for because I am a smoothbrain. Should I just head to using basic plain jane Debian or something?

And that's not even the fully decked-out configuration.

Until he actually had to use it.

Took 2 hours of reading through examples just to deploy the site.
Turns out, it is hard to do even just the bash stuff when you can't see the container.

It’s going to cost you a small fortune, though.

I have a multiboot system. One of the installed OS's does not use the NVMe SSD installed on the motherboard at all.
At the time of taking the screenshot, all the SSD partitions are unmounted, so apart from detection, the SSD is mostly unused.

• I would like the temps to drop down to SYSTIN (≈35°C) levels.
• I know, it's right next to my GPU, but I am not doing anything GPU intensive, the GPU temps are ~37°C ^[apart from GPU memory, which is 48°C due to the awful AMD 7th gen Zero RPM, which has no workarounds on Linux]

For the unmounted and unused HDDs, I just use hdparm -Y, but there seems to be nothing in terms of that for the SSD. And even though I appreciate the additional heat in winters, this is going to be too expensive for me. I'd rather burn some cheap Nichrome than my data storage device.

I checked out a Debian forum thread and from that, I checked the following:

❯ sudo nvme get-feature /dev/nvme0 -f 2 -H
get-feature:0x02 (Power Management), Current value:0x00000004
        Workload Hint (WH): 0 - No Workload
        Power State   (PS): 4

Showing it is already in the lowest power state.

I have no active cooling setup for the SSD from my side. This becomes relevant soon.

• Checking the SSD temps (using the same widget as in the image), the temperature on Sensor 2 starts out at ~40°C (after a normal reboot) and slowly increases to >50°C as shown at the start of the graph. Power State (PS) is still 4.

• Running KDE partitionmanager, which probably does some reading to check the partition information, at 50°C stage, causes a temperature drop, as shown in the image.

• Running KDE partitionmanager right after reboot, when the temperature is increasing very sloowly, seems to do nothing significant.

• Turns out that after a few minutes of System Standby, the SSD doesn't return to PS: 4, so I have the culprit.
• Running partitionmanager after that causes it to go back to PS: 4

So we have a solution! All I need to do is run partitionmanager on wake. nlol jk

Motherboard: MSI MAG X570S TORPEDO MAX (MS-7D54)
SSD: Samsung 980 512GB (correct firmware, bought long before the fakes started coming out)

Fatbobman's Swift Weekly #058 | Luck Rewards Patience

• View Update Mechanism
• Code Spelunking in DocC
• AttributeGraph Notes
• Beware @unchecked Sendable
• Live Activity and Dynamic Island
• Nested Transparent Objects
• Concurrency Proposal Index

via https://fosstodon.org/@ichard26/113494296968334680

My SO is interested in learning Python because she hopes it becomes useful in her work. She works with ArcGIS and/or QGIS and apparently it supports Python scripting so she's thinking about giving it a go.

She has no programming background so I was hoping you friends could suggest something for absolute beginners that would teach her both the Python and programming basics. It doesn't have to be very comprehensive, just something to get her started.

She has managed to get some scripts working through copy/pasting and minor adjustments but she lacks the foundations to really build a script of her own.

Thanks a lot!!

There’s more than one garage opener with a not-quite-open ecosystem. That’s why an Ars writer installed an OpenGarage unit.

I experimented with several ways to run my services:

1. "regular" systemd services (services.glance = { ... };)
2. nix containers (containers.glance = { ... };)
3. podman containers (virtualisation.oci-containers.containers.glance = { ... })

and I must say I'm starting to appreciate the last option (the least nixos-y) more and more.

Specifically, I appreciate that:

• I just have to learn the app/container configuration, instead of also backwards-translating from their config into the various nixos options (of course the .yaml or whatever configuration files are still generated from my nixos config, I just do that in a derivation instead on relying on a module doing it for me)
• Services are sometimes outdated in nixpks (even in unstable - and juggling packages between stable and unstable is yet another complication)
• I feel like it's more secure (very arguable and also of very little consequence since everything is on my homelab... it's mainly for the warm fuzzies)

Do you guys use one of the options above? Something different?