I’ll drop this: https://www.techradar.com/best/best-linux-distros It’s written by an actual journo and not a bunch of nerds in nerdville!

Getting into Linux is a bit like Windows back in the day - interesting and a lot of fun … and rather nerdy. My first Windows version was 1.0 and my last was 7. Mind you I do run a MS Silver Partner and worry about a lot of Windows servers and desktops but my daily driver is Linux.

Mint is a great choice, even though it isn’t mentioned in the article I linked because you get a great community, which is pretty important. Its basically Ubuntu and therefore Debian too, so a lot of howtos will work.

I personally rock Kubuntu but I have a requirement for enterprisey stuff - ESET and Veeam and AD integration and all that. I also get Secure Boot out of the box and not all Linux distros work with that.

Your smart new laptop will have Secure Boot enabled so you will have to deal with that if you deploy a distro that doesn’t. So with say Arch, you will need to turn it off or learn how to sign your kernels etc and that is not a beginner topic! I suggest you turn off Secure Boot if your chosen distro doesn’t support it, rather than insisting on it. Its a nice to have but not the most important security feature ever.

You might want to show a bit of ankle and try out a few to start with. Most distros have a live CD that you can boot and try out first. I suggest trying out Mint, Ubuntu and Kubuntu. That gets you three modern interfaces to play with.

If you are into gaming then it kooks like Pop!OS would be a good place to start instead.

There is no real best option - it’s what suits you and you have choice.

If you’re expecting the same type of reliably you’ve from VMware on Proxmox you’re going to have a very hard time soon.

Try upgrading a v6.0 or even 6.5 ESXi from the command line. If there is no “enterprise” iLO or iDRAC or whatever with media redirection then you’ll be jumping in the car. Or what about if, back in the day, you went ESX instead of ESXi? lol!

How often do you find yourself repairing a vCentre? Oh dear the SSL certs are fucked again, despite being fixed a few years back. Yes I can bring the bloody things back but I’ve also got longer Linux experience than VMware. Those 14 virty discs were a daft idea and let’s dump the logs to all sorts of random areas and then stir them around every few versions. … and its 400GB in size - even thin provisioned they are still huge for what they do.

How about when the Dell customised .iso was the only way to install on Rx10 hardware and then made the box unupgradable years later? or when the Intel NIC drivers got a bit confused - yay - PSoD?

Reliability: don’t make me laugh!

It’s always good to have choice.

I’m not sure what better MS compatibility really means. I’ve been using MS software since before Excel, Word etc even existed and taught a lot of people how spreadsheets, word processors, databases, DTP and the rest work in a former life (do you know what a decimal tab stop is, or how to control leading and kerning?)

I generate, by far, the most complicated documents within my company and I have been using LO since way before before it forked from OO. All software has bugs and peccadilloes.

As I said: it’s good to have choice.

I don’t understand what you mean by “epic pile of hacks”. Proxmox is just a Linux distribution, with a particular focus. All the software is the usual stuff with integration scripts and binaries and a webby front end. They start off with stock Debian and work up from there which is the way many distros work.

I’m not sure what Proxmox switching to Incus would really mean. They are both Linux distributions that focus on providing a VM and container wrangling system.

I happen to be porting rather a lot of VMware to Proxmox. My little company has a lot of VMware customers and I am rather busy moving them over. I picked Proxmox (Hyper-V? No thanks) about 18 months ago when the Broadcom thing came about and did my own home system first and then rather a lot of testing. I then sold the idea to the rest of my company and we made some plans and are now carrying those plan out.

Now, if Proxmox becomes toxic, I still have projects like Incus to fall back on. I … WE … have choice, and that is important. You can be sure that if Proxmox drops the ball, Veeam will suddenly support Incus or whatever the world decides is the next best thing in Linux VMs and container land.

I was a VMware consultant for 25 odd years. No longer (well I am still but only under mild protest!) I also have to wrangle a few Hyper-V clusters too. All of these bloody monolithic monstrosities work at the whim of massive corporations who really don’t have your best interests at heart. They bleed you dry.

I like to have choice. Proxmox and Incus are both examples of choice. You start off with "I’d like to run VMs and containers on my hardware with software that is “open” and you have more than one option. You do not start off with: “I’d like a HyperV or VMware”, nail your colours to the mast and live in a rather rubbish monoculture.

Sorry, I seem to have gone on a bit 8)

Add the Collabra online built in CODE server and Nextcloud Office apps. Link them up and you have Libre Office in your browser on your Nextcloud. You can get more complicated: https://collabora-online-for-nextcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install/

https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

I put one in at work. It sat idle for a while until a member of my admin staff asked me how to do a job involving pay slips. We discovered the pipeline tool in Stirling. It is now a permanent system with an SLA!

Each tool has a nice big icon or you can create desktop or browser shortcuts to the ones of interest - ideal for keeping it simple.

KDE since I hand compiled a 2.0 beta.

about 10 q5vyrs ago

Have you been distracted and typed a password/PSK in the wrong field 8)

rsync was written by one of the original Samba developers. I wonder if Tridge and co have any idea about how to shuffle data from A to B safely?

CIFS/SMB will only indicate received and not received and written. This is unlikely to be an issue.

I would start by proving that my network works properly, especially that dodgy cable with only wires 1,2,3,7 connected - because that’s all 100Mb/s needs, or the solid core cable that runs for 150m with plugs at each end instead of sockets and drop leads.

“Is this a common issue with samba” - no.

Samba shuffles rather a lot of data, quite happily. You have not given us an exhaustive description of the shoddy wiring, dodgy switches and wonky configuration that makes up your network. If it was perfect, you would not be posting here.

There is one snag with CIFS (Samba follows MS’s standards and ironically, I think that CIFS is now renamed back to SMB) that I am aware of, so SMB … snag: SMB will indicate that a chunk of data has been received successfully but not that it has been written to disc successfully. NFS will notify that a chunk of data has been written to disc.

The difference is subtle but if there is not a battery backed RAID involved then SMB/CIFS can lose data if the system restarts part way through a write.

Your issue is probably hardware related. Test your network with say iperf3. Have a look at network stats. Don’t rely on cargo cult bollocks - do some investigations. Nowadays we have nearly all the tools as open source to do the entire job - we did not have that 30 years ago. Grab wireshark, nmap, mtr and the rest and get nerdy (or hire me to do it - don’t do that please!)

If I give you a free beer, you have one beer. If I give you the recipe, you can make your own beer. You do have to make your own open source beer or you can hire someone to do it for you or perhaps take you through the steps a few times until you’ve got it. With luck there will be a community of open source beer brewers with whom you can interact and improve those recipes.

Free software is free until it isn’t! The illicit drugs industry works in a similar way (the first hit is for free).

You have loads of options but you need to also start from … “what if”. Work out how important your data really is. Take another look and ask the kids and others if they give a toss. You might find that no one cares about your photo collection in which case if your phone dies … who cares? If you do care then sync them to a PC or laptop.

Perhaps take a look at this - https://www.veeam.com/products/free/linux.html its free for a few systems.

Good skills Sir! Advice noted and I will re-evaluate how I do specs.

Thank you.

Perhaps, but have you actually tested this for yourself?

PLA is extruded at 220C in my Prusa beastie. Once the filament is slapped on the model, I probably want it to to fuse to the previous layer really well and then cool really fast and become stable.

We need to provide working and results rather than “I think that”. My printer is quite close to a very large double doors to outside, which open and shut as required.

It’s complicated but PLA is bio-degradable … eventually. Not months but years. That’s much better than the horrors you see on Blue Planet II.

Plus humidity is bad for your filament.

I keep on hearing this but it does not check out for me.

I have a Prusa 3S+, self assembled. I do not do a great deal of printing and go through phases. I did a flurry of prints during the pandemic and then it rested idle in our rather cold and slightly damp study for a couple of years. When I bought it, it came with a spool of silver Prusament which worked nicely. I then bought a spool of “Sunlu” filament (Chinese firm off of Amazon) and then a box of 10 colours of the stuff.

I recently got the printer out and updated the firmware, re-calibrated it and so on. I’ve done several prints with filament that has been open to the environment for at least two or three years and its fine. I have done a print using some transparent filament which was unopened and that was fine too. The unopened stuff was vacuum shrunk wrapped so could not possibly be damp. The opened filament was stored in the original cardboard box in a slightly damp and unheated room.

For me the main issues for a decent print are:

• Adhesion on the plate. I actually used glue for a print for the first time recently
• First layer calibration. If the first layer is wrong, the rest is wrong. You need to get the right amount of “squashing” to get a smooth bottom
• Always clean the plate between prints - a squirt of EPA and a decent rub with tissue whilst the bed is heating up does the job
• Keep the guide rails lubricated - Mine whined that all three axes were too tight or just wrong and yet the Prusa app to check belt tightness and forum and wiki advice said it was fine. Any engineer will tell you to lube up when in doubt - do it! X, Y and Z.

I will try repeating a challenging print with filament that is way older now and see what happens. I printed a couple of tank models in red around four years ago. Both involved their turrets with the barrel facing upwards - that’s a lumpy cylinder about 4cm long and 2mm wide.

I have seen some notes about PLA being hydrophylic (absorbs water) on the Prusa website’s official advice but I don’t personally think it is an issue and people are probably missing another factor or factors that is fucking up their prints. I think the filament dampness meme is “cargo culting”.

PLA is heated to around 220C whilst being extruded so any water will steam off very quickly as water vapour - which is not even “wet”, well before worrying a print job.

PLA is touted as bio-degradable and it is … eventually. It is extremely stable, despite being derived from corn starch. It really doesn’t seem to care about a bit of water hanging around. That’s why I can print new hinges for a plastic garden storage thing to replace the original ones and they last through winters and summers in the UK.

So, if you think moisture is an issue for PLA filament used for 3D printing, why not do some experiments and then decide for yourself.

I’m happy to be proved wrong.

That is superb. Sadly my eyes degrade faster than the frames wear out!

I see you are on the John Lennon specials which makes it a bit easier to model. I haven’t worn circular specs since college (~1990) My current Tesco specials only have lens frame from the nasal bridge clips, over the top to about 5mm below the temple joints.

Just a thought but you might like to investigate using spring steel for the arms and PLA just for the frames. You could create a jig for joining and heat the ends of the arms up with a brazing torch (kitchen supplies) and sink them into a suitable cylinder close to the temple joint. If you go all in you can make the straight part of the arm rigid and the over ear part flexible with careful heating and cooling and whacking with a hammer!

Now, that metal work will be comfortable but might be a bit chilly. What about PLA tips over ear instead of steel?

Anyway, great job. I’m very impressed.

My family tree (bush, thicket) is the ongoing effort of my uncle, started roughly 30 years ago. There are nearly 130,000 individuals in it.

We are migrating his data from The Master Genealogist (TMG) to Geneweb. That is quite a long story 8)

You might like to look into Webtrees.

In Australia, it’s the other way around and the clock will try to eat you or at least sting you to death.

So where do you put the rest of your helices on a cylinder or cone, in 2D? In Flatland a screw or bolt becomes a circle with a short hair. The whole point of “leftie loosy” is to try to help with reality as we perceive it.

Try it the next time you are underneath a car wielding a socket spanner with a taped on extension thingie that you jury rigged whilst trying to shift a hex nut at 45 degrees to reality that you cannot see, with oil dripping in your eye. Obviously the oil is a mix of the 30 year old native stuff loosened up with the WD40 that might break the rust lock.

I suggest you do think abut things in 3D and don’t forget the other dimension (time). That WD40 needs time to break the rust lock.

“Leftie loosy” isn’t for keyboard worriers - its for engineers and technicians, plumbers, and the rest and obviously for DiYers.

When you are knackered and pissed off and you need to shift a fucking nut or bolt or whatever, you need incantations to get you back on track.