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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 3rd, 2024

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  • I wonder if the numbers are still this good if you consider more supercomputers.

    Great question. My guess is not terribly different.

    “Top 500 Supercomputers” is arguably a self-referential term. I’ve seen the term “super-computer” defined whether it was among the 500 fastest computer in the world, on the day it went live.

    As new super-computers come online, workloads from older ones tend to migrate to the new ones.

    So there usually aren’t a huge number of currently operating supercomputers outside of the top 500.

    When a super-computer falls toward the bottom of the top 500, there’s a good chance it is getting turned off soon.

    That said, I’m referring here only to the super-computers that spend a lot of time advertising their existence.

    I suspect there’s a decent number out there today that prefer not to be listed. But I have no reason to think those don’t also run Linux.


  • but it did not stick.

    Yeah. It was bad. The job of a Supercomputer is to be really fast and really parallel. Windows for Supercomputing was… not.

    I honestly thought it might make it, considering the engineering talent that Microsoft had.

    But I think time proves that Unix and Linux just had an insurmountable head start. Windows, to the best of my knowledge, never came close to closing the gap.



  • The first thing I do to, if I need to get the size down, is swap out Gnome for one of the X11 Windows managers, usually XFCE.

    I usually do this by starting from the minimal install and building up, as schizo already suggested.

    That said, I guess I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Linux Mint is an easy way to get Debian’s core with the XFCE window manager.

    Looks like Mint starts at 3GB - 8GB, depending on options chosen?

    Disclaimer: It’s honestly been awhile since I really paid attention to my own Linux install size, as long as it’s below 40GB.


  • MajorHavoc@programming.devtoLinux@lemmy.mlSlim Down Debian Install
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    4 hours ago

    the live disk won’t find my Wifi

    Oof.

    In case it helps: I have solved that problem for myself using a $9.00 USB Wifi dongle.

    For whatever reason (other contributors facing the same issue?), I have found that every cheapo USB Wifi dongle I have tried has worked perfectly with the minimal Linux images.

    I realize I might have just gotten really lucky a bunch of times, but it could be worth a try.




  • Can you be more specific?

    Sure.

    I’ve had discussions about my impression that Rust’s build chain can be a bit surly compared to other popular languages.

    I don’t particularly mean it as a criticism - of course Rust’s security enforcement comes with more warnings and errors.

    But the novel part of the interactions, for me, was Rust community members coming at me with ‘well get gud, newbie’.

    These interactions are particularly ironic, given my experiences and specialties. I’m an old school veteran software developer. I have spent over half of my career in dedicated Cybersecurity roles.

    These conversations converted me from a mildly interested Rust proponent into a casual Rust critic.




  • Maybe because I tried to follow MS’s “use your own distro” instructions instead of using something prepackaged?

    Not op, and I don’t care about systemd, but…

    When I’ve used anything I wanted to substantially modify, I’ve followed the “use your own distro” instructions. In the past I’ve done this because WSL had a strong assumption of exactly one copy of each distro, and I like to abuse it for more.

    Overall, I’ve had a better time with the the “bring your own distro” instructions. But some of my experiences with WSL were before they even got the Windows Store installer working correctly.

    More recently, I recall Windows Store being fine for stock Ubuntu and for stock Debian. But I didn’t find the “bring your own distro” instructions to be much trouble, either. My perhaps faulty memory is that it took maybe ten minutes, last time I used them.


  • So why are you advising to change the default install of Debian to include it?

    I didn’t advice any such thing. My edit is just to acknowledge someone else who makes it part of their process.

    Citation needed.

    I shared my personal experience and you turned it into a distro war. Go look up your own damn sources.

    Pretty sure this is either personal opinion or anti-canonical, anti-snap ideology.

    Fuck yes. It’s both! Snap is a slap in the face to the contributors who brought Canonical this far. I appreciate their partnership so far, and now, speaking as a package maintainer, Canonical can fuck right off.

    Targeting WSL users with this rhetoric is ridiculous.

    Helping people make an informed decision about their tool chain is rhetoric? Give me a fucking break.

    I don’t like Ubuntu. That’s not a secret. Ubuntu is a fine option for total newbies. People using WSL tend not to be total newbies and may well run into real issues (such as the ones that prompted me to switch), thanks to snap.


  • I mean, I didn’t read terribly closely, because I already made my choice.

    My reason is that the benefits of Ubuntu over Debian are most noticeable in the GUI, which WSL doesn’t contain.

    In contrast, I find the benefits of Debian over Ubuntu to be most noticeable on the command line, which is all we get in WSL anyway.

    To me this is some solid advice that I already knew.

    I think there’s also a fair assumption by the author that anyone running WSL isn’t a total Linux newbie. I personally, think of WSL as an intermediate skill level way to run Linux, because WSL is still - frankly - a huge pain in the ass, when contrasted with trying out a bootable USB drive, and then only gives the command line, which is also a very limited way to experience Linux. (I think it will get better, but today WSL is not a way that I recommend to newbies to try out Linux.)



  • All the answers are going to assume WSL is using Ubuntu.

    Every recipe that I have ever encountered for Ubuntu worked on Debian, except the recipes involving Snaps, which were inevitably much simpler on Debian. And I haven’t seen anything useful under WSL (cli tools) packaged better as a snap anyway.

    Why do Linux advocates try so desperately to overcomplicate things?

    Computers are complicated. Linux advocates just aren’t being paid to lie about it.

    In this case, this is a simple 7 character (edit: plus a (optional) one line command to enable systemd) change that can save a newbie a lot of trouble, and comes with no downside. the downside that systemd isn’t enabled by default. (Edit: a good point made below.)

    There’s very few cases where Debian and Ubuntu are different at on the command line (which WSL is). In those very few cases, anyone using WSL is going to have a much better time on Debian, because they’re more likely to find a working recipe.

    The exact reasons for this are nuanced, but come down - folks liked me publishing recipes don’t target Ubuntu anymore, because I wasn’t (as a package maintainer) invited to the Snap party. Which is fine. Flatpak does the same job, in an open way.

    So for the 98% of recipes that predate Snap, there’s no difference to be had as a user. For the cutting edge 2% of new stuff, newbies are increasingly better off on Debian.

    (Edit: In case anyone was wondering, I really, personally, don’t like Ubuntu, because it has Snaps. I’m aware that makes me a meme.

    Snaps are bad for the community, and bad for the user.

    Some of us understand why, and do our best to mention it politely, every so often, to save our peers a headache or two.

    That said, folks who need hand-held through the specifics of why Snap sucks would do better asking elsewhere. I am famously old and irritable.)