I've been using TrueNas with a nightly sync to Backblaze for years and I like it.
It used to be called FreeNas and used FreeBSD. Now the BSD version is called TrueNas Core, and a new Linux based version is called TrueNas Scale.
I would go with TrueNas Scale if I were starting a new one today. You probably won't use the "jail" functionality immediately, but they're super handy, and down the line if you start playing with them, you'll run into fewer compatibility issues running Linux vs BSD.
Yeah, but then I end up in all the threads about steam for linux having issues with NTFS.
I accept that the powers-that-be don't want me to do it, I understand that the foolproof user experience is to just play a game made for windows on windows, but if that's how we lived, none of us would be gaming on linux in the first place.
Outside of the download/update of a game, the files should be read only. As long as the files have the right data in them for a given OS, and the OS has proper support to read the files, then I should be able to load them and execute them. Any little permissions or metadata quirk that prevents that from happening is a bug as far as I'm concerned.
Windows ext4 compatibility is awful. I have my steam library on an ext4 partition, and occasionally boot to windows for specific games that don't work in linux. I tried mounting my ext4 partition using WSL (which worked fine), adding the steam lib folder to steam (worked fine), but all the games wanted to be verified before being run, and then i finally started one and got a BSOD. I thought maybe steam might complain that some files were wrong, but I didn't expect that lol. But at least steam tried, Epic launcher just flat out refused.
I haven't tried btrfs in windows, I see WinBtrfs exists, I wonder how well it works.
Yes, I misread and immediately deleted my post lol. I think you were talking about tailscale VPN, and I was thinking something more like cloudflare tunnel.
That said, the risk is still there that tailscale (or whichever middle company) can read your plaintext packets.
Follow the first few steps of this guide to download Linux Mint, create a bootable USB, and live boot into it.
You can now play around with this like it's a real system. Nothing will be saved when you shut down.
When you are ready, you can continue with that installation guide to either dual boot, or completely wipe your disks to use linux. (To start, I recommend dual booting. You never really know when you'll need it as you're transitioning.)
Good luck!
Good job debugging it. Where'd you get that list of IPs?
You would have to calculate it assuming that msft wouldn't deliberately make the process more difficult and impractical, which they have demonstrated they are willing to do.
(Refer to the section labeled "The Microsoft Playbook": https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html)
For a new laptop, the initial cost is higher. But the idea is that future maintenance and upgrades would significantly lower the long-term cost of laptops. If a part breaks, you don't need to buy a new laptop, just that part. If a new CPU comes out that you want, just upgrade your mainboard for less than the cost of a new laptop.
The disagreement here might be a semantic one. When people say "swap" they're usually referring to the swap partition on disk, not just any memory that can be used to "spill" to.
What you are describing with zram serves a fundamentally different function from swap space. If the OS dumps its memory to swap, the PC can lose power and still recover. If it compresses LRU memory to zram, and loses power, it cannot recover.
Both are useful in low memory situations, but swap covers more than that. Most familiar with swap space would agree that its location on a nonvolatile disk rather than in volatile memory is critical to what makes it "swap" space.