LDAC works just fine on Linux, but may be a different package or repo since it’s somewhat proprietary. Just worked out of the box for me on Arch.

Another reason to use ~/.local is you can do things like

./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local
make -j$(ncpu)
make install

And then you get your .local/bin, .local/share, .local/include, .local/lib and such, just like /usr but scoped to your user.

and it should mostly just work as well.

That was 7 years ago, and he seems to have distanced himself from that past. He’s kind of retired from the whole gaming channel thing and does more family life things.

People can grow a lot in 7 years, I sure did.

I really like the positive vibe and “here’s what you can do with Linux, for funsies” instead of the usual “here’s all the problems I had and I switched back”.

No “it’s perfect”, no “it runs all my games”, just “I tried it and had a blast setting it all up”. He’s legit enjoying it and sharing those feelings is powerful.

It’s shaping up to be pretty good at least. It’s pretty good for being in alpha state still.

The main thing it needs to beat for me is Kwin’s excellent Wayland support. Everything just works.

The per-screen workspaces are appealing though.

For what it’s worth, I experience none of that. My laptop is absolutely rock solid with KDE, it’s like a MacBook you pull it out of your backpack and it’s ready to go before I’m even done opening the screen.

My desktop is currently just over 5 days of continuous uptime (no sleep). I’ve crashed more often because of ZFS than KDE.

Both are ArchLinux. I also have a friend on Bazzite that doesn’t have issues with KDE either, and it runs great in my VM.

Those all sound like possible graphics driver issues.

In that specific context I was still thinking about how you need to run mysql_upgrade after an update, not the regular post upgrade scripts. And Arch does keep those relatively simple. As I said, Arch won’t restart your database for you, and also won’t run mysql_upgrade because it also doesn’t preconfigure a user for itself to do that. And it also doesn’t initialize /var/lib/mysql for you either upon installation. Arch only does maintenance tasks like rebuild your font cache, create system users, reload systemd. And if those scripts fail, it just moves on, it’s your job to read the log and fix it. It doesn’t fail the package installation, it just tells you to go figure it out yourself.

Debian distros will bounce your database and run the upgrade script for you, and if you use unattended upgrades it’ll even randomly bounce in the middle of the night because it pull a critical security update that probably don’t apply to you anyway. It’ll bail out mid dist-upgrade and leave you completely fucked, because it couldn’t restart a fucking database. It’s infuriating, I’ve even managed to get apt to be incapable of deleting a package (or reinstalling it)/because it wanted to run a pre-remove script that I had corrupted in a crash. Apt completely hosed, dpkg completely hosed, it was a pain in the ass.

With the Arch philosophy I still need to fix my database, but at least the rest of my system gets updated perfectly and I can still use pacman to install the tools I need to fix the damn database. I have all those issues with Debian because apt tries to do way too fucking much for its own good.

The Arch philosophy works. I can have that automated, if I asked for it and set up a hook for it.

Pacman just does a lot less work than apt, which keeps things simpler and more straightforward.

Pacman is as close as it gets to just untar’ing the package to your system. It does have some install scripts but they do the bare minimum needed.

Comparatively, Debian does a whole lot more under the hood. It’s got a whole configuration management thing that generates config files and stuff, which is all stuff that can go wrong especially if you overwrote it. Debian just assumes apt can log into your MySQL database for example, to update your tables after updating MySQL. If any of it goes wrong, the package is considered to have failed to install and you get stuck in a weird dependency hell. Pacman does nothing and assumes nothing, its only job is to put the files in the right place. If you want it to start, you start it. If you want to run post-upgrade, you got to do it yourself.

Thus you can yank an Arch system 5 years into the future and if your configs are still valid or default, it just works. It’s technically doable with apt too but just so much more fragile. My Debian updates always fail because NGINX isn’t happy, Apache isn’t happy, MySQL isn’t happy, and that just results in apt getting real unhappy and stuck. And AFAIK there’s no easy way to gaslight it into thinking the package installed fine either.

I would distrust my carrier well before I distrust the encryption. Even when roaming, your Internet is tunnelled through your carrier using an internal VPN. It even works in China, that’s a fairly common way to get around their firewall.

I also wanted to put an emphasis on how working with virtual disks is very much the same as real ones. Same well known utilities to copy partitions work perfectly fine. Same cgdisk/parted and dd dance as you otherwise would.

Technically if you install the arch-install-scripts package on your host, you can even install ArchLinux into a VM exactly as if you were in archiso with the comfort of your desktop environment and browser. Straight up pacstrap it directly into the virtual disk.

Even crazier is, NBD (Network Block Device) is generic so it’s not even limited to disk images. You can forward a whole ass drive from another computer over WiFi and do what you need on it, even pass it to a VM boot it up.

With enough fuckery you could even wrap the partition in a fake partition table and boot the VM off the actual partition and make it bootable by both the host and the VM at the same time.

What you’re trying to do is called a P2V (Physical to Virtual). You want to directly copy the partition as going through a file share via Linux will definitely strip some metadata Windows wants on those files.

First, make a disk image that’s big enough to hold the whole partition and 1-2 GB extra for the ESP:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 YourDiskImageName.qcow2 300G

Then you can make the image behave like a real disk using qemu-nbd:

sudo modprobe nbd
sudo qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 YourDiskImageName.qcow2

At this point, the disk image behaves like any other disk at /dev/nbd0.

From there create a partition table, you can use cgdisk or parted or even the GUI GParted will work on it.

And finally, copy the partition over with dd:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb3 of=/dev/nbd0p2 bs=4M status=progress

You can also copy the ESP/boot partition as well so the bootloader works.

Finally once you’re done with the disk image, unload it:

sudo qemu-nbd -d /dev/nbd0

It’s literally been working just fine for like a decade? Even for NVIDIA users that’s kind of a stretch.

Maybe if you share more details about your issues and your setup we can help fix it.

NixOS isn’t a bad option, I’m not sure how much you can trim it down but I’d expect it to be possible to express in Nix to install to a target that’s different from the host. Maybe not NixOS but Nix itself as a package/config manager. I’m sure at minimum it makes for a great development environment for building a buildroot.

It’s hard to give concrete advice without knowing the specs or the software you want to run on this, but for tiny Linux systems there’s Buildroot so you can compile just the bare minimum you need and not use a distro at all (unless you could Buildroot as a distro). This is what OpenWRT uses to build all the router firmwares among other things.

For something that would go in a car that seems pretty ideal to me. Skip initializing things you won’t use, make something that boots to GUI in 3 seconds. When you want to update the software you flash it as a new firmware image, no on-device installing or anything.

Depending on what you run, ideally you’d skip Xorg/Wayland and use the framebuffer directly. But if you need to run a more standard environment, that’s what things like Cage are designed for. Single app, always full screen. It’s called a kiosk environment.

Proton is Wine but tweaked for the sole purpose of running games, so it packs a bunch of extra stuff needed to make games run well together.

Usually there’s also a long list of per-game tweaks and changes to make sure it runs, it’s all preconfigured so you press play in your launcher and it works. Not need to change settings whenever you want to play a game.

You can still use regular Wine but you’ll have to set up a bunch of stuff yourself, and eventually you run into a game that needs a different version of something that breaks another game, you get into prefix management and it’s a mess. Or oh this game runs better when we pretend to be Windows 7 but this one works best with Windows 10. Proton just does it all for you, every game gets its own space with all the correct settings from the get go, and you just launch into the game and play.

Honestly a VPN that doesn’t support Linux at least through manual connection settings, run away. All reputable and even the sketchier VPN providers support Linux, because that’s what the privacy crowd uses, not supporting it implies those aren’t even the target user base at all. It’s a red flag. It’s not a VPN for privacy or getting another country’s Netflix.

I’d trust Norton about as much as my ISP, so unless you use public WiFi somewhat often, it doesn’t add much value, just the downsides of captchas everywhere. They’re probably analyzing the traffic to map out malware campaigns and such, which would make sense but isn’t very private.

The business model of antivirus companies is fear, and they sell the solution to that fear. They have a VPN because people assume VPN means more security, of course they’ll sell you one. At best they block known malware domains and IPs, which is utterly useless on Linux anyway.

If you want a VPN get a real VPN.

Proof of work is what those modern captchas tend to do I believe. Not useful to stop creating accounts and such, but very effective to stop crawlers.

Have the same problem at work, and Cloudflare does jack shit about it. Half that traffic uses user agents that have no chance to even support TLS1.3, I see some IE5, IE6, Opera with their old Presto engine, I’ve even seen Netscape. Complete and utter bullshit. At this point if you’re not on an allow list of known common user agents or logged in, you get a PoW captcha.

It ran fairly well for me out of the box. I think it’s similar to trying to run Windows 98/2000/XP on modern VM software, it gets utterly confused and needs very specific hardware configuration to boot. Modern VMs run this good in big part because of paravirtualized hardware.

I think what made Ubuntu so good is a combination of being based on Debian and also being there at the right time when Linux software was getting generally better. When I tried Mandrake it was too early for Wine to run any sort of game, codecs were lacking for video. When I tried Linux again with Ubuntu, there was now VirtualBox and computers fast enough to run that reasonably, graphics drivers were more usable. Compiz was popping off to show off that Xorg could now do compositing like macOS and Vista.

Mandrake was good but limited by what Linux could do back then. Enjoyed it quite a bit but 9 year old me ran back to XP for the games. When I tried Ubuntu I was a bit older and more interested in programming and WoW ran great in Wine, so I managed to stick and have been on Linux since.

My very first distro I believe was Mandrake 10, it’s the distro that planted the seed to eventually switch for real with Ubuntu 7.10

AWS does have plenty of VPN solutions for this, but likely not with the credentials you have because they’re usually very specific. And it’s probably intentional, if they wanted to give you VPN access they’d give you VPN access.