Not to mention the fact that, Google being Google, this is going to be shitcanned in a couple of years, anyway.

I am a simple man, I see someone construct a keyboard out of wood, I upvote!

This sounds like it’d be exactly how I currently use Tumbleweed on my workstations: I don’t update daily, but rather every once in a while. I appreciate the new versions of things, but being on the daily bleeding edge is more work than I care to put in.

I can also see this working quite nicely for those with nvidia hardware, where with TW you’d sometimes end up with a kernel too new for the drivers to get shoehorned in. A slightly easier-going pace would help there.

It also reminds me of Android, where you have roughly monthly updates (theoretically) and every now and then a bigger one.

Installing a software package through a distro’s package manager sounds like a perfectly fine “Linux way” to me.

Of course, that filesystem exists today as btrfs.

Which, to be fair, isn’t exactly the fasted FS around. I love me some btrfs, but not for the benchmarks.

Muscle memory needs some time, especially for symbol stuff. Don’t hesitate to tweak your mappings, I’ve made some changes at some point which made things a whole lot more workable. I started with Miryoku which was completely unsuitable for the PHP work I was doing back then, to mention something, and moving the number cluster to the right hand rather than left did miracles for my day to day work as well.

I code with it, yeah. Just have those symbols wherever you want them (I never used those inner upper keys either, except for things that I don’t mind lifting my hand for). Layers layers layers. Also home row mods.

For my next board, I’m probably going with a 6×3+3, I don’t use the number row either. Keypad on a layer under the right hand is so much nicer…

That’s correct. Btrfs will simply divide your disks in 1GB chunks, and when writing, always ensure that a bit of data is always stored in 2 chunks on two different disks. You can also do 1C3 or 1C4 if your data is truly that critical, which means data is always stored in 3 or 4 chunks (on different disks), respectively. Of course, that also requires at least they amount of drives.

This chunking is also the reason why the sizes of the drives don’t have to match, as long as it’s possible to divide it evenly you won’t lose space as unused. Simply put, make sure your largest drive is not larger than your other drives combined and you should be fine.

In my case, data will always see one copy on the 4gb drive, and another on either of the 2gb drives.

As for the reason to switch: that’s something I can get behind, although you could also just slap Proxmox on it an do all your experimenting in VMs; at least that keeps the server itself running as smoothly as possible, while not limiting you in your learning experiences.

As for btrfs: it most certainly does have RAID functionality. RAID5/6 is considered unstable (although I’ve heard/read from plenty of people who have great experiences with it, provided you don’t run into the edge cases), but I’m sticking with RAID1 because I don’t need to run the risk, and I’m not sure if waiting for a checksum calculation whenever something does go pear-shaped is going to do a whole lot of good for me.

Anyway, as for my setup: an HP Microserver (an oldie, a Gen8 with a Xeon switched in) running Leap, powering a few VMs, a collection of Docker containers, and a few “native” services (nginx, PHP, stuff like that). The root fs is a single SSD (btrfs SINGLE with some directories having a flag to disable COW), and there’s a data pool of 3 spinning disks (2x2 and 1x4GB), 4GB effective, that contains “data”. Most of it is setup with Ansible these days, hence no real use for YaST on that machine for me.

You’ll lose more than just snapshots, btrfs does a bit more than just that.

I’ve been running my NAS/server on btrfs for years, now. I started out on Rockstor (which was still based on CentOS back then, they switched to an OpenSUSE core some years ago), later I decided to roll my own setup on Leap, partially because I already had (and love) Tumbleweed on my workstations, and keeping everything on one distro is just less mental overhead. For me, it’s been rock solid. I like OpenSUSE, I like btrfs. Snapshots have saved my bacon on the workstations more than once when bleeding edge updates and nvidia clashed; it’s never been an issue on the server of course, and I don’t really use them for data (although the option is there). I do however use RAID1, on 3 drives, and being able to just add a drive even if it’s not the same size as the others (within reason), is a big plus and one of the reasons I opted for btrfs back then.

OpenSUSE as a distro is great, there’s a fair amount of software, stuff that’s not in the default repos might be on OBS. It’s a fixed-release distro but the cadence feels somewhat different from Ubuntu’s. YaST is great when you want to have some easily accessible menu driven interface to setting things up, rather than poke around in config files (I’m more of a config file guy, but having the option is nice).

Of course, as for opinion… It all depends on what you want to use the machine for, where your experiences lie, and so on. What’s the NAS doing, besides file shares, what do you hope to gain by switching distros? Where are you on the scale from “I want it to just work, something like a Synology would be nice if they weren’t so pricey” to “I hand-compile kernels for fun”?

Eh, the split part is easy, it’s the lack of row stagger that’s going to trip you up for at least a couple of days.

You do get used to it, though, and after that a “normal” keyboard will feel as weird as it actually is, when you think about it.

ascetics

I think you mean “aesthetics”, an ascetic is something quite different. 😛

The layout looks Colemak-ish, so I’d expect the E to be the key labeled 5 on the right half.

Smaller keyboards like this use layers to reuse certain keys, rather than adding more. The idea is to minimize finger/hand/arm movement. Things like choosing a more efficient layout (QWERTY is actuality pretty bad in that regard), using home row mods (so the letter keys under your index fingers double as Shift when held, for example), and so on.

It takes some getting used to, but it actually quickly becomes second nature.

I’ve used Rockstor in the past, I liked it mostly (but in the end went with a self-configured OpenSUSE system).

Apart from that, I hear good things about OMV and TrueNAS

Coming across your mapping (again, I might add, it was already on my personal list of inspirational stuff), was a bit of a trigger to redo my mapping. Pinched your altgr-on-innermost-homerow-keys and it’s very nice.

I’m in camp “arrows on hjkl on a layer, home/pgdn/pgup/end right below that”, but if you really want them as physical keys, I’d probably stuff them below the pinky cluster, right next to the outer thumb.

That, or maybe something dpad-like on the left edge, close to the H.

Edit: Oh, for clarification: I’m a programmer, as well. I make plenty of use of the arrow keys, so it’s not like “eh, let’s stuff those on a layer, I never use 'em anyway” or something.

Actually, you’re right.

Oh well, a humanity, then, just not ours.

Hadn’t read The Algebraist yet, so there’s a new one on my list. Thanks! I’ll make sure to check out Barnes, too.

Fun stuff, although I wonder how weather proof this would be — my door bell is outside, with nothing in terms of shielding from the elements.

I also liked the pi-as-a-travel-router, that gave me a solid idea!

Not just “should”, the GDPR actually requires it. Not giving consent must be an easy option, not this dark pattern clickfest bullshit.