When you discover something that’s been missing in your life that you didn’t know you needed.

Welcome to the club!

There’s a reason why there’s only privileged write access to /dev/sda.

If you run unknown software as root on any computer you get to experience first hand the impact of: “fuck around and find out”.

Education.

I’m assuming you’re familiar with Asahi Linux?

It’s still very much a work in progress.

https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/overview/

At the moment I’m bridging the gap by using homebrew, UTM, ssh into local hardware and shortly remote desktop on EC2.

It’s far from ideal, but that’s where I found myself after my x86 iMac died last year, so I feel your pain.

I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, observant, or something else. There have been many a meal where I was asked what I wanted to eat and it’s rare that I go beyond the words “surprise me”, knowing full well that the person asking would eat the same as I was offered, making the “surprise”, less of a risk and more of an adventure.

In this case, OP asked a completely unanswerable question to which there was absolutely no reasonable answer, since we know nothing about the person, their interests, their experience, the hardware they have access to, or anything remotely resembling a needs analysis.

So, even my answer, generic and random as it might appear, was based on how I use a computer, namely, to be productive. I’ve been using them for over 40 years, mostly like that, with some sojourns into art and personal expression, not nearly worthy of public scrutiny, but not specifically “productive” as such.

So … what were you attempting to say?

Whatever you need to be productive.

Thank you. Glad I’m not alone in this quest with that kind of history.

My current desktop is Wheezy inside a VM - also across several platforms, but VMware, by design , doing the heavy lifting.

Anything of note, essentially everything except Audacity, is running on a Bookworm Docker host with X11 forwarding and reverse mount sshfs, so all the container “sees” is the directory I give it.

I’ve made several attempts to move away from Wheezy, but there’s too many scripts in my ~/bin directory to make that simple.

The “fresh paint smell” experience for me comes from a docker pull or docker build, but it does require hardware capabilities that died eight months or so ago, when my 64 GB RAM iMac died. No data loss, just endless frustration.

At the moment I’m exploring EC2 on demand. I suspect that for the $10k I previously spent on hardware, I can always have the latest on tap, but I’m still trying to get real-time audio editing to not be a weekly disaster. Getting closer, but not quite there yet.

I’ll have a squiz at NixOS, seems like an interesting approach.

Much obliged for sharing your experience!

Unfortunately I can’t run Debian on my M3 MacBook Air :-(

Wow, that brings back memories. Forgot about the whole Palm thing. That was a wild ride at the time.

Thank you!

I got a T-shirt from Mozilla in the early 1990’s and foolishly wore it to death. My Linux tie pin is somewhere, but I’m sure that my penguin tie has died, as have the Debian Potato CDs with boot disks for x86, PowerPC and SPARC.

Forgot about BeOS (and NetBSD for that matter), and wonder what came of BeOS.

Why NixOS? I’ve been using Debian since Slink and am interested to hear, what made you move?

Debian Slink

Before that, Windows NT, A/UX, Solaris and VAX/VMS.

Before that, Vic 20 and Apple II

Still using Debian every day whilst navigating the perils of MacOS.

I’ve been using Linux for over a quarter of a century. Initially I spent hours attempting to come up with the best partitioning scheme but these days I pick LVM and use the defaults.

If I run out of space, I add a drive (or grow the virtual one) and grow the filesystem into the extra space.

Sometimes I need temporary space and use sshfs to mount a directory from another machine.

In other words, today you have infinite options to adjust according to need, partition schemes are not nearly as important.

Even swap space can live as a file on a normal partition if required.

That said. If you have specific use cases, check what’s required. Specifically because different uses need different attributes, it pays to check.

Wallpaper, yeah, there’s a lot of that going around. The main feature discussed with the recent new release of apt discussed colour as the primary new feature. No mention of any actual substantive changes or reference to the impact on apt-get et al., or even a link to the detailed change log.

BIOS could be managing CPU based on battery power.

CPU thermal throttling.

Hardware fault.

My excitement is muted by two things:

1. Every X11 application runs in the same Xserver, so there’s no isolation which would be a massive incentive for adoption.
2. Attempting to run anything Wayland inside a Docker container across the network is doomed to fail. RDP, VNC and the rest of these are a massive loss in functionality compared with X11 across the network.

I want this to work, but so far it just doesn’t.

In case you’re wondering, try running a GUI application on a remote server side by side with one running on another server on the same display and copy/paste data between the two.

Arguing about which browser does not make much sense to me because ultimately to render HTML with CSS in the way that the designer expected is the whole reason you need CSS.

ePub is interesting, but the functionality supported in the HTML is limited, as is CSS support.

You make an interesting point about JavaScript, but in my experience, the use of it is increasing, not decreasing.

I never said that Firefox, Chrome or Safari was required, there are plenty of light(er) weight browsers around, there’s even a Wikipedia page about it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_lightweight_web_browsers

My point stands, use a browser.

A browser is specifically designed for rendering HTML and does it better than anything else.

However, if you must, you can use something like pandoc to convert the HTML to something else, like a PDF or an Office document.

An alternative is to use a text only browser like lynx.

The ides that a browser is overkill is only true if you don’t already have one installed and only if you’re happy to put up with half baked rendering.

So … use a browser.

Depends entirely on what “Production” means. In a corporate environment it means something completely different from a homelab

If you’re doing this for real, you’d have two identical environments.

If it’s playing with Docker or Kubernetes, you don’t need anything more than a VM with Linux and Docker.

If you want to get serious, you can also set up a sandbox on EC2.