It depends on what you want to run.

Games generally run very well or even better than windows, but if your target is games you should use a more “optimized” verison of wine, like proton. Other applications are a bit of a hit or miss: things like MS office, adobe trash, etc. don’t run very well if at all, some may have random issues like crashes or the UI not working properly, others run perfectly, you have to try it.

If you run into issues, don’t be discouraged: for games, take a look at protondb.com or PCGW (fixes that work on windows usually work on wine too), for applications, check the appdb on winehq.org; when something doesn’t work more often than not it’s just a missing library or some setting you have to tweak.

The Eaton unit is a UPS that’s connected to the whole setup. It works really well, I can recommend it.

The home server under my desk. Very professional, as you can see.

What can I say, I’m a sucker for punishment 😂

I like having the latest (or at least recent) hardware so having the latest kernel and mesa is a must.

Things have gotten A LOT better since I started using it, but here’s a list of things I hate after using Arch with KDE as my main OS for almost 7 years:

• Not having an archive manager as good as 7-zip was on Windows. Ark is a good replacement but it supports less formats, has less options when compressing, and most importantly if you close the archive while extracting it silently fails (reported in 2019, still not fixed)
• You can’t make an account without a password (yes, I know I can configure the sudoers file and polkit to skip password prompts, but that’s not user friendly). For the average user, having to type the password after login is incredibly annoying, I would like to have something like the UAC prompt in Windows
• Wayland: it was made mainstream waaaay too early, causing a lot of issues with both Qt and GTK applications, some of which persist to this day, especially with fractional scaling and HDR
• Developers seem to think that I enjoy using the terminal: I don’t, I hate it. Why isn’t there a GUI for pacman supports the AUR and doesn’t suck?
• Random broken commits being pushed to stable. I’m talking about “how the f did you not notice this?” kind of bugs, like how I had to rename files twice in Dolphin before it would actually rename them. It was fixed quickly but how did this get into stable in the first place?
• Flatpak having its old ass version of mesa in the runtime, causing all sorts of issues if you have a newly released GPU. I stopped using it because of this

I burn exactly one DVD every year.

The school where I teach wants us to deposit all tests done in digital format (I teach programming) at the end of the year on a DVD-RW.

I keep an old USB DVD drive around specifically for this, but I also have some old PCs that I could use. I use k3b to make these discs.

If I had to guess, the second curve allows the GPU to boost higher than the first one, so it generates more heat.

Personally I had zero issues with upgrading my server to Debian 13; it’s an installation dating back to Debian 9 or 10 with a lot of services installed.

The only inconvenience I had was that somehow Transmission 4.1.0 beta made it into debian stable, and beta clients are usually not allowed by private trackers. I switched to deluge and called it a day.

It would need to be open source, distributing proprietary kernel modules is a nightmare that can cause the OS to fail to boot after every kernel update. An open source anticheat kernel module would probably be useless and easy to bypass.

It actually happened to me today on Arch.

I updated the system, including the kernel, everything went smoothly with no errors or warnings, I rebooted, and it said the ZSTD image created by mkinitcpio was corrupt and it failed to boot.

I booted the arch install iso, chrooted into my installation and reinstalled the linux package, rebooted, and it worked again.

I have no explanation, this is on a perfectly working laptop with a high end SSD, no errors in memtest, not overclocked, and I’ve been using this Arch install for over a year.

The chances of the package being corrupt when I downloaded it and the hash still being correct are astronomically low, the chances of a cosmic ray hitting the RAM at just the right time are probably just as low, the fact that mkinitcpio doesn’t verify the images that it creates is shocking, the whole thing would have been avoided on an immutable distro with A/B partitions.

Generally speaking, Linux needs better binary compatibility.

Currently, if you compile something, it’s usually dynamically linked against dozens of libraries that are present on your system, but if you give the executable to someone else with a different distro, they may not have those libraries or their version may be too old or incompatible.

Statically linking programs is often impossible and generally discouraged, making software distribution a nightmare. Flatpak and similar systems made things easier, but it’s such a crap solution and basically involves having an entire separate OS installed in parallel, with its own problems like having a version of Mesa that’s too old for a new GPU and stuff like that. Applications must be able to be packaged with everything they need with them, there is no reason for dynamic linking to be so important in Linux these days.

I’m not in favor of proprietary software, but better binary compatibility is a necessity for Linux to succeed, and I’m saying this as someone who’s been using Linux for over a decade and who refuses to install any proprietary software. Sometimes I find myself using apps and games in Wine even when a native version is available just to avoid the hassle of having to find and probably compile libobsoletecrap-5.so

I’d say I’m a “time-strapped” user since I have a full time job and I’d rather spend my free time gaming rather than fixing a broken OS, nevertheless… I have 2 PCs with Arch Linux (one for personal stuff and one for work) and a server with NixOS.

When things break on Arch (which is rare these days but it can happen, especially if you play around with things from the AUR), I just rollback with timeshift (it takes just a few seconds with btrfs) and try that update again in a few days. Minor issues I can just ignore or work around them and take care of them when I feel like it, but they usually get fixed with updates within a few days. The only time I felt that it was actively wasting my time was when Plasma 6 came out a few months ago and a lot of little things broke, especially on wayland, but they were fixed rather quickly with 6.1 so I can’t complain too much.

NixOS on the other end has been nothing but trouble and a waste of time ever since I installed it. It took me a week to configure it, some packages are kinda old, most have incomplete declarative config, I had to manually write some units myself, and when things break it drives me crazy because even basic troubleshooting of services can be a pain in the ass because I have to find out where stuff is, know which config files are going to be overwritten, launch the correct nix-shell, … it’s all so tiresome… so I just revert to an older config and hope for the best. To make things worse, major updates often require manual changes to the config or even to application files themselves (looking at you, nextcloud) and you will excuse me if I can’t be bothered to do that on a DECLARATIVE DISTRO. Even debian doesn’t need that, come on! I don’t care what people say on NixOS, this OS is not ready yet, I don’t have time for this shit when I’m working and that server will be going back to debian next summer.

I think I might be the only person who bought a 9950x on launch and was actually very happy with it. Not only it performs excellent, but unlike its predecessor, I can actually use it with air cooling, it’s a very efficient and powerful CPU.

Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.

Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don’t want or don’t know how to compile stuff from source.

I already had a script on the router that I used to notify me of network outages, IP changes, keep the DDNS updated, etc. and I thought it was easier to just add a couple lines to that

The jitsi user is a system user so it can’t login even if you set a key for it. Besides, I wouldn’t risk it anyway since that user is in the docker group, if it gets compromised somehow, the attacker would have very high privileges.

I think this one beats them all.

My home server keeps a few services up, including an instance of Jitsi Meet. The server runs nixos and the nixos package for jitsi is incomplete to say the least and doesn’t even support authentication, so I use the docker-compose version and I have a script that runs periodically to keep it updated. So far so good, right? Well, no.

Because the server is at home, I have a dynamic external IP address, so I have to use a DDNS provider, but jitsi doesn’t expect this and uses a stun server at startup to determine the public IP of the server once, so if my connection goes down or is restarted and the IP changes, jitsi needs to be restarted or it won’t work anymore.

The solution?

• My router runs OpenWrt, so I am able to run a script that checks for external IP changes. When a change is detected, it uses SSH to connect to my server to restart jitsi
• Because I don’t want the router to just be able to run any command, I created a jitsi-restart user that has no shell
• When the router tries to log in with its pubkey, sshd creates a file called restartasap in the jitsi folder and closes the connection
• On the server, there’s a systemd unit running a script as the jitsi user that periodically checks for that file, and if it exists it deletes it and restarts jitsi

I’ve been running this setup since mid 2020 and I expect this to continue until IPv6 becomes the norm.

I switched for good in 2019, when I realized that I was wasting more time getting windows into a usable state than the average arch user.

Privacy and usability were the biggest reasons for me.

Good idea, I’ll add it to the to-do list for the next major release.

Occasionally some cloud providers or ISPs chime in and offer their servers to the public. If you have an LS server, you can submit it here: https://librespeed.org/submit