The big one is no Snaps. You can get them, but I prefer flatpaks which I use on LMDE.

I’ve been enjoying LMDE. Mint without Ubuntu.

Didn’t I see something about someone bringing it back? They should call it Miley CyrOS.

I was thinking of posting something about all the tracking and control in… Linux, but then decided why bother?

I find that straight Debian takes a bit more work to get to daily driver territory than some other distros, but I do like the balance of Linux Mint Debian Edition. Plus, I had a weirdo problem with LMDE once, and Clem actually responded himself with a fix, so thumbs up there!

I think a lot of the hate is snaps. Ubuntu has pushed a technology on the users that is unpopular before (Unity) and largely ignored the criticism, which is a Windows-like behavior. I can attest that snaps really sucked on old hardware when they first rolled out. I haven’t really used Ubuntu since 22.04, so I can’t comment on the current state of snaps, other than to say that a buddy swears they are way faster now. It’s a rock and a hard place situation for Canonical though, because if Firefox from apt crashes, Ubuntu gets hate, not Firefox.

Today I learned that Jellyfin does music. Had Jellyfin and Navidrome both for years, never even tried sticking my music library into Jellyfin. I use Substreamer on my Androids.

This! I also have an old GPU in it, passed through to whichever VM I want to game on! Total pain to set up, but then also a pain to use! I forget why I did it…

I don’t actually use the arr stack, but if you set up Tailscale it won’t hurt anything else by being set up. I just know that it’s pretty straightforward to use, so I thought I’d throw in a good word for it.

Nobody is addressing tailscale so far, so I’ll throw my two cents in: I have tailscale on my phone and my laptop, and I have a bunch of stuff running at home, and they all act like they’re on the same network as long as I’m logged in. There are a lot of alternatives out there, but I find it quite useful. I have immich for my pictures and pihole for ad blocking using docker. The basic docker tutorials are worth following. All I really use is docker ps, docker image docker compose up (-d), docker pull. Nano to edit the yaml files I find online. Unhacked so far!

I run a Pi400 every now and then… It’s not setting any speed records, and starts to lag out after 10 tabs, but it runs all day on an external phone battery. There’s the odd app that nobody bothered porting to ARM, but I have more trouble with Arm Windows than Arm Linux.

I had a pinebook 1080p, same exact experience. Fine, not fantastic, good battery life. It keeled over and died after a year though.

Ahh, I see. Someone else mentioned portainer, that has a lot of “click to do bleh” functions. Might be what the doctor ordered. You could also put the command in a bash script, like restart.sh and then it’ll show up with an ls.

I Tailscale in to my home network, and then from one of the machines I’m the network, I can ssh in (or whatever.)

Dad joke time: Mostly the Aussies!

I have a Windows 11 VM running in Proxmox. It works fine. I put a desktop with a Windows license in the cluster, passed the hardware ID into the VM, it didn’t work, so I hollered at an MS rep for a bit and they activated it for me. I don’t use it for much, but it works.

I have a really cheap old as the hills desktop with an ancient Quadro gpu in it connected via a decently expensive but also used 10gb Nic to my nas which is running Proxmox and a bunch of containers, but the two interesting ones are a tailscale exit node and Jellyfin. The Jellyfin gets the gpu via pass through, and I get 1080p on tap anywhere in my house with no fuss no muss, and I can use the tailscale app, connect, and act like I’m in my house from anywhere else, including other continents. Noticeable delay on play and pause on media if I’m on the other side of the planet, but that’s it for limitations.

Are you sure you’re passing your gpu through correctly? This didn’t happen to me, but a buddy of mine didn’t do iommu and tried to pass the gpu through to a VM, and he couldn’t boot either. If you boot rescue and change the VM to not start-up on boot? I would definitely post your grub boot line.

I have an old as eff laptop hiding behind my TV, and I use Unified Remote to make my phone act like a wireless mouse and keyboard for it.

Also, Proxmox is basically the answer to “I hate big tech and have a lot of time to kill. How do I deal?” Make one computer into 30 mini servers.

Thumbs up! Refind plus mint and you have yourself a nice little machine! This is my “music when I game” or “quick Google the walkthrough” secondary machine. Mine might be older though.

Ah hah! I went to write “Fedora”, and someone beat me to the punch! I find that you’ll get a lot of Bazzite, Silverblue, KDE Neon, Pop OS recommends, but I find that Mint and Fedor tend to work without too much fussing. I sometimes need to get rpmfusion or flathub stuff for Fedora to be 100% for me, but it really works quite wonderful after that. Mint is funny, because it’s the one everyone recommends for beginners, and, well, I keep coming back to it. It somehow manages to be more reliable than the Ubuntu base it’s built on.