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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 1st, 2024

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  • I’d say the operational requirements.

    A home PC mostly has max 1 simultaneous user (i.e. the “person”) - out of maybe a small pool of potential users - the availability requirement is ad-hoc. It offers many services, some available immediately on boot, but many are on call.

    A server typically has capacity to provide services to many simutaneous users and probably has a defined availability requirement. Depending on the service, and the number of users and the availability and performance requirements it may need more communication bandwidth , more storage, faster storage, more cores, UPS, live backups and so on. But it doesn’t strictly need any of that hardware unless it helps meet the requirements.

    In terms of software any modern PC runs an OS offering a tonne of services straight from boot / login. I don’t see any real differences there. Typically a server might have more always on serices and less on-call services, but these days there’s VMs and stuff on both servers and on PCs.

    Most PC users would expect to have more rights such as to install and execute what they want. A server will typically have a stronger distinction between user and sys-admin. but again if a server offers a VMs it’s not so clear cut. That mostly comes out of the availability requirement - preventing users compromising the service.




  • I agree, there’s a lot of people in this thread who seem to know exactly what is good or bad for a new user. But I don’t see many being sensitive to what the user might actually want to achieve. New users are not a homogeneous group.

    If the user wants to both use (stably) and learn (break stuff) simultaneously, I’d suggest that they start on debian but have a second disk for a dual boot / experimentation. I don’t really use qemu much but maybe that’s a good alternative these days. But within that I’d say set them self the challenge of getting a working arch install from scrath - following the wiki. Not from the script or endeavourOS - I think those are for 4th/5th install arch users.

    I find it hard to believe that I’d have learned as much if ubuntu was available when I started. But I did dual boot various things with DOS / windows for years - which gave something stable, plus more of a sandbox.

    I think the only universal recommedation for. any user, any distro, is “figure ourt a decent backup policy, then try to stick to it”. If that means buy a cheap used backup pc, or raspberry pi and set it up for any tasks you depend on, then do that. and I’d probably pick debian on that system.





  • I just dont get why you have to assume that though?

    Maybe I’m a pessimist, but I’ve met and worked with enough humans that I think the best assumtion is that they’re all full of shit until they prove otherwise.

    It’s fine to rely on experts for some things, but if those experts aren’t subject to independent scrutiny or directly independent of the claim or sunjecy under test, or can’t give clear testable /replicable evidence, I’d just not put much weight on their testimony as a source of evidence.



  • I hope the screenshot dude is also going to stop this unquestioning belief in the things people say or claim without evidence.

    Those first two paragraphs look like a tendency to prefer hero-worship to critical thought; that seems to be a fairly widespread problem in humans from long before this latest batch of demagogues.

    There’s also a hint of “I’m not an ‘expert’ in it so I can’t (be bothered) to understand anything about it” also a very depressingly common attitude.



  • Haha, i’d write a thousand pages of documentation before entering ticket hell. I fact I do put a lot of information into the ticket - they still won’t read it though and i’ll have to repeat myself 15 times to 5 different people.

    The solution to this problem. . . I have no idea, but I’m sure they’ll appoint another delivery manager who will get hired by the ones who already know fuck-all to know less than them.

    I’ve found that the few managers who want documentation, get documentation, and the others who want tickets and “story points”, get tickets and fictional bullshit - in general.___






  • I’m talking about sotware they produce and my employer buys that i’m expected to use.

    I can’t rewrite their “tools” and databases and fucking awful cloud-web front end things. I tend to think multi-billion$ shitware companies should do that; but even so no way I’d be allowed.

    Yes, I do end up having to write my own tools choosing whatever free stuff I’m allowed to have, or can get working, Yes, It’s incredibly easy in any half way decent (including free) software, far from rocket science, that is until you try to put something back into a database via one of these “tools”.

    So you work around, pre-processing, post-processing, get it working. Then they unexpectedly release a “patch” that sees through my work-a-round and tries to convert the thing i’d convinced it to treat as string into a screwed up datetime again.

    Next time, I will prepend “fuckoracleiquit” to all datetimes before they go into the database.