Over the past few posts I’ve set up a Windows VM with USB passthrough, and attempted to reverse-engineer the official drivers, As I was doing that, I also thought I’d message the vendor and ask them if they could share any specifications or docs regarding their protocol. To my surprise, Nanoleaf tech support responded to me within 4 hours, with a full description of the protocol that’s used both by the Desk Dock as well as their RGB strips.

I’d recommend mint too, but testing stuff around with ventoy or just live-usb images is a good way to get to know what you like and what you don’t.

Official author don’t recommend it due to different semantics. But honestly for my own personal use case its fine for me.

I don’t recommend that either. If you get used to that ‘rm’ doesn’t actually remove files and then your alias is missing for whatever reason it’ll bite you in the rear at some point. And obviously the same hazard goes with a ton of other commands too.

And then get screwed over when you’re using another system without said alias. As I need to work on multiple different linux-hosts both as a selfhoster and on work I’d strongly suggest against aliasing any system command to something else and getting used to it.

Someone with more experience on sed or awk should chime in, but out of memory something like this (which MOST LIKELY WONT WORK, verify it before running it on anything important):

find -name *mkv -exec sed -e's/file=.*/file=' > {}.changed \;

That, at least in theory, reads every .mkv file recursively in a current working directory, finds lines that contain “file=<whatever><EOL>” and replace that with “file=<EOL>” and stores the output to <original filename>.changed.

Delete windows partition with your preferred tool and update-grub should remove the item from boot menu. Then, depending on your partitioning schema, you can either create a new partition in the empty space and mount it however you like or expand your existing linux partition, but options there depend on how your partitioning has been originally built and if you can leverage things like LVM or ZFS when expanding the usable storage.

And, while pretty obvious, make sure to only delete the correct partition and all data stored on that will be lost, so make sure you don’t have anything important on windows side of things.

Majority of the data (video) is already compressed as MPEG-2 so I’d think it doesn’t compress very well. But if you don’t have enough storage it’s always an option to re-encode video with something more modern and achieve smaller file sizes from that. But that also removes at least DVD menu and other ‘format dependent’ options.

That would get you an exact copy of the disk with everything on it. And also, while 200 DVDs sounded a lot, it’s “only” 860GB (assuming 4,3GB/disk which I think is the most common for movies), so it’s not stupidly expensive either. Obviously you’ll want a RAID setup and most likely backups for that, so it’s more than just a single 1TB drive, but still quite manageable.

Ah, you’re correct. I somehow misunderstood the assignment, OEM installation is a bit different and I don’t think there’s a Debian version of that readily available. You could of course write scripts to manage that, but that’s a quite a bit more difficult than just set up preseed for the installer. Or you could just include instructions on how to set up your accounts afterwards, but that’s not the same either.

Debian (and I suppose a lot of derivatives) can use preseeding. That gives you pretty much full control to the whole installer where you can just start the installer and it does everything for you, including users, partitioning, installed software and so on.

I’ve been using refurbished thinkpads for at least a decade and in my experience they have pretty decent value for money. I’m using local shop (taitonetti.fi, I don’t think they currently ship outside Finland) which ships their machines mostly with OEM windows, but that’s not a big deal for me.

I’m not too familiar on how well the x64 - ARM conversion works, but in general gaming tends to be more dependent on single core performance and I’d assume that emulating single core functionality with multiple cores doesn’t really work, or at least with performance you’d need.

I don’t think there’s one at least in official repositories. But if you’re missing libc6 one might argue that your system is not in any functional state anyways.

I have absolutely zero experience on pacman, but I could argue the very same with dpkg/apt with the same arguments. The Debian kind, not the abomination Ubuntu ships with today.

as far as i know apt and dnf have no equivalent easy redo all

It’s similarily possible (dpkg --get-selections, some sed/cut/awk wizardry to cut unnecessary stuff from the output, xargs to apt install --reinstall on that and you should be good to go, maybe there’s even a simpler way to achieve that) with Debian.

But that’s just me. I’ve been with Debian for quite a while. Potato was released 2000, but I think I got my hands on it 2001/2002 and I’ve been a happy user since. And even if I’ve worked with pretty much any major distribution (RHEL, CentOS, SuSe, Ubuntu and even Slackware back in the day) around I still prefer Debian because that’s what I know and learned over the years on how to fix things if something goes sideways.

In case you’re not aware: Back in the day Ubuntu took off because Debian was maybe a bit too strict on their approach on being stable and rock solid for quite a few of different architectures. There was a time when you could just edit few files and migrate a running system from Debian to Ubuntu, just with way more up-to-date software packages and that’s about the time frame I moved from Debian to Ubuntu too. For quite a few years it was pretty smooth, updates just worked, software versions were up to date and the general experience was more polished than what you could get from Debian at the time.

But that ship has sailed. Ubuntu changes stuff so frequently that the package maintainers can just barely keep up, snapcraft is a steaming pile of shit in my opinion and the stability is faint ghost on what it used to be. Maybe becuse it’s not that compatible with Debian anymore and thus can’t benefit from the original source, maybe for some other reason.

Whatever the case might be, running ubuntu gives you an ubuntu experience, which is very much not the same than debian experience. If you want more streamlined distribution I’d recommend Mint (Debian edition), if you want the rock solid system but with less refined experience where you might need to tweak thing or two manually then go with Debian.

And, mostly for the nitpicking commenters, I know, I grossly simplified things around and cut some corners. I know it’s not as black and white comparison. This is just my generic experience over quite a few years with Linux on Desktop.

I think it’s easier the other way round, find all symlinks and grep the directory you want to move from results.

Something like ‘find /home/user -type -l -exec ls -l {} ; | grep yourdirectory’ and work from there. I don’t think there’s an easy way to list which symlinks point to any actual file.

Exactly. You can build rules with ufw and view them on iptables. Maybe the one thing ufw does better out of the box is persistent rules and simpler “firewall on/off” switch, but specially on this particular question I don’t think they matter.

They are excactly what the name implies. Testing is generally pretty good, but it’s still testing. And unstable is also what the name implies. People, myself included back in the day, run both as daily drivers, but if you want rock stable distribution installing unstable revision might not be the best choise.

Debian. I’ve had installations which went trough several major version upgrades, I’ve worked with ‘set and forget’ setups where someone originally installed Debian and I get my hands on it 3-5 years later to upgrade it and it just works. Sure, it might not be as fancy as some alternatives and some things may need manual tweaking here and there, but the thing just works and even on rare occasion something breaks you’ll still have options to fix it assuming you’re comfortable with plain old terminal.

Can you switch to console? Try ctrl+alt+F2 when the system is booted up and log in to that.

I suppose some package update was interrupted or crashed. You can attempt to re-run what’s missing with ‘sudo apt-get install’ and ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a’. And, assuming your console access works, you can at least check log files on what’s wrong, but for that I don’t think any generic ‘read /var/log/syslog’ file is too helpful as there’s a ton of stuff and with things like journalctl it’s pretty difficult to navigate around if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

And also, more details would be helpful. What you mean by ‘enters a loop’, what it actually says that went wrong and so on.