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.

You can’t hard link across docker volumes. In the second example, you need to remove the /media/movies and /media/downloads volumes, only keep /media.

After fixing this, only future downloads will be hard links. Use a deduplication tool like jdupes to create hard links for the already downloaded files.

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.

When you release something, your work is not done. You have to maintain it, fix bugs, release patches, and probably the worst part, keeping it up to date.

For example, Apple decides to deprecate some API, or decides to switch cpu architecture, or for the millionth time change how app signing works, or add some new security feature that breaks your app. Now you need to make your app work properly on the new platform, switch APIs, all the fun. Or, there’s some critical vulnerability in library you used and customers are deleting your app from their computers (a lot of companies use automated scanners that check against published CVEs). It’s most fun when you learn that the new version that fixes the vulnerability completely breaks compatibility with the old one and now you have to rewrite all the code that used that library.

Also, maintaining open source projects is not fun. It’s a lot of work, in most cases unpaid, thankless, and building a community around a project is really hard.

If you store them properly and create fresh backups on new discs every couple of years, they can last a long time.

The biggest disadvantage of physical media is DRM. With the exception of music which isn’t usually locked, pretty much all optical discs have some form of region locking. Software/video games also typically have additional DRM schemes. Some are easy to bypass (e.g. nocd cracks). Online activation is the worst because it relies on the game publisher keeping the servers alive.

I have a Surface Laptop 5 as my work laptop. I hate it with passion, it’s one of the worst laptops I ever used.

Beyond the lack of IO (not even a fucking hdmi port) and the piss poor cooling, the USB C display isn’t connected to the integrated GPU, it uses a different display adapter that is so bad the mouse stutters on high res displays.

The built-in display has a 3:2 aspect ratio. I wanted to use a lower resolution so I could disable scaling (having different scaled monitors is annoying to use), none of the “supported” lower resolutions are 3:2 and they all have ugly black bars.

It has a touch screen, but the lid only opens about 120 degrees, making it completely useless.

And it uses “special” locked down hardware that is very hostile to other operating systems like Linux.

Or just download an older live CD that is compatible, and use it in a VM.

Google isn’t any better. And there aren’t a lot phone operating system options you can choose from.

This answer is stupid. I don’t think it’s unusual for a non-tech savvy friend who heard about Linux to ask for an opinion.

While in this particular case I agree with you, I’ve noticed a frustrating trend that just keeps getting worse. On one hand, search engines are failing to adapt to content farms. On pretty much any topic, you will find these generic sites that have poorly written articles that are hard to distinguish from AI. Try searching for “best linux distro” to see what I mean. Even on programming topics, you will find many sites that simply copy the content from stackoverflow and github.

On the other hand, people aren’t making websites and blogs anymore. More and more people are only using social media platforms, which aren’t being indexed by search engines. I hate seeing that so many discussions are now on Discord instead of forums. How many Twitter threads have you seen that should have been blog posts?

The only downside is that they don’t support zfs properly, and the package selection is more limited. The community repos aren’t always maintained.

Yes, that could work. I just switched to Google Messages which, other than being from Google, is pretty good.

Pulse is shit now, it’s been acquired by a sketchy company.

Jellyfin or Plex media server on the NAS.

To view content, there are several options. Both servers have client apps for various platforms, this usually provides the most features and best experience. Another option is using a browser, both come with an integrated web server. The third option is through DLNA, which is a protocol for media streaming that many players already support, but it may be a bit more limited.