first off, if you plan to scan the storage for bad “sectors”, that’s gonna take eons if the disk is of any considerable size. what’s more likely is you running the SMART self-test and that will work over any medium.

the cables absolutely can and do cause corruption, whether it’s plain SATA-SATA cables or the USB-SATA with their own controller on it; however, if you don’t have reason to suspect this particular cable/adapter is faulty, it’s not a worry vector per se.

wish they would say what the “old intel CPU” refers to and which ate the modern ones that don’t need the hack.

I have no idea what this challenge is (I automatically assume it’s some cringe when I read “challenge” also that pic is… what?), but you don’t run Mint/Debian/Ubuntu if you have super-fresh hardware, like AMD 7000-series or Intel 14th gen and so on. in that case you have to go with Fedora or one of its derivatives (Nobara, Bazzite, etc.), because they have the newest kernels that allow this hardware to run OOB.

if you have a bit older hardware (like 2-3 years old), Mint or Debian is your best bet; Ubuntu if you have to, and only as a stepping stone. it’s a solid base and if you use flatpak for everything (Firefox, Chrome, Lutris, Steam, etc.) you won’t have issues with old packages and you’ll get the best of both worlds - stability and supported hardware.

weeell you kinda misrepresented the stated point, creating what’s commonly referred to as a strawman.

the subject isn’t a random sandwich that might or might not have contaminates in it; the subject is a shit sandwich. therefore it’s pointless to argue exactly how much shit is in a shit sandwich, as its essence and genesis preclude it from being considered nourishment.

now there’s copious propaganda out there convincing you it isn’t that bad, lotsa people do it, memba the sandwich from decades ago you loved… but we’re in the wrong community for that.

does it matter how bad it is? does it matter how much shit is in a shit sandwich?

I’m not having it however little there is.

https://lemmy.ml/post/14792804

bazzite is fedora based? If so, your filesystem is btrfs and your /home is a subvolume, same as your / (root). you can install a new operating system in a btrfs subvolume (e.g. /blendosroot), then have systemd-boot or grub mount it as root and mount your existing home from it.

sadly, there’s no noob-friendly way to achieve this, but if you’re adventurous, you have enough search terms to make it happen.

you need a swap file, a swap subvolume, or a swap partition that’s RAM + 50%, on account of zram. then you need systemd scripts that disable zram and enable swap on suspend and do the reverse on resume. also, you need some selinux tuning to allow you to write to said file. you have a detailed howto in Fedora Magazine.

stop using bullshitgpt.

edit: here’s the article.

btrfs with subvolumes. I have fedora gnome, fedora kde, debian 12 kde, arch mate as subvolumes on the same disk and of course a home subvolume that they all mount on boot, so all my data is always available.

the fb route would be awesome, I’m adding this to my research list. would video playback be accelerated in this case?

yeah, that’s the main question - do I need a window manager, when I all want is just full screen?

I’ve found something called mpv-kiosk, but that’s a snap and that monstrosity is the opposite of what I need.

doesn’t matter. in the future I might cobble something together, like a clock or weather or a slideshow, but I’m fine with a blank/black/whatever screen.

jellyfin’s android app has the cast functionality built-in, it connects to jellyfin-mpv-shim. you select the video from the app and press play and that’s it - it plays on the remote device. you can then pause, ff/rewind, change subs, etc., from the android app.

as to youtube videos, select video in newpipe, share to allcast, allcast connects to macast, which uses yt-dl to play the video via mpv. you can then control the playback (stop, skip, etc) from allcast.

this all works on a full-featured desktop without problems; I’d like to strip everything but the bare necessities needed to run mpv.

any mods around? what’s this bullshit have to do with programming?

absolutely. I have a list as long as my arm of irritants that are 99% just the absence of sane defaults. I’m not saying that’s what’s deterring people from switching over, but it’s not helping either, is it?

every DE, distro, whatevs I install, I try to imagine what this looks like to a non-techie, how would a random grams deal with this… and it’s not looking good.

apple has a vertically integrated tech stack and are free to focus their sinister efforts elsewhere; they don’t have to dick around with 15 different DEs and 27 WMs, 50 teams pulling in 127 different directions, abandoned paths and duplicated efforts galore. just imagine where The Linux Desktop would be at if we had just one DE/WM and all devs would pull in the same direction…

I don’t have the answer. it’s chaos over here and out of that chaos eventually some order emerges. it’s unquestionable that shit’s way better than five years ago, let alone 10 or more… but it’s so slow and wasteful and it pains me that I see no other option.

meanwhile this (hey, try this shit out) is the best we as users can do; I know I regarded KDE/Plasma for the longest time as something clunky and un-serious and whatnot - I couldn’t have been more wrong. things that are outright deal-breakers (like the years-long refusal to implement scroll speed in Gnome) are handled beautifully over there, and then some.

that (and many other irritants) is why I switched to plasma. please try it before going back, it’s way better in every regard.

I have acknowledged that they’re that, but that’s not what OP asked for - they asked for a cheap setup (which the minis ain’t) and they intend to run a servarr instance, which implies large storage and those are both difficult and not cheap to cram into said minis.

I don’t understand the fascination of other commenters with mini-PCs, as the mini-ness was mentioned nowhere in the OP.

any used and decomissioned old office PC, any i5/i7 is way more powerful than you’ll need for that setup. you get everything you need right in the box and you can cram it full with cheap RAM and hard disks. you get to repurpose something that’s useless as a desktop workstation and not buy more future e-waste.

yes, the mini-PCs and the Rpis are more power efficient, but the operating costs of a $30-50 PC don’t come close to the price of buying one of these mini-things, not to mention - figuring out how to run large hard disks with it.

just watched a video where the dev explains LG; this is for a Windows VM that allows GPU pass-through, or am I missing something? when you say “host” and “client”, you’re referring to two physical devices or how does that work in your case?

I have two physical machines (both running linux, Fedora 40 on the desktop and Debian 12 on the laptop) connected to the same monitor, keyboard and mouse and I need to alternate between them.

edit: aha, the LG site refers to KVM as kernel-virtual-machine, whereas I’m talking about KVM as in keyboard-video-mouse; completely different things, maybe I should amend the post’s title.

Aside from the god-awful installer (which they’re replacing), and the ball ache of installing media codecs, it’s an amazing distro.

yeah, so I got AMD graphics and it was news to me that from now till the end of days, you’re supposed to run dnf up thusly:

sudo dnf up -x mesa-va-drivers

that suffix prevents fedora’s shitty mesa from interfering with your cool mesa from rpmfusion, even though you swapped shitty-mesa with cool-mesa, as instructed. apparently, they started forcing this shit recently, can’t remember ever having to do this, from F35 on up to F39.

this feels like a new take on wrestling Ubuntu and its snap monstrosity, you ripped shit out and thought you were fine. not so, we want shit done to your computer, even though you’re like against it but you don’t really mean it, right? man, gtfo with that bullshit, go break a Gnome extension or something and leave this shit be!

that’s mentioned NOWHERE - not in the rpmfusion howto’s, not in askfedora/fedora magazine (but there are swaths of jerkoffs going “well that’s a risk when using 3rd party shit”), nor any step-by-step articles I looked at, I accidentally found it buried in a 3rd level comment of some rando reddit discussion.

edit: the installer sucks big fat elephant dick.