Yeah sure, a distro could start spying on users. How easy it would be would depend on their distribution model, and how willing they are to violate the GPL.

Linux is a tool that big corporate entities have profited greatly from for many years, and will continue to. Same with BSD, Apache, Docker, MySQL, Postgres, SSH…

Valve, Sys76, Framework, etc. Are proving that using Linux to serve an end user market is also profitable, and are capable of supporting enterprise use-cases.

I understand that there may be specific problems to solve wrt improving adoptability, usability, compatibility, etc., but Linux is doing more than ok within the context of the FOSS ecosystem (and increasingly without).

Your thinking is slightly skewed, IMHO. Linux doesn’t have an inherent incentive to compete with MacOS or MS, and if it did, it would be subject to the same pressures that encourage bad behavior like spying on users, creating walled gardens, and so forth.

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Fixed it for you: VSCode, Red Star OS, and sh

Fugg yeah thanks for the tip!. I was not there for krohnkite the first time around, but I’m here for it now.

Whatever you do, steer clear of Plasma Wayland right now. Polonium has a lot of issues.

You haven’t provided any info about your partition scheme for either drive, but I assume you’ve got your bootloader installed in an EFI partition in the newer drive. You will still have an EFI partition on the old drive created by the Ubuntu installer, so just be sure you know which bootloader you’re using.

Option 1 and 2 aren’t functionally any different. It’s not clear what issues you’re worried about, but if you’re nervous about breaking the Ubuntu installation, you might just want to wait until you can get the new drive.

You also don’t give any indication of how much data you have that you want to keep. If the 2tb drive is almost full, you have fewer options than if it is mostly empty or half full. You could resize your EXT4 partition and create a new partition, for example, allowing you to mount a fresh, clean filesystem to a subfolder in your home directory. Once the data migration is finished, you can format the old partitions and mount them somewhere else, or resize the newer partition over them. Be aware that your HDD will eventually fail mechanically, however. Maybe 5 years from now or next week, but they all fail someday.

It’s not clear to me what the goal of option 3 is, but it’s dependent on how you use your machine. If you want to install a lot of applications or games that you want to run fast, you don’t want to migrate a bunch of your data to your newer SSD. If you just want a temporary place to store the data you want to keep until you can format the old drive, I guess this is a fine approach, but creating a dedicated user for this is just adding unnecessary complexity, IMHO.

I would recommend they follow the full installation guide instead, which is probably one of the best pieces of technical documentation in existence at the moment. The amount of detail, context, and instruction provides both an invaluable learning experience and introduction to Linux.

archinstall is not foolproof; that’s why I wouldn’t recommend it to an absolute beginner. IMHO, It’s more valuable for people who are familiar with the process and want a shortcut.

As great as archinstall is, it can’t possibly account for every contingency. Troubleshooting a bootloader issue, for example, is easy if you’ve installed one before. If a noob managed to navigate the TUI (with all of the confusing questions and settings) and complete the installation only to have something go wrong there, they’re off it, maybe for good.

Two DEs enter the steel cage… Only one will emerge.

Thanks for your time and consideration. I planned a few different builds with an N100, but everything priced out way more than I wanted to spend, even without drives. I saw this server for $80 on FB marketplace, and that was that.

RAID1 is only for the Proxmox installation, them I will use ZFS for the block storage.

Thank you for your insights and suggestions. Very glad I didn’t buy anything yet. There appear to be a number of PCIe options for using both SATA or NVMe, but I’ve decided to get a couple of smaller, cheap 2.5 SATA SSDs just for the OS.

The plan is to just have Proxmox installed RAID1 on the two SSDs for redundancy, then the real data array is 4x12tb HGST in some ZFS configuration. Does this seem sane?

What is more expensive for your organization: time or money? In general, your options that cost less take more time to setup, and vice versa.

It seems like cheap is more important, so I would roughly do:

• SSG like Hugo or MkDocs
• store the content in S3
• serve with a CDN like Fastly or CloudFront
• authentication via VCL or a Lambda using OAuth

It’s such an insane amount of money

That’s some super user dough

I’d recommend just scripting with rsync commands and run with cron or whatever scheduling automation. Backup locally to an external drive or orchestrate with cloud provider cli tools for something like S3.

There are some tools that probably assist with this, but it’s just very few moving parts to roll your own. Clonezilla seems overkill and harder to automate, but I will admit I’m not an expert with it.

I have Arch on a 2013 mbp and it has served very well for years. I think I had to do a little work getting the backlight controls bound to some hotkey combos, but that might depend more on DE than distro. I’m probably going to put NixOS on it, since I’m not using it as my work laptop anymore. Use whatever you want! Debian is always a pleasure, too, in my experience.