>>3404
Windows 10 has a way of slowing down itself for lulz. Never used it since I figured it out. I'd reinstall it and few months later it wouldn't be just slow, it would take nearly half an hour just to boot and then plague me fucking slideshow. I've never used a worse OS ever in my life.

>>3406
Maybe it's because I use LTSC, but I haven't had this issue.

>>3406
>half an hour to boot
There's probably some sysinernals tools to debug this: discover autoruns, profile launch time, etc.

>>3405
I waited a bit before replying to see how the computer would perform on the following days. The slowdowns on that day persisted regardless on whether the emulator was running or not, but it was more noticeable with mgba running. Later on that day other processes related to win10, this time the usual suspects, started popping up on task manager. On the following everything returned to normal and I resumed my games. I think this may be another case of win10 fucking things up.
My CPU usage right now is around 3%-9%, sometimes higher, occasionally rising into around 18-20%. RAM usage right now is around 3,8 - 4gb out of 5,9.

>>3409
>RAM usage right now is around 3,8 - 4gb out of 5,9
Gotta say, that's a minuscule total amount. Good that it's fine now though.

>>3410
Linux can be easily brought down to 400-600mb of ram usage without sacrificing usability, so 6gb ram total is a lot, unless you use heavy virtual machines or heavy corporate software. That's not minuscule. It's crazy how people grew to think about ram. And it's stupid how modern software sometimes fucks you up so badly, that even with 16gb of ram you reach swap.

>>3408
Maybe, but instead of debugging bad software, it's more reasonable to try to avoid using it at all.

>>3409
It might have been swap usage then, which would explain the transient period of slowness. I like to log cpu and memory usage so that such transient issues are easy to diagnose.

>>3411
It's a lot in absolute terms with a lightweight OS, but for something modern and bloated like win10, 16GB is really the minimum. And then add on top of it modern browsers/frameworks which assume memory is endless.

I want to get an external HD. Which brand do you guys use and/or recommend? I looked onto Seagate first, but apparently there's some sketchy shit going on with them, with some reports saying it's the worst brand. Toshiba looks nice and at least where I live it seems much cheaper than Western Digital. But I heard the control board is directly built on the HDD itself and if the USB port develops any issues it's over.

>>3432
You can check backblaze drive stats: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2024/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/

Seagate generally seems to have higher failure rates, WDC and HGST seem to have the lower ones.

They say Seagate have SATA to USB adapter even on low volume disks. I really have no proof though. If it's true it means even is USB connector dies you can still save your data at no cost by shacking it. WD only have SATA to USB on high volumes and 3.5'' form factor. All this info is from reddit, though. I haven't bothered to seek a better confirmation, because at the time I didn't know how or where, honestly. I have a Seagate disk and it's been working OK for three years or so now. If you're up to more research, I'd say it's better to go with higher failure rates than buy a WD disk and then pay probably lots of money to restore data if USB fails. So I'd go with finding out which disks have SATA to USB inside, so you can shack and connect SATA directly if needed. I hope you understand what I'm saying

https://www.reddit.com/r/PS4/comments/37bday/has_anyone_upgraded_their_hdd_to_the_new_seagate/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/jkf5da/deciding_between_2tb_external_hdd/
Sadly, I don't know where else except reddit such info can be found. Anyway as far as I remember this is the kind of threads I used to decide to buy Seagate. I don't care about reliability I care about not having to pay. And my drive has served three years now. Even if it fails in a year or two it will have done its job just fine.

If anyone knows some niche forums beside reddit that deal with this kind of stuff you're welcome

>>3434
How often do USB connector failures occur though? I can't find any stats. That being said, HDD failures also are relatively rare even amongst the worst manufacturers like Seagate. Honestly probably the better option is to just buy more of the cheapest and then mirror your data (or RAID if you're fancy).

>>3436
Seagate disks are not exactly expensive, as for USB connector failure it depends on you. If you're careful, maybe it won't ever fail. Cable and connector quality are OK, at least as far as my disk is concerned.

Oh yes nearly forgot. You may want to keep this in mind
https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SAT-with-UAS-Linux

I moved a linux install from a smaller drive to a larger one with Clonezilla. The size of the partitions stayed the same, so the drive has a bunch of free space, but it isn't adjacent to the primary partition. I want to add all the free space to it without deleting any partitions. Using 'print free' in parted gives me this:

Model: ATA CT1000MX500SSD1 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1024B 1049kB 1048kB Free Space 1 1049kB 255GB 255GB primary ext4 boot 255GB 255GB 1048kB Free Space 2 255GB 256GB 1023MB extended 5 255GB 256GB 1023MB logical linux-swap(v1) swap 256GB 1000GB 744GB Free Space

What do?

There is no way to do it without deleting partitions and recreating them with different sizes. Instead of using clonezilla repartition manually and use rsync -aAXUHS to copy your files.

>>3521
I'm not experienced with manual partitioning and am having a hard time getting swap and all of that bullshit working. Isn't there an easier, more automated way?

>>3520
>>3522
Going back to Clonezilla, this time using the r and k1 parameters, did the trick.

My asus k45a wont work anymore. A few days ago I did some browsing and left it on while I lay in bed and from the corner of mu eye i saw a blue screen and it went off. When i try turning it on it will go as far as to boot the windows logo but then it will be stuck loading or on a black screen. I tried advanced options but when i click afvanced options or restore pc it will freeze. I can enter the bios. Im posting from an cellphone . Is this a problem in the hdd? What can i do to solve it?

>>3524
If you can turn it on, and the bios works, it's probably your HDD. I would get a 2.5 SATA SSD and a SATA to USB adapter. Replace the HDD with the SSD, reinstall your OS to it, and use the adapter to check the HDD for damage and recover data from it if possible.

There's software for that, like CrystalDiskInfo on windows
https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

If you don't have a USB from which you can install an OS, I guess you could use this app on your phone to make one. It doesn't seem to support Windows ISOs, but you could install Linux, then use balenEtcher in Linux to make a Windows install media.
https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.depau.etchdroid/

Anything from the high-end SATA box in this would be good. You don't want to cheap out on SSDs. I've personally bought the Crucial MX500, so I can vouch for it.
https://ssd.borecraft.com/SSD_Buying_Guide.png

Post edited on 28th Nov 2024, 10:00am

How do Tohnos manage having multiple computers, that they actively use? For the longest time I used my desktop for virtually anything and used my laptop just for watching a movie or anime in the evening or read some PDF I downloaded, but never actually used it for anything else. This changed and I use my laptop far more frequently than my desktop, simply out of convenience sake. Now I have the problem, that I'm basically always on my laptop, but have all my files on my desktop. I've contemplated using something like a locally hosted Nextcloud instance, or an FTP server, or a network file system, but I'm not sure what to choose. What do you guys use for this issue? I assume the simplest solution would be do get a docking station for my laptop and basically use my laptop as a laptop and as a desktop, but that's not ideal either as a desktop has performance and storage capacity perks, that are hardly possible to imitate with a laptop, but I digress.

ideally nfs but like all truly unix software it is a barely usable piece of shit that you end up having to integrate with kerberos which is another bizarre piece of shit, so in the end you probably just want a samba share. don't take me wrong, samba is also a piece of shit but at least you won't spend eternity contemplating some stupid autistic design, because it just works. or fuck them all and use sshfs. i have been researching this topic regularly for years and my conclusion is that all network shares fucking suck and there isn't any brainfuck-less ways to share data between devices, not even when they run the same OS family

>>3538
>ike all truly unix software it is a barely usable piece of shit that you end up having to integrate with kerberos which is another bizarre piece of shit, so in the end you probably just want a samba share
Does Windows or MacOS have a better solution? Also, this might be worth exploring:
https://alexdelorenzo.dev/linux/2020/01/28/nfs-over-wireguard

Post edited on 2nd Dec 2024, 1:44pm

>>3539
SMB is what windows had. Macos used to have afp but they removed it. Both kind of suck and any slight misconfiguration can catastrophically degrade speeds.

>>3539
integrating wireguard with my current vpn that might occasionally become two vpns or even more, is all the more pain in the ass. i could do it with openvpn, but did you ever count the amount of hours it takes to get openvpn running on both sides and doing exactly what you want? even though i have some experience and, on the surface, know how how openvpn works, i still wouldn't like to touch it's configuration ever in my life. wireguard is 100 times more pain in the ass, because it takes retarded approach to routing, wg-quick is dumbass schizo piece of horrible shit that can't be integrated literally in any existing setup, so you rewrite the whole configuration framework yourself and in the end it still ends up fucking you in some subtle ways, especially with routing. and oh yeah let's also mention that there isn't any fucking documentation even on how to properly configure the fucking firewall, so you don't even know what half of the manual is talking about, and just a kind mention that iproute2 man pages fucking suck as well. so yea go get a degree and a few certificates in networking before you're entitled to make your text editor work. fuck it

So basically, I've been subscribed to a physical Linux magazine up until a few days ago and probably have dozens of those laying around in my room. I picked it up at a gas station and at the time it seemed interesting, so I subscribed. However, it quickly turned out that it's not the 90s anymore and everything this magazine was, was a collection of news articles about Linux and a DVD with Linux and Windows software, which you could just as easily download or look up on the internet. Time has gone on, but the subscription stayed and since the fee was minimal, it wasn't too bothersome. Eventually I didn't want it anymore and unsubscribed to it a few days ago.

What interesting things can you do with dozens of paperbacks of a magazine with old Linux news and DVDs having old software on them? Should I leave them untouched and maybe wait until they gain some value? I thought about archiving them online, but 1) this is copyright infringement 2) nobody cares anyway, when you can just download it. As of now, they aren't particularly old (around 2018-2024), so nothing worth selling. The software on the DVD are popular distributions, utilities like 7zip, Unetbootin and Putty. Any ideas?

>>3544
you could turn the CD's into artistic wall decaration, e.g. spraypaint them and lay them out in interesting patterns.

Unless there are specific important interviews or original articles/programs in the magazine that might become historically important for one reason or another, I doubt you'd be able to sell them for much. But check eBay and similar sites for older Linux magazines, I might be wrong.

>>3432
I use toolless drive carriers for NVMe drives, HDDs are big and sensitive to shocks so I don't like them for external drives. The cons of this approach is that NVMe drives are relatively expensive and the interconnect is slow unless you're willing to spend a lot. They're small, light, durable, and are easy to pop out of the enclosure and into another PC. For example, when I bought a new laptop I just wrote the whole image to the new drive I wanted to use, popped it out of the case, and into the laptop. I like this workflow a lot better than trying to do a netinstall or copying a config or something.
>>3537
I use NFS for this, but if you're actively editing common files on both computers, this is an unsolved issue in my opinion. I found NFS easy to setup and configure (less than 10 minutes total) and I replaced an sshfs setup with it. I had permissions issues with sshfs and NFS is so far much more of a seamless experience. There are applications which are supposed to seamlessly enable sharing files e.g. syncthing, which I hated, file management control like git or git-annex that lets you manually sync files, and applications which are supposed to make it easy to seamlessly send files, like magic wormhole. I had problems with all of these. They are of course also more basic linux programs like rsync. In my case I have a third computer (server) with all my files that is accessed by both my desktop and my laptop, which mount it over NFS. It's not good to have the same file, e.g. a text file, being edited in two places though, this is what causes conflicts. For files that are only read, e.g. anime, manga, videogames, it works great.

How do you manage following threads? RSS and a thread watcher like 4chanx includes work pretty well, but is there a functional universal "webpage has updated" checker? I end up not posting on interesting websites that I simply forget to check.

>>3566
>less than 10 minutes total
Literally how? NFS lacks basic common sense features and the only way to make it useful is kerberos. You can't even map UIDs by default. I looked at NFS from all sides and no matter how hard I try it's just pure scam. Unless you know how to configure the damn kerberos.

>>3568
Well, I don't know what kerberos is. I have a big zpool on another computer. There's a systemd service called nfs-server that keeps NFS running, and it exposes the drives to the network. There's a configuration file you need to write, then you just mount the drives on your other computers with mount and they work as if they were local. It was all pretty seamless.

>>3569
>what is kerberos
A gatekeeper

>>3570
>A gatekeeper
And a damn good one
>>3569
>systemd
I'm sorry but no

>>3571
You can use whatever service manager you want. I prefer and mostly use shepherd anyway, but this server is still running debian. I don't feel like I need kerberos, I can mount the filesystem anywhere on my LAN and I already have a VPN that I use to access all the other services I host. I didn't find any of this particularly hard. If you're struggling a lot with setting things like this up I'd consider switching to a declarative configuration system like Nix or Guix. It's much easier to copy configurations, and it's much easier to help people with their configuration because it doesn't rely on them remember whatever they tried to copypaste from stackoverflow over the last three days.

>>3572
Not him but somehow I don't think switching to guix is going to make anything easier...

Besides SSHFS, how about one of these?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace#Remote/distributed_file_system_clients

rclone with nextcloud sounds interesting.

How do I test color rendition?

>>3575
You have to buy a colorimeter used for profiling

Not a question per se, but an online friend of mine pointed out that a picture that I edited in GIMP and sent him had a lot of metadata, including the picture's creation time, thus leaking my timezone to him (and deducing from other information he'd be able to pinpoint my exact country) (I bluffed that I set a random timezone on my system for privacy, but I don't know if he was convinced). And now that I think of it, I've been making various pictures and edits on GIMP and sharing them on the internet over the years, thus leaving a digital footprint. I know that I'm partially to blame since I should've been more careful about this and paid attention to the options on the "export picture" dialog, but still, who the fuck thought it was a good idea to leak so much info by default? I hate software devs.

>>3577
I believe you have to unset "Save Exif-Data" when exporting the file. If you want to be sure, there a plenty tools who view saved metadata and are able to remove that from the file. In the Debian repos there is package called "mat2" or "Metadata anonymisation toolkit v2", which does remove such from the file. Maybe your distro has that particular tool, if not then there is other's tool. If you need or want a GUI, there is also "Metadata Cleaner" from Gnome.

Post edited on 27th Dec 2024, 12:21pm

>>3577
exiftool can strip it. Timezone by itself isn't revealing too much since you can infer that just by the times someone is active. Unless you had geolocation data embedded, you probably don't need to worry too much.

>>3577
In IRC there's a widely implemented CTCP protocol that allows leaking your timezone and client. I've been convinced through years that the only safe way is to set up a VM with truly random data (timezones etc) that would run the most popular distro out there and contain all your internet activities to it. Or at least those that you think might potentially leak your important data.
>I bluffed
Never do that. The best response in such cases is either silence or
>it's not my real X
and then ignore. If they insist and inquire why not, I'd reply
>it's been made in a virtual machine
Period. Your goal here is not to convince anyone but to leave them in a perpetual state of confusion where their wrongness would be slightly more plausible. In case they need to make an emergency decision they would prefer to consider themselves wrong since they don't have enough data.

Speaking of justice and storage, 10TB disk would cost me around 230-290EUR depending on my luck. This would last me for some years, but I hope I don't need to explain you the fate of a poorfag. I try to seek out the most compressed reencodes possible and still the space fills up very quickly, even if I remove stuff that doesn't stick, there's a lot of stuff I enjoy very much and it pains me that I can't afford to store it. Removing it later in time causes me enough grief that I don't want to download it in the first place. Deservedly no doubt but I guess I'd rant while I'm at it.

Post edited on 9th Jan 2025, 6:15am

>>3585
What about buying used drives and using RAID to avoid data loss? I don't know how often used drives fail compared to new ones, so possibly it could not be worth it in the end, but for instance, I got two 12 TB drives for 230€ total on eBay (resulting in 12 TB of storage if I'm going with redundancy). I'm not using them right now though, I'm procrastinating on ordering a used workstation for <100€ to use as a NAS.

>>3586
>What about buying used drives and using RAID to avoid data loss?
I'm living in my laptop, I don't have a PC, so I can't have nice things RAID. And if I buy a drive, it is of necessity external. And also HDD, because SSDs are ridiculously expensive in comparison. I pondered it for some time and came to the conclusion that the only functional setup I can come up with would be getting 3.0 hub with it's own charger to plug disks into it. HDDs will never be fast enough to throttle on 3.0 bandwidth but my USB ports won't carry more than one drive on their own. Hubs are expensive on their own, but there is no point in even considering them, if I can't have the drive in the first place. Maybe I could have a used one and then surrender myself to the btrfs, I don't know. Then, you spent 230EUR on a used 12TB, I'd rather have a new 10TB for that price instead. The catch is, even 300EUR are an issue when you're dysfunctional on top of having literally no useful skills.

>>3587
I don't know how poor, or limited in space you are, but you could get a used all-in-one for very little. A lot of them even have optical drives.

Post edited on 10th Jan 2025, 9:57am

>>3588
>used all-in-one for very little.
all-in one what exactly?

>>3589
PC. Like this one

edit: the cpu in this is better than a celeron despite being quite bit older
https://www.amazon.com/HP-EliteOne-800-G2-FHD/dp/B08B5HHD1J

Post edited on 10th Jan 2025, 11:09am

>>3587
>Then, you spent 230EUR on a used 12TB, I'd rather have a new 10TB for that price instead.
Well, I got two 12 TB drives for 230€ total, even if they're used. In the end I only get 12 TB of storage if I'm going with redundancy, but I'd like to have redundancy in any case regardless of whether the drives are used or new, since you can't trust any drives. I bought a new 5 TB external HDD for 110€ or so a few years ago, but I'm paranoid about it failing and I plug it in as rarely as possible.
>>3589
Don't get an all-in-one, 426$ is not cheap and all-in-ones have a myriad of problems that regular PCs don't. I'll give you the sacred poorfag advice, look up used business workstations on eBay, like ThinkCentre. You can get a semi-recent PC for less than 100€ that way. A used monitor plus some cheap keyboard+mouse and headphones/speakers shouldn't cost a lot. I recently got a decent functioning computer for a family member just like this, for less than 150€ total. It sounds too good to be true but it's indeed real.

Thank you for your advice. Actually, I was half aware of the possibility to get cheap but decent hardware like this >>3591 but admittedly have no experience.

One thing to note here, forever, is that I have no confidence at all about my residence place, ever. So I - I won't claim paranoia has not left its mark here - prefer to use a laptop because it allows me to relocate immediately while loosing only the comfort of an office keyboard I got for free from a random dude and a used monitor.

As for drive failures, I just play the russian roulette, really. Let the world burn! If I could afford it, I'd simply keep some drives for backup only, but as it is, I have no choice but to stop caring. Actually some years ago I had a fit or two of anxiety/paranoia over it, but survived.