JovialSodium

joined 1 year ago
[–] JovialSodium 5 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Would a VM work? I've read that you can run MacOS inside a VM. Though I haven't attempted it (yet). Could do Windows in a VM too but virtualized ad-riddled spyware is still ad-riddled spyware.

[–] JovialSodium 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've used mailfence's paid entry tier for several years now. Been happy with them.

They are on the "other excellent options" list, but wanted to give them a highlight.

[–] JovialSodium 1 points 1 week ago

Fine points. And I am considering that simplicity might be worth it. Except for:

Another fix might be moving towards software that doesn’t require the capacity to reverse updates frequently.

Totally solid advice, but I love my rolling release distro though. So for the time being I'm willing to accept the associated risk.

[–] JovialSodium 2 points 1 week ago

Your comment as well as @stupid_asshole69@hexbear.net were really food for thought for me. stupid_asshole69 advising against, and yours as a cautionary tale.

This would be a complex stack to accomplish my goal. It occurs to me that it'd be mdadm (raid 1) > LUKS > btrfs since btrfs can't do encryption which is right in the middle of that stack, so I couldn't use it's raid 1 functionality. If any of those pieces break, all the protection they would have otherwise provided me goes out the window.

And I'm not really worried about losing data. I already backup my personal files and most of my configs. The appeal with this kind of setup is the data redundancy and fairly quick recovery. But a partition clone like what saved you also works pretty well for that purpose. I don't know what I'll do just yet, but definitely taking all that in to consideration.

[–] JovialSodium 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I wasn't familiar with timeshift so I took a look at it. My primary use case for snapshots is to take one before updates. So I can load from the snapshot if there's issues. It doesn't look like using it with ext4 would fulfill this use-case. But it looks like it also supports btrfs snapshots so could be useful as a UI to configure that.

[–] JovialSodium 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Hearing roughly a decade of successful use, especially on systems with constrained resources, certainly makes me lean further towards btrfs.

its RAID ≠ 0/1/10 are buggy, but 0/1/10 are considered reliable.

btrfs has been solid and done everything I could want. It was a huge upgrade from mdadm and lvm

@ikidd@lemmy.world said that btrfs is poor at software RAID. I'll do a little research in to how it fares for RAID 1 vs mdadm. I don't see any reason I couldn't do mdadm>luks>btrfs if that's the better choice. But if btrfs is reliable and with comparable performance, I'd certainly rather do that.

[–] JovialSodium 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It’s the shits at software RAID, but that’s rarely a thing on a workstation.

I am using a RAID 1 mirror over two disks. So that's good to know. I'll do a little research and see if it's better to let mdadm handle that.

Look at btrfs-assistant for adminstration. That’s what Fedora ships with, I think it uses Snapper in the backend.

Doesn't look like that's in the void repo. But that's ok, I don't mind learning the command line tools.

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submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by JovialSodium to c/linux@lemmy.ml
 

I'd been using ZFS with Void linux on both my laptop and desktop for a couple of months. And ZFS is cool! But I'm thinking not great for my use case, especially for my laptop with it's more constrained resources. Memory usage was a real problem, even after imposing low ARC limits. And the kernel module compile time was long enough to be a bit annoying, especially for a few kernels (I like to keep the last few around, to be safe) as it happens fairly often on a rolling release.

I switched the laptop to LUKS/btrfs a couple of days ago. And I'm thinking that was the correct choice for that. And now I'm considering doing the same for my desktop. As they seem comparable but btrfs is in-kernel and seemingly more system resource friendly. But before doing so I figured I'd ask the community about it. Maybe some important factors or features for either setup that I might not be considering.

Here's the stuff I care about. All of which both offer, but I'm not an expert at either and I don't know how equal they are.

  • Disk encryption. For ZFS everything (except the EFI partition) is encrypted. I use ZFSBootMenu in this scenario. For the btrfs setup I have the kernel/initramfs on an ext2 partition. I do not store any decryption keys in the initramfs. I know grub can decrypt LUKS with limitations, but I prefer this setup. And it feels secure enough to me. Any pitfalls I'm missing?
  • Pools/subvolumes
  • Snapshots. ZFSBootmenu has an option to load a snapshot. For btrfs it looks like I'd need to create a subvolume from a snapshot, which in a recovery situation might mean doing this from recovery media. That's ok, given this is an unlikely thing to encounter. But if anyone knows of an easier way, I'd love to hear it.
  • CoW
  • RAID 1
  • Compression is nice, especially for the laptop

Edit: typo in title.

[–] JovialSodium 20 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I don't know specifically about a medical lab tech program. But I do know about clinical software in general. It is by and large proprietary Widows software. Seems like something you may encounter. But said software could be delivered via Citrix, which does have a Linux client.

[–] JovialSodium 2 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks for the tip!

[–] JovialSodium 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Edit: I typed out two sets of the same numbers, one in a row, intonating one after the other, and the others in a column in an attempt to impart the idea of all at once.

My Lemmy client put both on single lines, which is confusing. So I removed the original comment.

[–] JovialSodium 1 points 2 weeks ago

Fair point. I dislike competitive multiplayer games. Also why I don't encounter anything with anti-cheat, as that's the primary (maybe only?) type of game it's used for.

But absolutely an important consideration for those that do like competitive multiplayer.

[–] JovialSodium 6 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

My personal experience gaming solely on Linux for about two years is a 100% success rate running Windows games. Mind you I don't play anything that has anti-cheat. And maybe 85%-90% without needing to fiddle with anything.

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