I see. The word lie is strong, and it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that you never had any issues arise with your install. I see your point, and apologize for perhaps a bit of grandstanding on my behalf. I was more focused on the pros/cons of different types of distros, and missed the reason why you were acting defensively.

I feel this kind of conversation still isn’t super helpful though (for either of you). I mean it clearly can be true that one person (or one chunk of the community) has no issues, while another person (and maybe another good chunk of the community) does have issues. Though perhaps in getting involved, I haven’t really helped either.

I’ve had my own issues with two different laptops over the years, and in that time I’ve seen multiple packaging/dependency issues hit a majority of Arch users. My own issues are often caused by bugs on the bleeding edge that users on a non-rolling distro dodge altogether. For me these have mostly been easy to resolve, but it’s a much different experience compared with “stable” distros, where similar changes that require manual intervention (ideally) happen at a predictable cadence, and are well-documented in release notes.

I still strongly prefer Arch, as I’ve hit showstoppers and annoyances with “stable” distros as well. I guess I’m saying I don’t really understand your responses, and why you seem so critical of user anecdotes in this space, when your original comment was a (perfectly fine) anecdote about how everything’s working for you. That’s great! But we can also point to many examples caused directly by bugs or dependency issues that only crop up in a rolling release. Taking all these data together, good and bad, pros and cons, working and not working, can help us learn and form a more complete picture of reality.

What you’ve said is true, though it’s a bit of a trade-off – over the years I’ve wasted so many hours with those “user friendly” distros because I need a newer version of a dependency, or I need to install something that isn’t in the repos. Worst case I have to figure out how to compile it myself.

It’s very rare to find something that isn’t in the Arch official repos or the AUR. Personally I’ve found that being on the bleeding edge tends to save me time in the long run, as there’s almost no barriers to getting the packages that I need.

Right, but if you want a digital video library that hasn’t been compressed to hell by some streaming company then your only option is using Blu-ray as a source.

Something like a v60 or an aeropress saves a lot of money in the short term. But you lose out in the long term by increasing your standards for coffee and basically falling down a coffee rabbit hole.

I bought an aeropress 10 years ago to save money…

Signed, someone currently in the market for a 4 figure espresso machine.

I had the same surgery for $7600 a year ago.

My glasses prescription was really strong, and my corneas are really thin, so LASIK wasn’t an option for me.

Anyone considering this surgery should research the side effects and risks (there are some meta-papers in medical journals that go over these items).

I experienced all of the visual artifacts below in the days/weeks after my surgery. At first they were very bad/noticeable.

After a couple of weeks, the only major issue was still getting halos. (Occasionally I also get the ghosting like in the Netflix image especially if my eyes are very tired).

Those have gradually diminished over the last year, and 99.9% of the time, I don’t even notice that I have the lenses in.

Night driving is a bit more annoying because I still get a lot of halos there, but it’s manageable, and my brain is better at filtering them out.

Overall getting this surgery was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I see better than 20/20, and no longer have to wear glasses/contacts. But I’m saying (to anyone reading this and considering it), go into it with the expectation of some risk (e.g. could cause early cataracts), and give your body time to recover from the surgery and your brain time to adapt & filter out the halos.

At least they told you what they banned you for. I appealed mine and they were like, nope you’re still banned and we won’t tell you why.

They also automatically ban every new account I made that they can link to me.

I’m still on there on a single unbanned account (to comment on some very specific things for specific reasons) but I spend much more of my time on here.

I really hope they do…

I love my Nvidia Shield, but it’s definitely aging, and sometimes getting it to actually play 2160p Blu Ray remuxes without stuttering is a chore. Plus Dolby Vision does not even display properly due to “red push” issue, and Nvidia has no plans to fix (they have abandoned the device and the entire market segment).

Currently the only method to get a streaming box to actually display Dolby Vision properly (profile 7 FEL) involves installing Linux (CoreELEC), and I believe the only device with all the proper support (licensing, hardware, etc) is the Ugoos Am6b+.

I much prefer the Jellyfin android client to Kodi, so I’ve been sticking with the Shield for now. I’d love another Linux based competitor, and hopefully a more polished streaming box from Valve could spur some development of better clients and tools.

I am a bit nervous about Valve actually being able to get all the licensing in place to pull this off.

When I think about how many hours of my life I’ve wasted and how much room in my brain is dedicated to all these stupid modern formats…my hope is that a player like Valve entering the market could do some good work. We are in a very sorry state when it comes to compatibility.

Though again… While I don’t have a deep understanding of the issues, it seems like a large chunk of it revolves around licensing, and I don’t know how much of a dent Valve can make in that.

The Culture. Part of me seriously doubts he’s actually read it himself, like you’re saying.

I haven’t gotten that far yet, currently on Inversions. I think Veppers comes later.

Possibly…the counterexample is tech CEOs jetting off to Burning Man, tripping balls for a week, and coming up with app ideas for things nobody actually needs.

Musk has used a lot of drugs, including psychedelics.

Currently I’m in the middle of what’s apparently one of his favorite book series…communism, post-scarcity, and frequent gender changing are featured front and center.

The “everybody should take psychedelics” argument maybe carried some weight in the 60s when the “squares” were the ones in the way. (Though I still kinda doubt that because look who so many of those “free love” boomers turned into).

But the Republicans of today are not the same as they were then. They are partying, smoking weed, and doing a whole lot of other drugs including psychedelics. It’s possible to eat drugs, realize some profound things, become incredibly self-actualized, and be so addicted to power that it doesn’t really matter anyways.

Or just be so narcissistic that you just ignore the things you read in a book or think about on your acid trip and just carry on…

I don’t doubt the research into psychedelics, and their power on an individual level to help people work through things in a therapeutic way. I am starting to doubt the idea that “if everyone just tripped one time the world would be a better place”.

Yes, what you’re saying is the idea, and why I went with this setup.

I am running raidz2 on all my arrays, so I can pull any 2 disks from an array and my data is still there.

Currently I have 3 arrays of 8 disks each, organized into a single pool.

You can set similar up with any raid system, but so far Truenas has been rock solid and intuitive to me. My gripes are mostly around the (long) journey to “just Docker” for services. The parts of the UI / system that deals with storage seems to have a high focus on reliability / durability.

Latest version of Truenas supports Docker as “apps” where you can input all config through the UI. I prefer editing the config as yaml, so the only “app” I installed is Dockge. It lets me add Docker compose stacks, so I edit the compose files and run everything through Dockge. Useful as most arrs have example Docker compose files.

For hardware I went with just an off-the-shelf desktop motherboard, and a case with 8 hot swap bays. I also have an HBA expansion card connected via PCI, with two additional 8 bay enclosures on the backplane. You can start with what you need now (just the single case/drive bays), and expand later (raidz expansion makes this easier, since it’s now possible to add disks to an existing array).

If I was going to start over, I might consider a proper rack with a disk tray enclosure.

You do want a good amount of RAM for zfs.

For boot, I recommend a mirror at least two of the cheapest SSD you can find each in an enclosure connected via USB. Boot doesn’t need to be that fast. Do not use thumb drives unless you’re fine with replacing them every few months.

For docker services, I recommend a mirror of two reasonable size SSDs. Jellyfin/Plex in particular benefit from an SSD for loading metadata. And back up the entire services partition (dataset) to your pool regularly. If you don’t splurge for a mirror, at least do the backups. (Can you tell who previously had the single SSD running all of his services fail on him?)

For torrents I am considering a cache SSD that will simply exist for incoming, incomplete torrents. They will get moved to the pool upon completion. This reduces fragmentation in the pool, since ZFS cannot defragment. Currently I’m using the services mirror SSDs for that purpose. This is really a long-term concern. I’ve run my pool for almost 10 years now, and most of the time wrote incomplete torrents directly to the pool. Performance still seems fine.

Now that Truenas Scale supports just plain Docker (and it’s running on Debian) I think it’s a great option for an all-in-one media box. I’ve had my complaints with Truenas over the years, but it’s done a really great job at preventing me from shooting myself in the foot when it comes to my data.

I believe raidz expansion is also now in stable (though still better to do a bit of planning for your pool before pulling the trigger).

Ah well, nevertheless.

Based admin.

I am actually in favor of tariffs in a couple of limited situations:

1. Foreign goods are cheap due to non-existent labor laws

2. Foreign goods are cheap, but produce more emissions than domestic manufacturing

#2 is also called a carbon border adjustment mechanism, or CBAM, and the EU voted to implement one last year that goes into effect in 2026. The USA desperately needs one IMHO. I’m involved in a nonprofit that’s been lobbying Congress to implement our own CBAM.

It’s silly though to think that a tariff is anything but a tax. It’s not any different than any other way that we use our tax laws to try to regulate “pure” capitalism by encouraging certain behavior and discouraging other behavior.

I thought Republicans were the anti-tax party?

goodbye

Seems like people have been doing this enough that companies have started to disable the functionality. Comcast will just hang up on you nowadays if you spam zero.

My trick lately to speed things up with Comcast is just go straight to cancellations. I always immediately get a human on the phone. I them tell them what I’m actually calling about, and they will then transfer me to the correct department.

I scrolled back on this community and honestly even the memes with 0 upvotes are pretty funny. I appreciate its existence.

I use arch, btw