𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

I’ve done the Arch to Artix. It wasn’t hard, per se, but it took a while. I think that should be Medium, because Artix isn’t just an Arch derivative.

In fact, might I suggest a different way of looking at the difficulties?

• Replacing the package manager: Hard.
• Replacing the package manager without a live USB: Extreme.
• Going from a basic systemd-based distro (init, log, cron) to anything else: Hard
• Going from a systemd distro that’s bought into the entire systemd stack, including home and boot: Extreme
• Going from one init to another: Medium
• Changing boot systems: grub to UEFI, for example: Easy.
• Replacing all GNU tools with other things: Extreme (mainly because of script expectations).

And so on. You get 1 point for Easy, 2 for Medium, 4 for Hard, and 8 for Extreme. Add 'em up, go for a high score.

I don’t think rolling your own is that hard, TBH, unless you’re expected to also build a package manager. If maintaining it would be harder than building it.

While I love the thought, what makes Portal the best game is GLaDOS, and the story. Solving the problems quickly took back seat to the GLaDOS interactions and story; I don’t think I’d enjoy a dungeon crawler version of Portal nearly as much without her, and the story.

It’s a big part of why I don’t like MMORGS and combat royals, where it just feels like random characters sprinting everywhere in their own little worlds and no cohesive story. I get why many people do like it, and it’s obvious why studios love the format - they’re just low cost money printers. To each their own!

where I don’t feel like I have some big commitment if I go in.

This is so important for me, these days. I used to be able to drop an entire weekend in Destiny, to the dismay of my wife; now I’m more selective about how many of the hours of my life I spend unproductively moving pixels around on a screen.

Factorio is my current weakness. So easy to get into; so easy to lose entire days to. I’m really happy with the Space Age upgrade, because it’s self-limiting. EE except for Vulcanis, the other planets are a lot harder to make progress on, and without that constant dopamine fix I only go in one a week for a couple of hours now.

If you can boot from USB, I’d look at Ventoy, which will let you put multiple distro ISOs on a single USB stick and then pick one of them to boot from when you boot up. I linked to a tutorial rather than the project page for a quick review.

It could be that OpenSUSE is contributing to your boot issues, and that one of the other distros may have a kernel and configuration that plays more nicely; Ventoy will help you determine this. It’ll also let you play with several distros without having to install all of them, and see if you like one more than another.

If your boot problem is hardware related - either an issue with the hardware itself, or just Linux compatability, then you should stay away from rolling release distros like Arch; while you can configure them to minimize reboots, they’re managed in such a way as to expect people to upgrade frequently, including the kernel, which requires reboots. For example, I run Arch and I love it, but I also tend to not upgrade it very often and the longer between upgrades, the greater the chance of something going wrong during an update. It’s absolutely the least dependency-hellish distro I’ve used if you update frequently, but something like Debian is better if you’re looking for long uptimes.

TL;DR: use Ventoy and try several distros. If you find that your boot problems persist through several distros, ignore rolling-release distros like Arch, Alpine, and Void, and focus on Debian-derived distros like Debian, Ubuntu, or Mint. Or you can try a Redhat derivative, but I hate RPM with the fire of a thousand suns so I’d recommend that last - still, some obviously insane people like it, and it’s an option.

Good luck!

Yes! I’m not into that, so it was a little off putting until I noticed the bike horn, and then when I saw the frying pan I cracked!

I can guess the secret of the bike horn, but the… oh. Oh, I just realized what the frying pan is for.

Ok, the hilarity has passed. To each their own, but hoo boy.

You rule.

I stay away from Usenet because I’m particularly susceptible to it as a time sink. It’s worse than Lemmy, than Mastodon; I can spend hours in Usenet, and I’m really incapable of not doing that when I have access to it.

But I’m really glad it’s still active.

It really depends on your needs, like most things.

What are you trying to achieve? Just set up a place for folks to chat about a topic?

I’m inclined to suggest that if you’re moving from Discord, then I suggest you pick a public server and create your room there. You already aren’t self-hosting or getting bridging, so no loss. A public Mjolnir used to be on matrix.org but isn’t anymore, so you have to be alert to spammers; if you have enough people you’re willing to make mods, this is manageable. Matrix spammers tend to pop in, drop some fishing or advertisement; if you have someone watching 24/7 they can ban-and-remove the spam pretty quickly. Otherwise, you clean things up whenever you’re in there; it’s annoying, but not arduous. If you’re a small room, you won’t attract the spammers as much; if you’re larger, I’d hope you have enough folks who can help mod.

I would not try to self-host out of the gate. If you do, start with a beefy server; you’ll need a bunch of disk space - maybe not immediately, but as soon as one of your users joins a big room on a different server. I’ve only tried Synapse; you might try one of the other servers, but they’ll all have the same disk space issue: it’s a result is the design of the protocol.

Matrix is probably the closest; it’s federated, there are a dozen more-or-less actively developed clients, for just about every platform. You can self-host your own server. It has a lot of features.

It’s not perfect; it has a lot of flaws, but there’s slow progress. Things to be aware of:

• Despite it being “open”, there’s really only one server that supports everything, and that’s Synapse. It’s where all of the new features are tested and land first. All other (half-dozen) servers lag Synapse. And - IMHO - Synapse is an awful piece of software. It’s a giant mess of Python, and it lumbers along like a bloated, arthritic hippopotamus.
• The way federation is done makes it very expensive to self-host. Everything’s fine until one of your users joins - even briefly - a popular room, and suddenly your server’s downloading 9GB of history and binary blobs. This can be managed, but you may as well quit your job and become a full-time admin, because
• moderation tools suck. Aside from the most basic banning, all mod tools are external servers you have to set up and configure and run in parallel. And the most essential tool - mjolnir, a “this account is a troll spam bot, so ban it site-wide” is still very beta-ish and it’s nearly impossible to get any help with setting up or using it.
• It’s really a rather heavy protocol. Lots of network traffic.
• bridging is better in theory than practice. Most bridging requires you to run your own server, and few major hosts provide anything more than IRC bridging, and even then you can’t actually bridge to most of the biggest IRC networks because it’s blocked by the IRC providers, because Matrix bridges are a major source of spam grief for the IRC rooms. And setting up a bridge between a Matrix and an (e.g.) Discord room is a fairly significant PITA, requiring a Discord mod to perform several steps.
• It does hand e2e encryption for DMs, but it’s honestly pretty bad at it. It’s a better Discord than a, say, Signal. Key management is a minor nightmare and it is both prone to breakage, and complex, with a lot of fairly obscure terminology needed to understand any but the most basic operations. Like, when it’s working, it’s fine, but as soon as anything goes wrong, you’re in a world of pain. I came count the number of times I’ve lost entire chat histories with people.

And to throw up a challenge before anyone disagrees about that last point: try changing clients several times, across devices, and on the same client. Delete your client and reconnect (as if you lost your phone). See how long you can go before you hit a point where you can’t get to your chat history.

It’s a good alternative to Discord; it’s categorically better than Discord. If you’re not hosting the server, it’s better than IRC; the user experience is simply undebatably better. It’s a crappy IM platform. It needs far better mod tools, and some competitor to Synapse has to get out of Beta.

But if all you’re looking for is an alternative to Discord and you ate fine with using a public service, it’s a good choice.

TELL EVERYONE ABOUT USENET

Yeah, there was, and probably still is, a bunch of warez trading on Usenet. But everything that was good and holy was also on Usenet.

Anyway, plebes won’t show up there anymore because nobody runs free nodes anymore, and the worst of us are so used to being products the idea of paying for a service is a foreign concept.

Usenet existed long before the Eternal September. It survived that and the subsequent decades; it’s never been some sort of secret haven - it’s been a haven only because it wasn’t trivial to use, web interfaces for it never caught on, it started costing money to be on, and these are deal breakers for the people you don’t want on Usenet.

Agreed, SQLite 💗. It does have limitations when you need to scale with remote connections and concurrency; then you have to start bringing in layers, and it’s really not designed for that. For those jobs, it’s just better IMO to reach to something designed for that use case to begin with.

You make my heart hurt, you’re so right. It’s getting harder and harder to find RSS or Atom links on sites. The more people rediscover these technologies, the more chance there is that site developers will continue to provide them.

It would be fantastic if more people would rediscover Usenet, and IRC, and ditch the shitty knock-offs like Discord. There’s a pretty big contingent advocating for Jabber, which I’m ambivalent about, having been there when it started and when it (effectively) died and being very conscious of its flaws and limitations… but, still, these are all open standards and old-school internet - sometimes pre-web! - and they’re often still better than the commoditized successors.

Embrace and encourage the new infusion of youth! Gate keeping is a very post-eternal-September behavior.

I like PSQL far more than Maria DB, but it is the most stupid software for upgrades. It is the reason that, whenever I can’t use SQLite, I use a NoSQL DB like Mongo - any single executable NoSQL that contains the entire DB to a single directory seems to be the common factor. Sometimes you might hit an API change, but I think the number of times I’ve had a production application break because of a NoSQL DB server software upgrade is still at 0.

Instant classics. Money well spent.

@shimitar’s advice is what I’d go with.

Ideally:

1. Set up a Wireguard subnet. Test it thoroughly, including restarting the server a couple of times.
2. Close all ports except your Wireguard ports in your server firewall. Do this manually first (not persistent) and test.
3. Make the firewall changes permanent.

Then, it kinda doesn’t matter what else you do on the server, although you can fuss around with locking things down more.

Caveats:

• you won’t be able to use LetsEncrypt with this
• accessing your services from an Android phone will be futzy, because Android is too stupid to be able to use more than one VPN at a time. Unless you don’t use a VPN on your phone, in which case it won’t be an issue.
• you’ll only be able to access your server from computers/systems in your Wireguard subnet, so make sure you include multiple devices in the config from which you can ssh

Wireguard is super easy to build VPN networks with, and there are tools (e.g. dsnet) to make it even easier.

I was going to ask, but I just looked it up: it looks as if USB-4 has enough bandwidth to drive dual 4k monitors at 120Hz (and docks exist that support this).

Is DVI completely out of the picture? I hate the connector, but I’ve had a lot of issues with DP, mainly around Linux support and multi-monitor setups.

I was kinda hoping USB-C/4/Thunderbolt would step into this space and normalize chaining and small connectors, but all of those monitors are stupidly expensive.

Creative Commons is exactly the tool you need for licensing; they even have a “build-your-own” customized license tool. The tool will generate an icon, text, and a link to easily understandable legalese for your license.

CC is like GPL (but more flexible) for art, and it’s an awesome service.

Ooo, this is a good one! Accupressure Boy, able to relieve minor aches and pains, and cure headaches.

That would be a perfectly B tier power.

Yeah, she was a high point. I can’t see a whole Domino film, but she’s hilarious as a supporting superhero. It helped that the actor sold it well; so nonchallant in the most extreme situations.

Hers was definitely A-tier, though. She was more like a Teela Brown - the Universe simply was not going to allow anything bad to happen to her, unless it was ultimately for her own good.