I’d agree with the: come preinstalled. Most people buy a device and never change the operating system. So it needs to be the preinstalled operating system on the average computer or laptop, wherever people buy those.

(And mind that Linux completely dominates the market on servers. So technically, a lot of people use Linux in a way… Just not on desktop computers.)

Usually a library is curated, while the internet isn’t. Idk I usually have a good time there. It’s an amount of books on the shelf I can still manage. If it’s multiple, I grab the 5-10 or so books, walk to a table and skim the table of content and a few pages, see which one has the info I was looking for and has a style of writing I like. (And isn’t outdated.) I regularly find Linux or programming books that way. And they all have some minimum standard in the library so I’ll find something within 5-10minutes.

I had a dualboot on my last laptop for a long time and seems they’ve toned the overwriting of the bootloader way down since the invention of EFI. For the last 8 years or so it occasionally changes the boot order to default to Windows, every time these larger updates come in. But it doesn’t seem to overwrite anything any more.

Other than that, I’d also recommend Backups. Windows doesn’t come with drivers for these filesystems, so it can’t read Linux files. But theoretically things could happen to the data on a harddisk nonetheless.

Thank you very much for the info. I did the switch today, along with the overdue update to 25.05 and everything went smoothly ☺️

I think they have push notifications in XMPP these days. At least Prosody has modules like mod_unified_push and mod_cloud_notify and that seems to be supported for example by Conversations.im

To be honest, I didn’t have lots of battery drain, back when I used XMPP. And other old-school protocols like e-mail and sip voip don’t seem to be very bad either with whatever mechanisms they use. Or my phone isn’t reporting battery drain correctly… And with Matrix I also had to set up push notifications manually, or it’d just receive messages with a random delay per default.

I am graduating […]

Sorry, I read that after I replied and edited my comment, but a bit too late… That changes some things…

I agree. There’s roughly two options. Either a static archive as your heritage. Or some writable file storage which can be kept up to date. And yeah, that needs payment, maintenance…

And from my observation, finding people willing to maintain something, or clean up after someone did some annoying things or filled up storage or whatever, is harder than setting up the technology.

Obviously that option would be preferable, though.

[…] or set something local, but set it behind some proxy

Maybe Cloudflare is your friend. They dominate the market of free reverse proxies / tunnels.

But I’m really unsure if I have any good recommendation that fits your situation. Ideally find a successor, next best thing is a Nextcloud, Google Drive, OneDrive or some of the other ones. And if that can’t be done, split it into manageable chunks by course and dump it to some one click hoster or archive.org. That’s all I can come up with.

And by the way, I did appreciate such archives and made use of them. And there’s a lot of reasons (cheating aside) to share notes, PDFs, try old exams to prepare…

The main issue is, you graduate as well and life will move on for you. You might move far away, get a full-time job, maybe have new hobbies or a family and time will come and you’ll stop supporting it as well. I’ve seen that all the time and most privately run things vanish sooner than later.

Of course the entities have to abide by the rules. We also did that… officially… It just happened to be the case that some of the same individuals also did other things after hours, and not in their role as members of the entity… And while mingling you’d find similar-minded people and/or successors for the inofficial operations. It’s a bit trick to get it right. The official entity of course denies any involvement, they can’t take any blame.

And I’d say if you’re the main/sole contributor of content, it’s questionable if this even survives long term. Unless people upload recent exams and material, the content will become obsolete after a few years. Professors will have changed the questions and assignments or the entire course is done by a new professor and the archive will slowly become obsolete. So you kind of need some community anyways. Or skip the hassle and just upload the thing to archive.org or some one click hoster.

Another option would be to talk to the dev club. Maybe they’d like to revamp their solution and take yours, or they have some idea about tech infrastructure.

Seems things have gotten more complicated in the age of cloud computing. I think these archives have always been a thing. In the good old days sometimes on their infrastructure, buried several layers deep in some windows network share or on some specific computer in the computer lab or maintained by the student body of a faculty… And there was always some secret file stash somewhere.

If you’re concerned with a long-term solution. Are there any entities run by the students? Associations or clubs interested in maintaining such a thing long-term? I mean technology aside, the real issue is that this is done by random individuals and they’re gone after a while. Ideally this is done with some help of an entity that lasts longer than that and passed down to future generations.

In these cases I’ll do the same thing other people here seem to do as well. Do a backup (or snapshot) and then I’ll try to just do it. Obviously read the documentation on updates and major version upgrades first. I think that’s fine in the case of paperless-ngx.

Either it works or it doesn’t. In that case I’ll gather error logs and information for debugging and roll back to the backup. After a successful major upgrade, I often go through the settings and config and check about all the things that have been added or changed in the meantime and make sure they’re set to my liking.

Just be warned that those two are relatively complicated pieces of tech. And they’re meant to set up a distributed storage network including things like replication and load-balancing. Clusters with failover to a different datacenter and such. If you just want access to the same storage on one server from different instances, that’s likely way to complicated for you. (And more complexity generally means more maintenance and more failure modes.)

Since both Debian and Arch aren’t atomic distros or offer rollback… The way I do it is connect my large external USB harddisk, do a backup and then upgrade. If there’s something wrong, I restore the backup, but in reality I was always able to resolve issues with the updates.

On my server I do LVM snapshots, that’s fairly easy to do. I avoid BTRFS since that messed up one of my filesystems a few years ago, but I heard it got better since and it’s not supposed to do that any more.

There are a bunch of options available. I think the exact layout depends on the exact use-case. From GlusterFS, Ceph, to (S3 compatible) block storage, to straightforward NFS, to database replication, that’s all for different use-cases like VM failover to decoupling storage from a service, to something like a Jellyfin sharing the media library with another service, to horizontal scaling of services… I don’t think there is a single answer to all of that.

No worries, I pressed PieFed’s notification bell, so you pinged me by adding the top-level comment about the update 😊 I happen to be using NixOS as well. So it’s going to be the same. Now lets hope this project turns out good.

Thanks for your update here. Decision seems pretty easy then. I’ll see if I can find some time next week, do a database snapshot and move to continuwuity as well.

I think AVC1 is another word for H.264. That’s the oldest one with lots of hardware acceleration available in old devices and by far the biggest one in file size. VP9 should roughly be on a similar level with H.265. The main difference is that VP9 is supposed to be royalty-free and H.265 isn’t. The best one is of course AV1. But that also takes considerably more resources to encode and decode.

M4A and webm both aren’t audio codecs. They’re file container formats. I believe m4a takes AAC audio. And webm is a more general container format and it takes video as well. I think audio will be either Vorbis or Opus. And Opus is fairly good, especially at low bitrates. There probably isn’t a big difference to AAC, though.

What do the few people here who stop using Matrix altogether, replace it with? XMPP? Or do you just use Signal or the commercial messengers eveeyone uses?

I’m in the same boat. Keep me updated if you go forwards. I think I’m going to wait 2 more weeks or so and then make a decision. Community-driven sounds nice. I wasn’t aware of cuntinuwuity yet. And yes, all the drama and burnt-out people isn’t nice or healthy at all. It’s a shame that this is the state of messengers these days.

And they even changed more around for developers. A revised structure of the SDK. Demoting Pixel devices from being primary developer platform and now devs should use the emulator… We don’t get easy access to device trees for GrapheneOS any more…

I’m afraid that won’t help. That was like 6 years ago and all the hardware isn’t available any more. It’s a Xeon 4 core, an affordable workstation/server mainboard that happens to be very efficient in idle, 48GB of RAM and a bunch of harddisks. I started out with 6TB and then bought the best size/price hdds, which should currently be somewhere in the 12-14TB range if I’m not mistaken?

I got the idea from the German computer magazine c’t. They occasionally test mainboards and do recommendations for self-built home NAS, office or gaming rigs.