Hey, but that’s barely an explanation. I don’t force Arch on you, I am just curious what specifically you like about this fork. Is it some DE being pre-installed and pre-configured? Why would it matter for a server then? Or is it something else? If so, do you mind sharing more? Perhaps you have some blog about that. I like reading people new to Linux.

I don’t want to spill some memes worth Arch elitism here, but I just doubt Arch derivatives crowd knows what x86-64-v3 thing is. Truth be told, I barely understand that myself. So I guess the difference should lie somewhere else. My previous research showed that the crowd is afraid of no installer installer, but these days Arch has some kind of installer, doesn’t it?

I’m just struggle to grasp what does it have, what those defaults are? A DE and whatnot? Is it just an opinionated Arch? Looks quite popular for everyone and their dog to have their own opinionated Arch this year, isn’t it?

That may work for a family, but won’t work for a smart company that uses chat occasionally. We’re having like three managers who’d use the chat all the time, while the rest of the company may send 10 messages a month. Company subscription price would be an absurd one for that situation. We’re able to self-host any chat solution, yet I’m not sure which one. It looks like none fits the criteria, with the exception of Matrix perhaps. But I haven’t hosted it myself yet, and it looks like they’re looking for ways to motivate self-hosters just not do that.

That’s why I’m asking, what’s the difference? Which defaults? I have never used CachyOS and have no idea what it brings to the table. I use Arch for ~7 years, and I’m no looking for a replacement. Especially an Arch based one. Yet, I’m curious of the difference, and why one would want Cachy, especially as a server.

I haven’t noticed as I have zero NVidia GPUs among my computers and servers.

Have you explored what it takes to self-host a notification server? I explored Zulip, and it looks similar, but I haven’t explored the notification server yet.

Why would you want it? Especially for a server. If you can just use Arch. The installation part takes 5 minutes, if you’re not doing it the very first time. My very gist Arch server is about 6 years now, no need to reinstall, always updated.

I did, while it mostly okay, I don’t like the mobile notifications limit. Even for a family, ten people is quite small, as inviting a couple of friends would reach the limit.

With all the chat options, I’m looking for a self-hosted fully controlled version. So for me, that’s a bit weird that a self-hosted version is crippled in any way. If Zulip allows me to self-host the mobile notification thingy, then I think it’s a good alternative. I haven’t explored that yet.

Among other things, I quite like the blog, especially travelling photos. There’s some ‘old Internet / old blogosphere’ vibe in it.

Nothing really add to the topic of having a MacBook Air M2 with Linux. Glad it works well, I’m eyeing an M1 one for myself. Yet my Retina (2014 model) works perfect with Arch Linux (including sleep), so I’m patiently waiting for it to break. And at the same me I hope it would work another decade, so good it is. Battery life is quite great, it’s between 3 to 4 hours with battery being at 50% of capacity. So, I expect the new battery could give me up to 8 hours, which is pretty impressive for me. In reality, I don’t need a session for over an hour or two. The only thing I miss is USB-C charging, as that way I could charge with anything when I have no charger on me. Again, in reality, it’s a pretty rare scenario.

Do you know of a better alternative? No irony here, I’m looking for something similar for family and company (50 to 100 people) setting. Was thinking of deploying Mattermost. For family, we settled on Matrix and it mostly works. We are at their default server, and I’m considering self-hosting it in the future. Yet, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to have Matrix deployed for a company. It lacks too many features, including search. Mattermost looked like the best option for me. I did try it locally a couple of months back, and mostly liked it.

However, I never liked them as a company. They have been giving me those ‘we’d give you the community this wonderful opportunity to develop the software for us, for free’ vibes. Now, it feels like my impression correct.

Also, a year or two ago, I installed Windows XP (the one from 2001) on a relatively modern computer with an SSD. (The hardware was supported, as it wasn’t too modern.) I expected the whole thing to be like 5 minutes compared to an hour it was back then. Turned out, it took about an hour! Why? I couldn’t get it, Ubuntu or Fedora took like 5 mins for that very PC with an SSD.

The funny thing, installing Arch Linux to a relatively old computer, if you did the install pretty often, to the point of knowing what to do, the installation takes like a minute or two, completely depending on the internet speed.

Technically, other distros with modern SSDs and powerful processors, are in the same league. As there’s little difference in what they do upon installing. It’s really cool! I stopped bothering backing up some important system data beyond some configs and the list of installed apps, purely because reinstalling the whole thing is just non-issue, a couple of minutes.

And I’d say that was an interesting read, as someone who’s long in the game, so I cannot install the thing for the first time again. I hope your post would inspire someone else to try waters too.

I second this. When I came to the world of Linux almost 20 years ago, it was different. Games were mostly non-existent, interfaces were mostly super ugly (but tolerable), and things did not work quite often. To solve these issues, I developed a pretty solid base of knowledge that helps me in my day to day work, and life too. I just understand things much better, I guess. All that thanks to Linux. These days Linux, I’d say it just works. I run Fedora at home, and apart from some inconveniences, it was rock solid and very easy. A cherry on top, our shared home computer is mostly HTPC serving media to the huge screen, running Kodi on top of Gnome. And it has no keyboard attached! Which is fine, Gnome is quite manageable with just a mouse. I bet it would manageable the other way around, with just a keyboard.

What do you mean by the easiest way? For me, that’s pretty simple: backups. In general, it’s a nice idea to have your /home separated (partition or disk), but in reality, I don’t bother. I just do backups. Considering things are mostly in the cloud (e.g. browser bookmarks), the backups are usually just the files, rarely some configs. That’s why I don’t bother separating home even for myself. Most times reinstalling something is not an issue. Actually, rather teaching someone using the interface is more of a problem.

That’s why I wanted to ask why did you choose Mint for your task? I’m trying to migrate one place to Linux off Windows, all they do is basically browser and some printing (I checked, their printer works out of the box with Linux). I settled with Fedora atomic desktop. First I wanted Kinoite, as KDE is very similar to Windows, visually. But I gave it some thought and realised it’s too complicated for a basic use case, and Gnome is just very good and simple, and perhaps it would be just not too difficult to have them learned the new interface. It’s not much after all: the top left corner, plus top right corner to power off the machine. I expect them to get familiar in no time, but I’ll see how it goes over time, as I have just installed the whole thing very recently and haven’t migrated them fully yet. (I have to transfer their files to the new SSD I bought them, before giving them the new system.)

I thought of Mint myself, but I don’t like Ubuntu, never liked Mint, and I thought I’d prefer something more modern. I just have very positive, mostly positive, experience with having Fedora at home, it was mostly great for years, with some occasional inconveniences. But since I’m pretty experienced with Linux, most things could be fixed within minutes. I’m yet to discover how it would work in the wild.

I use it on a Raspberry Pi 2B and Orange Pi Zero, both work wonderfully for the task, and it looks like Pi-Hole can work fine even on a router. Both of my SBCs are passively cooled, that’s why I decided to comment on the photo: you don’t need a computer this powerful to run it. As far as I remember, my very first Raspberry Pi (v. 1B or something like that) handled this task very well too. I temporarily retired that SBC in favour of Orange Pi Zero, so I cannot say for sure, but I think that computer had no issues with being fast enough for Pi-Hole. Really, give it a try if you didn’t, it’s ‘install once and forget’ type of software. Perhaps it should be updated periodically, but I don’t manage that. The only nuance with it, you need to have two computers, for the redundancy. Otherwise you’d be having downtimes when you need to turn off the SBC, or even reboot it.

The author is Russian. That’s their culture after all.