Natal

So far I've tried Debian12 on my old laptop and Mint on my self hosting rig. I think I'll sping so VMs and test new distros before commiting to a full install. I wasn't too happy with Mint because its boot time is much slower than Debian on a comparatively better machine so I'm not too tempted to go for it again. But maybe I messed up something and caused slow boot times.

Oh great! Thanks :)

Yeah I'm not worried about encryption, it's more about convenience to not start from scratch every time, but whatever is critical is duplicated in several places and wouldn't be lost if I were to lose the entire machine. It's more me being lazy and wiling to avoid transferring games and music again if possible.

Cool! And how do you proceed to switch distro then? Let's say I have done as described above and separated the distro in its own partition. I plug a new USB distro, go through the setup and at the partitioner screen, I reassociate the new distro to where the old one was, and /home to where /home was, etc? And it just picks up that there are files there?

That's a nice comment. Thank you! :)

Gotta figure how to use my Quest2 on PC from Linux. I used Virtual Desktop on Windows but I couldn't find documentation to use it on Linux.

I think I have a fairly good idea of where I'm going. I've been using my old gaming rig as a Linux self hosting server for a few months now, I'm confortable with the Terminal and SSH. Kind of understand the file structure, but not as instinctively as Windows for sure.

I'm more worried about the friction of not having every software I wish for instantly available.

For instance, I use MusicBee to listen to my music library. It's been the case for over a decade, so I'm not sure where I'll go.

Thanks for dropping those names, I'll get Lutris and PoL :)

I've had the desire to leave for a while, that's why I thought creating a linux server to self host apps with my former gaming PC would be a great way to get started with Linux and learn the basics while still relying on Windows for my main stuff for a while.

Games were my last point of resistance, but I don't play as much anymore so I think I should just take the plunge.

Can you elaborate the /home on a different partition part? How do you split your partition and does it mean you can switch distro and still have your stuff laying around as if you plugged an external disk?

Okay so I'm slightly confused and I haven't experimented with that on my server because it's only one single drive. If I have several drives and partition one for the distro, the other drives as storage partitions. Are the data storage drives compatible between distro?

Would that mean that I could go pick a new distro, nuke the "distro drive", but leave the others disk intact and just log in the new distro with my drives as they were?

Not great. I'm tired of family drama all the time. Wish they could just get along some days.

I bought a kettle with a temperature selector. I have one degree of precision. Which is often overkill. It's surprisingly useful to be able to heat water at non scalding temps. Especially for cleaning tasks, actually.

Yeah, I wanted to go the usb route but I only have one usb port which is often used to display Waze on the screen. I thought of using Spotify with an Adblock but that's not ideal as it could stop working anytime and basically revert to being a radio. Can't wait to find a way to ditch tidal.