Easiest? More like… The only way.

Is this what burnout looks like?

If you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge and want a distro with longer support, CentOS Stream isn’t bad. Sure, there was some controversy surrounding it, when Red Hat killed the old CentOS. But ignoring that, the distro itself is pretty good and stable.

An external audio interface or DAC will be 100x better. That audio card won’t be any better than the on-board audio.

Let’s be real, they did it because they didn’t want people training AI models without paying them. They didn’t give a shit about 3rd party apps.

Much better. SSDs and HDDs do monitor the health of the drives (and you can see many parameters through SMART), while pen drives and SD cards don’t.

Of course, they have their limits which is why raid exists. File systems like ZFS are built on the premise that drives are unreliable. It’s up to you if you want that redundancy. The most important thing to not lose data is to have backups. Ideally at least 3 copies, 1 off site (e.g. on a cloud, or on a disk at some place other than your home).

PhotoRec and TestDisk are probably the best, but they don’t recover file structure.

Fuck up #1: no backups

Fuck up #2: using SD cards for data storage. SD cards and USB drives are ephemeral storage devices, not to be relied on. Most of the time they use file systems like FAT32 which are far less safe than NTFS or ext4. Use reliable storage media, like hard drives.

Fuck up #3: no backups.

The honestly prefer the bottom one than the modern 50 step wizards that take 10 seconds for each page to load, and load an ungodly amount of JS scripts.

A company I worked for was using an ancient bug tracking tool (called Pivotal) that looked like a 90s site. It was so fast and responsive. Later, we moved to something modern. It was 10 times worse, significantly slower and overly complex.

Give Solid Edge (from Siemens) a try. It has a free for hobby use edition. It’s not perfect, but I’m pretty happy with it, and none of the stupid restrictions of Fusion.

Would work great if samsung actually let people unlock the bootloader. Afaik you can’t do it in certain regions like North America.

It sounds like you’ve been browsing some pretty sketchy websites. I have yet to find malware bundled in torrents from trustworthy trackers. And I’ve been pirating for many years.

The Omen laptops are pretty good as well. Even the fan blades are made of aluminum. But I would avoid their desktop PCs because they use proprietary components.

Like any other company, some products they make are junk but others are decent.

While not all ARMs are the same, I’m pretty sure there are certain configurations that are more common. Why not just provide binaries for those?

I wouldn’t recommend Optiplexes… HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts use proprietary parts making them a pain in the rear to work with. I recommend getting a PC made with standard parts.

Personally I prefer older PCs in standard formfactors. I avoid HP, Dell, Lenovo pre-builts because they use proprietary power supplies and motherboards, making them difficult to upgrade. Laptops aren’t really upgradable, they don’t have enough SATA ports, and USB isn’t reliable enough for storage. Raspberry Pies, while power efficient, are too underpowered. Old server hardware is also an option, but they are generally too noisy.

Containers are very useful because they isolate the application from the rest of your server.

This solves a lot of problems: no dependency conflicts with your operating system, you can upgrade/downgrade any time you want, no state gets stored on your main system which makes resetting the application when it misbehaves as easy as deleting and recreating the container.

Before containers, changing my host OS (e.g. because ZFS wasn’t properly supported on the distro I was using) meant reinstalling and configuring a lot of shit, which could take days. With docker, I can migrate in 1-2 hours… Just install docker on the new OS, copy over the files, docker compose up a few times and done. The only things left to setup are samba, ssh and a few cron jobs.

My experience wasn’t as bad, but after the third time the database got corrupted during an upgrade I stopped using it.

DDG is just a front-end for Bing. There are very few search engines that actually do their own indexing.

It’s not just Google. The Internet has been getting worse over the last years. People don’t make sites any more. Blogs have moved to closed and centralized social media platforms. Forums are rarely used, most communities moved to platforms like reddit and Discord.

Most of these platforms make finding content very difficult. You won’t find articles posted on Facebook, Twitter threads and Discord discussions in search engines. You have to create an account on their platform, then use their shitty search (or be subscribed to the right people) to see it.