Serious games hardware testing channels like Gamers Nexus is a great progression. It brings Linux more into the mainstream while also putting a spotlight on driver deficiencies as well as weaknesses in the OS. How far we have come since the PopOS DE being removed by LTT.

”You can’t trust free software”

GNU Stow, backed up to a git repo.

For those who might not see the purpose, it’s for keeping your profiles on different machines in sync, especially if you use the terminal a lot.

Unless you have something completely esoteric, a power adapter you connect to your mains only provides a specific voltage and max amperage to your laptop. Assuming your connection to the laptop is appropriate you should be good. The charge controller is located in your laptop, not the adapter.

If you happen to have a relatively recent laptop with USB-C charging the key decision is already made - just get an adapter with a wattage that meets or exceeds what your laptop specifies and a decent USB cable.

Keep an eye on the HDMI version - 1.4 will only give you 30fps at 4k. You need 2.0 to get 60fps.

Will the disks be permanently in-place there or are they just a means of transport? Either way, traveling with that much spinning rust there is always a good chance for bit-flips or damage.

ZFS is up to the task if you can connect all the disks at the same time at the target location. You don’t really have to keep track of the order of the disks - ZFS will figure it out when mounting the pool. The act of copying the data from the disks will effectively perform a scrub at the same time.

If you will only attach one disk at a time, it is a bit more of a coin toss. Although - ZFS single disk volumes do support scrubbing as well.

Thinking about disk corruption in transit would be one of my worries - X-ray scans, vibration and just handling can do stuff with the bits. Tgz, zip or rar files with low or no compression can provide error detection, although low recovery. Checksum files can also help with detection. Any failed files can perhaps be transferred over the network for recovery.

A router provided by an ISP is not your hardware, thus any network behind it is by definition not controlled by you. There have been numerous cases where they have backdoors or known admin passwords. In cases where there is a wire type transition (for example incoming over coax or fiber) it might be necessary to use it though. Same if it is necessary due to your contract.

In my cases I always turn off the wireless antennas and switch it to bridge mode, then place my own router/firewall device behind it.

Edit: still learning to spell.

ChimeraOS predates the current Arch based iteration of SteamOS by several years. The first release on GitHub is dated 2019 (then called GamerOS).

Thank you. This article provides better context to the decision. The initial step aims at 40 people in one of the ministries by next year. It’s a start, but a far cry from the misleading main article in the post.

Switzerland is contradictory in many ways. At the same time as they go for on-prem or sovereign cloud (laudable), they are passing laws that chase away privacy first companies such as Proton (less than optimal).

To quote a quote in the article - ”Ubuntu 25.10 is a statement of intent for the next Ubuntu LTS in 2026.”

If it doesn’t work out at all, they will likely pull the change for 26.04. The LTS has after all a need to be stable as a lot of companies rely on it.

Recompiling and replacing libraries was a thing back then - linux had it’s own flavor of ”DLL hell”. I broke a Debian install trying to get an IDE for Mono running by overriding and replacing quite a lot of shared libraries.

That being said I didn’t fully know what I was doing when I started off and the package manager kept warning me.

Cosmic is basically a beta DE right now. Most of Linus’ bad experiences seem to be because of that. It looks promising and I can definitely see it as my daily driver, but in a year or so.

Support your local small businesses so they don’t go bankrupt. Purchasing anything from Europe will have you pay tariffs to support the orange guy’s administration. Oh yeah - vote so the current admin gets weaker.

Other than that - I have limited sympathy for the country that voted in the current chaos willingly making the world unsafe and trying to throw the victim of military aggression (Ukraine) under the bus. And that is coming from someone who is half American with relatives living in the US.

How about hosting an ADS-B receiver, tracking nearby air traffic. It doesn’t serve any practical purpose other than participating in the crowd sourced network that feeds sites like FlightAware and FlightRadar24 (and you get a free subscription by participating)

Not only Slack - it is likely also a replacement for Signal. Even if Signal isn’t a US entity, it is still hosted outside of the EU.

I’m not convinced Zoom doesn’t just sell your contact information to third parties.

This chart is US-centric though, you won’t find brands not available there. The main flag I have is the orange Ridgid brand under TTI that goes under AEG in Europe. I believe this chart is at least 2-3 years old. The channel ProToolReviews (I think) did a couple of videos and updates on these a while back.

Tenders. As in 2024, no development tenders were funded in 2025. Tenders related to LibreOffice development remain on hold, and will be resumed based on the development strategy currently under discussion according to the new Procurement Policy.

I’m curious what this means? Has there been no development other than maintenance taken place the last two or so years?

Starting of with some history… I have run Microsoft operating systems since MS-DOS 3.22 and Windows 2.11 (not a typo). I was one of the first in our high school to install Windows 3.0 on one of the school lab machines off of floppy disks when it launched. I have been an early adopter on almost all the Windows OS’s and had a powerful enough PC at the time not to be too bothered about Vista even. I work with Microsoft based development (Windows Server and nowadays Azure) so Windows has always been what worked in my career. That hasn’t changed.

That being said, my computing history started off on a Apple IIc, followed by the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga later on. I installed Linux the first time on my 486sx with 4MB of RAM using Slackware with a pre 1.0 kernel. Linux never stuck then as I couldn’t run the applications i needed and games I wanted. I came back to Linux every 5 or so years but it never stuck for the same reasons.

This changes about 5 or so years ago. A chain of things happened over time and it started at home.

• I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on an old laptop and it seemed to have what I needed on it. Mainly browsing and so on - no high demands. The web had moved away from client side plugins and the web just worked.
• Windows 10 nagging to install Windows 11 on my HTPC, when the hardware was too old. Ubuntu 20.04 replaced that install, and the software just worked (browser + Kodi)
• Broadcom purchasing VMWare meant moving away from ESXi in my HomeLab - Proxmox turned out to be mature for what I wanted. I now have a 3 node Proxmox cluster.
• A hard drive crash in one of my Synology NAS boxes led me down a rabbit hole resulting in adopting TrueNAS Scale and ZFS.
• Windows 11 was getting on my nerves for the last couple of years at work. Last year I did the research and took the leap to install Ubuntu 24.04 on my new work laptop. A lot of tools I use are open source - they have reached a decent level of maturity. Microsoft tech such as Dotnet, VSCode, PowerShell and Azure CLI just work for what I need. LibreOffice does a good enough job replacing MS Office. A VM with Visual Studio and MS Office fills the gap - I boot the VM a couple of times a week as needed.
• I installed Ubuntu 24.04 on a secondary desktop last year at home to see if it would fill my needs at home amid the launch of Recall. This resulted in me wiping my main gaming rig a couple of months ago, installing Ubuntu 25.04 as main and a smaller partition with Windows to mainly support flight sims (MSFS and X-Plane - an area where software and hardware support is still lacking on Linux).
• The old laptop that started off with Ubuntu back in 2020 is now distro hopping - Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE and currently running EndeavourOS. They are fun playing around with and familiarizing myself with but haven’t quite been work adopting fully so far.

The end result today is that I have one VM in Proxmox running Windows Server and a dual boot on my gaming rig running Windows 11 LTSC. Everything else is either Linux or FreeBSD.

It took a couple of months to get completely comfortable with the changes in workflow of daily driving Linux as my main OS, but it settled and it feel almost nostalgic to boot into Windows now.