methodicalaspect

HeliumOS, Kubuntu, Linux Mint (standard and Debian Edition), Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, VanillaOS, and Zorin OS here. Helium and Vanilla are not necessarily beginner-friendly but I use them in specific places.

May you run into a nerd with a Ventoy USB full of beginner-friendly distros in their back pocket to help you along your journey.

There are at least two of us out there, I’m sure of it.

Proxmox 9 dropped too, their major releases coincide with Debian’s. Upgrade process on a single standalone box was completely uneventful; I’ll be trying a 9-node cluster on Monday.

I’d love to see Linus verbally bitchslap the fuckwit. Or physically, that’d be cool too.

I’d rather eat the pizza.

Good pizza in North Dakota?

Chicago, New York, and Detroit have entered the chat

Same…but with Ungoogled Chromium as Flatpak because it made me feel the least dirty.

Pi-Hole’s great. Got my primary instance on a Pi 4 and three secondaries (one per vlan) on LXCs. Works so well it feels weird seeing ads when I’m not at home, I’m actually considering using Tailscale to route all my queries through my home connection.

I’ll second the Pop!_OS recommendation that others have been posting. Don’t get me wrong, Linux Mint is great, though I personally prefer Linux Mint Debian Edition over the Ubuntu-based one, but I think Pop!_OS is just as easy to use while presenting a different look & feel. Pop tends to support newer hardware as well: despite being stuck on an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS base until Cosmic is finished, System76 releases new kernels to support the hardware they sell. They’re currently running kernel version 6.6.6, as opposed to Ubuntu’s 6.2.0 (I think – that’s what server’s on, at least).

I gave my wife, who “hates computers,” a laptop running Pop!_OS when her Windows 10 one failed and, apart from the standard new PC complaints, I haven’t heard anything Linux-specific. She runs two businesses on the thing; the only changes I made to the standard Pop!_OS software were to replace LibreOffice with OnlyOffice, and to replace Geary with Thunderbird.

If I’m not mistaken, the Alaska Airlines accident aircraft completed 99 flights, as it went into service only a couple months ago.

Not an expert myself but I binge air crash investigation shows like nobody’s business, and this seems to speak to QC and maintenance workload/culture issues.

The one black PSU fan is throwing off the vibe. I can’t stop looking at it.

Not entirely sure why this reply is being panned (was at -6 when I first saw it).

OP is in the process of upgrading their PC to a Ryzen 9. If we make the assumption that this Ryzen 9 is on the AM5 platform, the CPU comes equipped with an IGPU, meaning the RTX 3060s are no longer needed by the bare metal. So, installing a stable, minimal point release OS as a base would minimize resource utilization on the hardware side. This could be something like Debian Bookworm or Proxmox VE with the no-subscription repo enabled. There’s no need for the NVIDIA GPUs to be supported by the bare metal OS.

Once the base OS is installed, the VMs can be created, and the GPUs and peripherals can be passed through. This step effectively removes the devices from the host OS – they don’t show up in lsusb or lspci anymore – and “gives” them to the VMs when they start. You get pretty close to native performance with setups of this nature, to the point that users have set up Windows 10/11 VMs in this way to play Cyberpunk 2077 on RTX 4090s with all the eye candy, including ray reconstruction.

Downsides:

• Three operating systems to maintain: bare metal, yours, and your partner’s.
• Two sets of applications/games to maintain: yours and your partner’s.
• May need to edit VM configs somewhat regularly to stay ahead of anti-cheat measures targeted at users of VMs.
• Performance is not identical to bare metal, but is pretty close.
• VM storage is isolated, so file sharing requires additional setup.

Upsides:

• If you don’t know a lot about Linux, you’ll know a bunch more when you’re done with this.
• Once you get the setup ironed out, it won’t need to change much going forward.
• Each VM’s memory space is isolated, so applications won’t “step on each other” – that is, you can both run the same application or game simultaneously.
• Each user can run their own distro, or even their own OS if they wish. You can run Fedora and your partner can run Mint, or even Windows if they really, really want to. This includes Windows 11 as you can pass an emulated TPM through to meet the hardware requirements.
• Host OS can be managed via web interface (cockpit + cockpit-machines) or GUI application (virt-manager).

It’s not exactly what OP is looking for, but it’s definitely a valid approach to solving the problem.

I’d say “the office dress code,” but what I really mean is my gut.

I don’t necessarily think this is brand new. Cold War era thinking was nutty, basically “hey let’s shove a reactor into everything.” We had the SLAM program and Project Pluto in the US during the 50s and 60s, I’m sure the USSR had something similar then too; probably a case of dusting off 60-70 year old plans and seeing if they still carry weight.

How recently did calling become supported? About a month ago I was still unable to even log in using Firefox unless I used a user agent switcher, and even then only text-based messaging worked.

I graduated a few years before you, also in Illinois, and can confirm that.

I can also confirm that I have not resisted the devil’s lettuce.

Depends on what level of responsiveness you need from the support team. I run it in my home lab and haven’t needed to raise any tickets as all the info I need to solve problems is readily available on their forums or in assorted blog posts. A company relying on it for their critical infrastructure would probably be best-served with Standard (4-hr response within a business day) or Premium (2-hr response within a business day).

If those still aren’t quick enough it may be worth looking into a partner of theirs, or into another commercial option altogether. I’ve interacted with the Red Hat support team on some high-severity issues and they are top-tier; that was unrelated to virtualization, though, and they tend to push the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization solution quite hard. I’m talking a response time of minutes.

If I’m using kvm on any standalone (non-clustered) hosts on the data center it’s typically on Ubuntu LTS, knowing that the company I work for has a Canonical support agreement in their back pocket, but we haven’t needed it.

That’s good as well, of course. I use QEMU with virt-manager and cockpit on my office workstation running EndeavourOS and it’s glorious. Keeps Windows from ever being installed on the bare metal.

From a usability perspective, though, I think Proxmox lowers the barrier to entry, as the web UI feels considerably more powerful out of the box than cockpit. An interesting bonus is that you can add it to an existing Debian install, including one with a DE, though it’s not something one would want to do in production.

Bitwarden is the shit. As if the free tier weren’t good enough, the annual subscription is dirt cheap and you don’t have to remember more than the master password anymore.

TrueNAS Scale. It’s based on Debian instead of FreeBSD (like TrueNAS Core) and has KVM virtualization and k3s containerized app support built in, in addition to being a NAS operating system.