Lol. Mine was a tape drive, then 360kb diskette. But even today I have a OpenMediaVault server with 256MB of memory and its fine for audio and 720p streaming. The key is software optimization…which Windows seems bad at.

I got lucky and picked one up for $200

I got lucky and picked one up for $200

Fanleas cases, no fan, no noise. https://www.monsterlabo.com/

Silent and fanless: look for a Monsterlabo case. It is all heatsink. Buy a fankess power supply, or buy a PSU that is overrates for the load and fanless under 30% load.

Its the setup I have. I can render video and other work loads and you don’t even know the system is on

Pixma just worked for me with GNOME ams the built in scanner app. If you mean network scanning, that’s a different story

If you have a machine with decent RAM them don’t worry about RAM usage. You don’t really gain anything by dropping 4 gig RAM usage down to 2 gig RAM.

I listen to his podcast. He often talks over guests and interrupts them to make sure everyone knows he knew something. Overall his show good, and the guest are amazing, but his ego ruins the feel of the interview a lot.

Of course, security first

I forget which distro now, but I installed one that on first boot cones to a welcome screen for adding a user. Install just got the OS ready to deploy. It was a bigger distro, but I forget

Microsoft’s installed ssh has a phone home behaviour, it logs the server IP you connected to back to the MS mothership during your login.

This is for colour printers for sure, to prevent counterfitting. Many black and white only didn’t have fingerprinting, previously anyway. The printers serial number and manufacturer is coded. They don’t need to change anything, its done by the printer (serial, Mac, model)

This is not why printers are terrible. Printers are terrible because they don’t follow a standard protocol.

It says Myrlyn to replace YaST GUI

Looks a lot like YaST

https://news.opensuse.org/2025/02/10/myrlyn-now-handles-community-repos/

But yeah, I liked all the easy config stuff in the Yast Modules

I found M ITX on eBay for cheap $50, the ad said used mobo (10 available), but it arrived absolutely factor clean and had CPU cover on, etc. I assume old stock rather than used?? And found a CPU for $40. Monsterlabo fanless case cost me the most at $200

Pretty much the requirement for my wife. She really struggled with inconsistency of Windows and how slow it responded. Move to Linux, and she runs it fine with no more complaints, she just wants it identical after a version upgrade or if there is a reinstall ever needed. So for her I went with NixOS and have her config files stored for later.

Yeah not sure how it works on Mint, on OpenSUSE after reboot it asks if you want to enroll the new keys into it. If you miss the timer you will boot and driver will bork

If you browse the webs so many people with “Help my drive is full of snapshots, what do I do?”. If there is a failure mode people will find it. Whereas a curated distro is OOTB ready to go without user intervention.

My daughter was in a state searching all over before she left the house, when I asked what she was looking for, she said “my phone”. My other daughter piped up " you have it to your ear, you are talking on it"

You can assign auto snapshots or create on demand, but whether or not you have a maintenance tool that does scrub, cleaning whatever is another story. I guess my point was something that has Btrfs as default install will also have some curation around the tools that optimize that system