I would be less concerned about the GPU driver and more about the entire distro. Like most distros, Ubuntu has a release cycle where versions of everything are deprecated over time in favour of newer ones, and to expect that the entire OS will be fully supported in 10 years may be asking a bit much (I’m not sure if even their LTS release goes that far).

On top of that, Ubuntu could go bankrupt or get bought out, or simply enshittify (more than it already has) in that time. Expecting Ubuntu specifically to be supported on your laptop in ten years is anyone’s guess.

However, what you can be reasonably sure of is that Linux will continue to support your system, GPU and all, for a very long time. I heard a kernel developer once say that due to the kernel’s modular design, there’s support in there for stuff just one or two people in the whole world use.

As someone else has already pointed out, FOSS support for hardware generally gets better over time, and a GTX video card is ubiquitous. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of those floating around on laptops, servers, and homelabs for a lot more than ten years.

You just might not be able to stick with Ubuntu. The older the hardware, the more you might have to lean toward the more technical distros that make it easy to customise the kernel or that favour old hardware. I like Gentoo for this job, but even Ubuntu or Debian have paths to do compile your own kernel for example.

Or, https://justuse.org/curl/

Buy two 4tb extern drives. Copy your photos onto both. Leave on at your mom’s house in a closet. Leave the other in a locker at work or a safety deposit box.

No monthly fees, no techbro cloud capitalists.

Honestly, I’d buy 6 external 20tb drives and make 2 copies of your data on it (3 drives each) and then leave them somewhere-safe-but-not-at-home. If you have friends or family able to store them, that’d do, but also a safety deposit box is good.

If you want to make frequent updates to your backups, you could patch them into a Raspberry Pi and put it on Tailscale, then just rsync changes every regularly. Of course means that wherever youre storing the backup needs room for such a setup.

I often wonder why there isn’t a sort of collective backup sharing thing going on amongst self hosters. A sort of “I’ll host your backups if you host mine” sort of thing. Better than paying a cloud provider at any rate.

From a read of that issue, it looks like it never was.

This might be useful: https://ffmpeg.app/

I keep seeing Zulip tossed around as an alternative, but I don’t know what’s up with their licencing. There’s also Framateam, but I think that might just be Mattermost as a service.

Matrix would be great if it wasnt so user-hostile, but it is :-(

You can also do this with New Pipe.

Don’t think too hard on it. Just use git. For example, I have a repo called handy-scripts that hosts all my dotfiles. I just check that out into ${HOME}/projects/handy-scipts and then symlink everything from where it’s expected to its corresponding place in the repo.

As you make modifications, remember to occasionally do a git pull --rebase && git commit -m WIP && git push so that all your devices are synced up.

Ooh! Has anyone managed to do this with Majel Barrett’s (the Enterprise computer) voice yet?

Basically the IP stops responding to any traffic. At one point I set up a constant ping, and every once in a while I got something like “destination host unreachable”. It doesn’t happen often enough for me to move the service onto a physical device though. That’s work and I’m tired like, a lot.

16: I’ve had more headaches getting multiple monitors to work in Windows than I ever have in Linux. Try connecting 2 monitors of wildly different resolutions in Windows and witness the abject failure of windows to handle that elegantly. Your mouse can slip off into a “void” where no monitor exists, and yet your content can just disappear to, dragging the mouse between monitors slips the cursor way off and to the right, screenshots are a mess, etc. etc.

17: I only play games in Linux and I never use emulators… unless it’s for things like SNES.

18: I don’t know what you’re getting at with this one. Software is way more shareable in Linux. You just say “it’s in your package manager” or “install this Flatpak”. Windows and Mac on the other hand have half-assed app stores and a culture of "just go to ${URL} and click “download, ok, ok, ok” which inevitably leads to stuff breaking and no discernible way to determine what failed 'cause your machine is full of rando installations.

19: This is fair, though most high-profile stuff like CrowdStrike works for Linux now.

20: I cannot begin to tell you how much Windows and Mac don’t work. Like, at all. Just today I spent an hour on a call with another developer stuck in Windows trying to get a JDBC driver to work. The constant ambiguous error messages, useless documentation directing you to "just go to ${RANDOM_SITE} and install some-cryptically-named-executable.msi that craps out with error messages about missing runtimes… the whole operating system is hot garbage and that’s before you factor in the missing keyboard shortcuts, flaky monitor support, creeping AI, and ads shooting into your eyeballs. The only way Windows “Just Works™” is if you redefine “works” entirely.

#3 is what does it for me. There are few things more enraging than something I own refusing to do what I’m instructing it to do.

I installed a Pi-Hole largely to serve as a local DNS, but enabled the ad-blocking 'cause it seemed silly not to. My wife got very upset. Apparently she likes the ads.

With that aside though, it seems to work quite well. Just make sure to (a) use a reasonably-powered device (my Pi Zero appears to be taxed by it) and you should probably use an Ethernet connection 'cause my Pi Zero regularly flakes out so DNS requests fail due to the IP being “unreachable” for a half second.

I suspect it’s because they allowed users to select multiple, 'cause if you add all the personal Linuxes together, you get 61% on their own.

Regardless, it’s actually looking really good for Team Free Software.

I am terribly jealous. Congratulations on finding a company with a (somewhat) sensible IT policy.

This is nowhere near the average Debian update experience. Debian is favoured precisely for its stability and simplicity, so if youre getting stuff like this, it’s far from average.

Those errors look like file corruption. Maybe they were partially downloaded or written to a flakey disk, it’s hard to say. I’d also echo the other comment or that Kali (and honestly Debian) are not well suited for gaming due to the distro preference for Freely-licenced software and favouring stability vs quick releases.

It’s fine if you want to experiment and “swim against the current” to do a thing with a tool for which it’s not designed, but turn around and complain as if this is normal behaviour is either dishonest or outs you as someone who doesn’t have the experience required to make such a statement.

Multiple disks with many moving parts, containing 80TB of data on magnetic platters flying at high altitude where they’ll be subjected to far more physical impacts, radiation, and cosmic rays than at sea level.

Yeah, it’s a risk.

Here’s a really amazing Radiolab episode about bit flips!

I can’t speak to Lunduke, but dhh is quite the piece of shit himself.

If you build for a containerised environment, standing up your service in Kubernetes with HPA gives you all the scalability (and potentially cost) benefits of serverless without all the drawbacks.