Dave.

That’s quite an odessy. I put MX Linux on my 13 year old dell laptop, and there was an option in the MX utilities app to install the NVIDIA 340 drivers for it, and it merged them into the 7.0.something kernel that I had in about 3 minutes.

This isn’t meant as snark. Get settled into things for a few months with what you’ve got and then boot a few distros off USB and see if there’s something that better suits you or your hardware. You’ll have a good idea by then if what you really want/need.

I had a MythTV system with an Athlon 700 cpu around 2005 as a DVR and somehow it was a ripping machine.

Using MythTV’s built in encoder it could rip a standard feature length DVD to about 800MB in about 45 minutes, so I’ve got plenty of 2000’s DVDs from the local video store on file still. The process was basically, watch movie via MythTVs interface, leave DVD in, select “encode” from the menu in MythTV, and about 45 minutes later, done.

A few years earlier I was putting bulk Looney Tunes cartoons onto VCD for my children, pretty much wore our DVD player out with those discs haha.

Brave’s been making, uh, some controversial philosophical design choices lately.

I mean, they had some before, but now they also have a few more lately that have riled people up a bit.

There was a good guide by Linuxbabe on building an email server from scratch with all the bits and pieces and antispam/email verification stuff you need to send mail to the big players, I used it a few years ago to do my server.

Here’s the collection of various guides for various ways to do it:

https://www.linuxbabe.com/category/mail-server

Yeah you also need a vps. Home addresses are pretty much all marked as spam generators these days, and most ISPs proactively block all the common inbound ports for mail servers.

It’s often not possible on other operating systems. Especially the consumer versions of a certain operating system starting with “W”, that system will refuse to have duplicate IPs.

But essentially it’s always been possible (but, probably not preferred these days) to have redundant routes/paths on Unix systems. The way you have it now is more of a side effect of being able to do more complex network setups, like using different interfaces to talk to different subnets, or using a slow link as a backup to a fast link.

With your current setup you should get a slow failover ability, for example if you ping some other device and then unplug your Ethernet cable, you’ll have a bit of a pause in replies and then they will start again as the stack switches to the other link.

The “metric 600” on your Wi-Fi adapter indicates to the system that it is a higher cost route than your Ethernet one. So the IP stack will prefer sending packets out via the Ethernet port.

Local devices who haven’t heard from you lately will send to whatever device gives them a response to their ARP (“who has IP address X?”) request first, and seeing as Ethernet is lower latency than WiFi, they will mostly use your Ethernet adapter as their target when sending data to you.

Devices that have received data from you already will have the MAC address of your Ethernet adapter in their ARP table, so they’ll just send packets to that without bothering to issue an ARP request.

Devices off your subnet talk to your router, so they don’t care about your MAC address, they’ll just use IP to talk to your router, who will then do the ARP request and hand the packets on to your computer via whatever interface answers first.

“We write essays that aren’t AI-generated! We’re authentic!”

Proceeds to hand off the bulk of the work to ChatGPT, with a final run through Claude with instructions to scrub all indications of AI from the text.

• what happens if your internet connection is lost while someone sends you an email?

On this point, mail servers will retry for a period, usually 24 hours, before reporting back to the sender that they couldn’t deliver.

You’re a bit behind the times. adduser has been asking for your full name since the dawn of Unix.

Edit: and if you don’t put in your full name, how will people know who they’re fingering?!

I have MX Linux on a 14 year old Dell Laptop.

Works great because it’s got a lightweight desktop, and it has a tool (a GUI tool even!) that seamlessly merges the last available Nvidia 340 drivers for my GPU into the latest kernel. Parked at the desktop with no desktop apps running, it uses about 800MB of ram, leaving 15 GB left for whatever I need to run. Which I have found is plenty for my use case, I’ve never seen swap in use.

The MX tools are good, like everyone else has been saying here. They take away a lot of the fiddly business associated with the average “sysadmin” things that an end user needs to do.

Our monkey-brain has put millions of years of evolution into a vision system designed to pick up 3d cues from our environment so we can use our fine motor skills to manipulate small objects. It’s a fantastic piece of wetware that uses shading and colours to pick up 3d hints about the objects we deal with daily and - once you’re a few years old - it’s completely automatic and requires no effort to use.

And then we remove all the 3D cues and skeuomorphic hints from our computer systems so that now the previously subconscious “monkey-click-button” process is now a foreground task where cognitive energy is burned up to identify the correct UI element to manipulate.

I should be able to shift the mouse pointer and click a UI element out of the corner of my eye. I shouldn’t be required to look at and then parse a ‘flat’ UI to determine if this element is a button or just a panel with text. GUI elements should map to recognisable physical objects wherever possible, and where they are more abstract (eg wifi icons) they should be clearly distinguishable from others in the icon set. You’re burning up cognitive energy needlessly otherwise, and that’s why I dislike the monochromatic new age UI/icon sets.

Have you seen some of the stuff at Adafruit?

A lot more DIY but a wide variety of stuff. I had a MagTag unit from them that ran for a few months at a time off a 1000mAh battery with hourly display updates over wifi.

The nighttime sky is not the same. You see different constellations in summer than you do in winter.

The stars appear above the horizon about 4 minutes later each day. There are stars at your particular latitude that are always visible (they never set), and they appear to rotate around the celestial pole. If you took note of their positions carefully at a particular time of night, you would see that they end up being 180 degrees opposite where they were 6 months previous.

If you’re talking about the pattern of stars shifting against the more distant background of stars (star parallax), when the earth is at opposite sides of the sun, this is measurable by observatories for stars within a hundred light years or so but the angular change quickly becomes very small and the universe is very big.

Friends:

hisses though teeth

“That’s good, buddy, good for you!”

Why

Monoculture isn’t great.

Having and maintaining other options is good for if/when things go bad.

Try Mint Mate, the desktop environment is lighter than Cinnamon. When I was running systems from that era, Mate was much speedier than KDE / Gnome 3.

After that it’s just looking at what’s running after boot up and deciding whether you need it or not. As long as it’s not hogging precious RAM/CPU don’t worry about disabling it.

Why are ya’ll still attached to that stuff?

It comes with every phone and is the lowest common denominator.

So I can ask a recipient what messaging-app-de-jour they are using, and then install said app , or I have to convince them to use MY messaging-app-de-jour and get them to install it. All this has to happen outside preferred channels of communication, because we haven’t yet figured out what shared methods we can communicate with.

Orrrrr I could just send them a SMS and know that even if they are using the shittiest, most locked down non-free piece of crap phone possible, their phone will go 'bing! ’ and they will receive my message.

My department just gives them a PDF explaining with cool graphics how Linux can save more money, how more secure it is, how we can avoid the constant force fed bug filled updates that MSFT pushes, how we can customize it exactly to our and users needs, we can actually own our own keys… The goes on and on.

No, because there is no simple point and click group policy/active directory equivalent in Linux that allows a group of 5 IT techs to manage 2000 desktops. And if you get your shit together and actually use the tools that Microsoft provides, you don’t get surprise updates, you can image PCs via a gui over network booting, you get bitlocker keys backed up in your domain etc etc etc etc etc.

All the things that allow a business to manage hardware and software with the minimum amount of expensive employees, Microsoft provides it, for money of course. That money is offset by the reduction in IT guys needed to look after everything.

It’s that simple. CorporateLand won’t touch Linux on the workstation until that’s possible.

Anyone completely switching off windows needs a bulletproof system

A solid 90 percent of home users just need a browser, email, and access to some kind of app store or repository where they can click on the big colourful icon and get a program they want.

Any modern distro can provide that, it doesn’t have to be the particular one that you’ve got an obsession about.

Revert to a version of nova launcher from a few years back.

All the features I needed from it were finalised years ago, so why update?

The usual nebulous comments like “bug fixes and performance improvements” in the changelogs isn’t really a strong reason for me.