While at university I did a lot of work on the SPARCs and this lead to Unix development as an early career for me. I moved into the windows world after that and I missed Unix so I picked up Linux around 98. I installed it on my work laptop of all things and made everything I needed work. Never looked back since although I run Windows VM for office and testing stuff.

Servers I run Debian, I do not want flashy I just want stable and tested security fixes.

I could not hack being that far behind for my desktop OS however (which I run on three different devices), so I run Ubuntu, which I remove as much Ubuntu and Gnome baggage as possible such as snaps and by running Sway.

I should really swap to a different distro that also has Debian as its root but without the stuff I don’t want and Sway by default. However I also want stuff to be simple and up to date, as I make my money on my desktop PCs, I cannot afford for it to be a PITA every time I try to install patches.

I do have one PC running arch, but its mostly for the memes (and for PIKVM)

I did used to be Red Hat through and through. I started with Linux back in 98 using Red Hat CD ROMs, but I left for Debian over some previous controversy that I do not remember now, years before the Centos stuff.

Ha, love the audio tell of the resource stealing

One of my favourite wars was to open audio files on other people’s SPARCs, somebody had the loudest bag pipe music that usually ended things.

Access to the SPARCs was normally restricted to third year but if you knew the right person you could get an account created pretty easily. Had the fastest access to the internet at the time within the uni as well.

Another fan of pikvm, love mine. I have it plugged into a HDMI switcher so I can control four boxes from one pikvm. It does use some pins so if you wanted to control the power switches you have to do some extra work.

Worth considering if you want to get a UPS at the same time for the NAS, pikvm and any networking you have. Will all last longer with one to avoid random power cuts or surges.

If you need to access it remotely I would strongly suggest getting wireguard or some other reliable VPN setup rather than exposing the web interface to pikvm directly to the internet.

I did not know that about Zoom, but would make sense given how stubborn the Gnome lot are that such a terrible bodge is required rather than them working with others.

The one that got me with them was when they banned third party screenshot tools from using the default screenshotting hooks. They cited security concerns, which is valid as it stops malware from hijacking this, however rather than adding the ability to add to a user controlled allow list (or any other potential workaround) they just rejected working with anybody on fixing this issue. Instead it came off as a transparent attempt to push their own screenshotting tool.

I did an in place upgrade to testing about a month ago on my PIs after running Bookworm on x86 VMs since it came out. Worked fine for me but my usage is pretty light compared to some as they are headless servers for me and I can rebuild really quickly if I had needed to from backups.

Today I had a shed load of updates per PI, about 160 packages so I guessed it had gone live.