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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 5th, 2023

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  • Just recently I had a tech store guy gently but repeatedly insist to me that a certain USB cable was a USB 3 cable because it was type C on both ends. I didn’t wanna argue with him, but the box clearly said “480 Mbit”, so it was just a type C charging cable.

    Of course the box designers were hoping you’d make that mistake so they didn’t write USB 2 on there, just the speed. And most boxes won’t even have that, you’ll just have to buy it and see.

    But I mean if someone who spent their whole life fixing computers can get something that basic wrong, then it’s really a hopeless situation for anyone who isn’t techy.

    And of course once it’s out of the box it’s anyone’s guess what it is. It’s a real mess for sure.


  • I was wondering if your tool was displaying cache as usage, but I guess not. Not sure what you have running that’s consuming that much.

    I mentioned this in another comment, but I’m currently running a simulation of a whole proxmox cluster with nodes, storage servers, switches and even a windows client machine active. I’m running that all on gnome with Firefox and discord open and this is my usage

    $ free -h
                   total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
    Mem:            46Gi        16Gi       9.1Gi       168Mi        22Gi        30Gi
    Swap:          3.8Gi          0B       3.8Gi
    

    Of course discord is inside Firefox, so that helps, but still…



  • About 6 months ago I upgraded my desktop from 16 to 48 gigs cause there were a few times I felt like I needed a bigger tmpfs.
    Anyway, the other day I set up a simulation of this cluster I’m configuring, just kept piling up virtual machines without looking cause I knew I had all the ram I could need for them. Eventually I got curious and checked my usage, I had just only reached 16 gigs.

    I think basically the only time I use more that the 16 gigs I had is when I fire up my GPU passthrough windows VM that I use for games, which isn’t your typical usage.






  • Well personally if a package is not on aur I first check if there’s an appimage available, or if there’s a flatpak. If neither exist, I generally make a package for myself.

    It sounds intimidating, but for most software the package description is just gonna be a single file of maybe 10-15 lines. It’s a useful skill to learn and there’s lots of tutorials explaining how to get into it, as well as the arch wiki serving as documentation. Not to mention, every aur or arch package can be looked at as an example, just click the “view PKGBUILD” link on the side on the package view. You can even simply download an existing package with git clone and just change some bits.

    Alternatively you can just make it locally and use it like that, i.e. just run make without install.


  • Aur and pacman are 90% of why I use arch.

    Also fyi to OP: never install software system-wide without your package manager. No sudo make install, no curl .. | sudo bash or whatever the readme calls for. Not because it’s unsafe, but because eventually you’re likely to end up with a broken system, and then you’ll blame your distro for it, or just Linux in general.

    My desktop install is about a decade old now, and never broke because I only ever use the package manager.

    Of course in your home folder anything goes.







  • I’ve been in love with the concept of ansible since I discovered it almost a decade ago, but I still hate how verbose it is, and how cumbersome the yaml based DSL is. You can have a role that basically does the job of 3 lines of bash and it’ll need 3 yaml files in 4 directories.

    About 3 years ago I wrote a big ansible playbook that would fully configure my home server, desktop and laptop from a minimal arch install. Then I used said playbook for my laptop and server.

    I just got a new laptop and went to look at the playbook but realised it probably needs to be updated in a few places. I got feelings of dread thinking about reading all that yaml and updating it.

    So instead I’m just gonna rewrite everything in simple python with a few helper functions. The few roles I rewrote are already so much cleaner and shorter. Should be way faster and more user friendly and maintainable.

    I’ll keep ansible for actual deployments.