It combines capacity without any fancy striping. It can still provide some performance benefit as different blocks of the same file can be stored on different drives, but it doesn’t stripe data across the drives for performance.

It also allows you to just add more drives later. The drives don’t need to be the same size or type. You can also remove drives, provided there is enough free space to move the data on a drive to the ones that will remain.

It really just pools the storage capacity into one big volume.

If a drive fails, it still takes the whole volume with it tho. But as long as you monitor smart, it is fairly simple to try ejecting it from the device group before it takes the whole thing with it.

with three drives, raid1 doesn’t make sense

In raid1c2 mode btrfs will give 3TB of usable storage with 3x2TB. It always stores two copies on two drives. Not three.

If you just want to combine their capacities, and don’t need redundancy, just use single mode?

No need to use a raid mode for multi-device btrfs.

Edit: You could also do two volumes.

Split each drive in half. Use the first half of each drive for a raid1c2 volume to get 1.5TB of redundant storage for important data.

Use the second half of each drives for a raid0 volume to get 3TB of faster storage for games.

But there are no hacks required to install it on old hardware.

Yes there are.

If you used rufus or ventoy, you’ve just applied them without knowing.

Unmodified Windows 11 ISOs will refuse to install on any hardware with a CPU older than Ryzen 3000 or Intel 8000.

In fact there are less hacks required to install / upgrade to windows 11 then there are to install any Linux distro.

What?

On the vast majority of systems, the vast majority of linux distros will install and run with zero “hacks” of any kind. Literally just boot the ISO as-is and have at it.

genuine copy of windows will receive all and any updates

No. On many machines, while windows will install just fine due to the modifications to the installer applied by rufus/ventoy, the yearly major version updates can fail catastrophically.

A lot of hardware will update without issue, but there ABSOLUTELY is risk.

Windows is just an os. As long as it is compiled for the correct CPU architecture, it is just as supported as any other hardware. The hardware is supported by individual drivers, normally provided by the hardware manufacturer, not Microsoft.

You are confusing functional, and supported.

Something can “technically still work” without being officially supported.

Not being supported means Microsoft can make breaking changes in updates, because they made no promises your hardware would be accounted for in the future.

Just because it works today, no longer means it will tomorrow.

Yes. But you don’t have to switch.

People say “start” with simpler distros because if you go past just using it as-is, and grow to understand linux closer to the system level, you’ll likely eventually end up preferring something more complex.

There’s little point to starting at the deep end, like arch, since you don’t know whether you’ll end up staying in the shallows yet. Either way, it’s the start. It can also be the end, but that is unknowable.

Nah.

Just do what Valve did with Wine.

Officially fork and contribute to Heroic.

Really common, actually. RAM doesn’t really wear out, so if you do get hit with some faulty DIMMS, look into RMAs.

?

The 580 driver does support wayland, it’s not that old. Or are you worried about future breaking changes since you won’t get updates?

I just switched my sisters old laptop with a 970m over to the nvidia-580xx driver, available on the AUR. Further manual maintenance should be unnecessary until the kernel becomes too new for that.

I even had to enable wayland for GDM because it was trying to use X11 and failing.

She plays minecraft and a couple other games so the nouveau was not an option.

Yeah. It’s almost more like Steam, complete with unmoderated social platform functionality.

Did you already find this?

https://github.com/thewierdnut/asha_pipewire_sink

I use this one professionally, yet to come across a PC that wouldn’t boot from it.

And yeah, you won’t benefit unless the PC also has both fast ports and fast storage.

But half of the time I’m using it to move files from a customers old PC to their new one, and more aften than not, even the old one has at least one quick usb C port.

Sure.

But that’s limited to SATA 3 speeds. A “mere” 600 MB/s. Not to mention SATA SSDs often can’t sustain their theoretical maximums.

USB3.2x2 can do 2500 MB/s, and with heatsinks on an NVME drive you can actually reach and sustain that transfer speed.

When you’re moving more than 500 gigs of something, or if you move ISO sized things often, it’s really nice.

When I occasionally have to write an ISO to usb for macOS or when ventoy for some reason wont work, I get annoyed at how I actually have to wait a bit, even though my thumbdrives aren’t slow.

They’re just not NVME with a heatsink fast. I’ve gotten used to moving ISOs around like they’re text files.

True. But if you have an old one laying around, from a laptop, desktop or whatever, even a low end one will saturate usb while beating 2.5" hdds.

Or if you want to install an entire iso in less than a minute, one of these.

I really like that one. I can move a terabyte in minutes, and unlike some other M.2 enclosures, this one is a heatsink sandwich, which enables sustained full-speed operation.

ZoneMinder?

Flathub and the AUR are by far the most comprehensive, and flatpaks works on a lot of distros. So I checked those.

They’ve also been getting their kinks worked out over the last few years and work much better than they used to.

That review you found is two years old and was for version 1.1. Current version is 1.4. Try it out today, if it’s been fixed leave another review letting people know. It seems to work just fine for me, but I haven’t used it before.

Material Maker is on Flathub, the AUR, and on Snapcraft (not up to date, but you shouldn’t use snap anyway).

No need for a manual install.

You’ll find a lot of software is available via package managers. Linux people don’t like installing anything without it being managed by a package manager so the installation and subsequent updates are automatic and occur alongside system updates. So when people find software they like, they’ll go out of their way to package and distribute it for others as well

Yes. But you didn’t.

Knowing what something does is important.

If you install a piece of software expecting it to do something it actually doesn’t, that can leave a security gap.

I wasn’t just correcting you. I was making sure you knew that if you install a “firewall” it won’t do the thing you’re looking for.

As for an actual answer, most distros will already ask you to confirm if you try to run a random appimage you downloaded.

But you shouldn’t need to do that in the first place. On linux, there’s not really any need to go running random programs downloaded using your web browser, since you can just download software from trusted reposotories that aren’t going to host malware to begin with.

Unlike on windows… You don’t need to risk it in the first place.

And I’m telling you a firewall won’t do that.

It won’t have anything to say at all about something you download and run.

It’s a completely different security feature. It handles potentially malicious network activity. Not software on your computer.

oh with the firewall saving me from myself I meant if I download something thinking it’s safe but isn’t

A firewall would not save you from that.

A firewall stops random incoming connections. But if you download and run something bad, that’d be an outgoing connection, since the malicious program is then already on your system.