• 4 Posts
  • 97 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Windows 10 LTSC FTW!!! I just installed it and wow is it snappier and devoid of nearly all of those annoyances. I have no idea if productivity apps are affected by its stripped down nature but for Steam gaming it’s perfect. I get less lag spikes on steamVR.

    I haven’t trusted Windows in years. This is just for gaming. I have a physically separate hot swappable Optane SSDs for Linux and Windows Gaming.

    For those who will winge at me for not just switching to Linux. During this process I gave a concerted effort to give Linux a go and chose Manjaro KDE to try for steamVR gaming. It sucked. Once I had worked out that it was a permissions issue (It’s always a fucking permissions issue under Linux) and just ran it under the root account, there was extremely high latency for the VR compositor to HMD display. Completely unusable as it made me sick and that’s usually very hard. I tried X11 and Wayland. Direct and Non Direct output modes. No success.




  • My solution is RAIDZ5 and storing the backup on LTO6 tape with parity/erasure code. I think the fact that scrub times take 24 hours even on 16TB drives is already over the safety margin. If a drive failure happens, the first thing I’ll do to run a manual diff backup which should take a fraction of the time and then run the ZFS resilver.

    I’m beginning to see why SSD RAID is being considered now. My guess for HDDs in enterprise is that a RAID 15 (I made this up) would be considered. What I mean is data is stored on two identical servers each running RAID5 or 6. Off the shelf solutions like Gluster exist and that seems to be gaining traction at least according to Linus Tech Tips.




  • Framework tackling phones is useless if they go the mainstream SoC route (Qualcomm, Mediatek) as they don’t have the software team needed to make those work properly (I would argue alot of handset manufactures don’t either). From what I hear you need a hell of software team to “fix” the garbage Android SDK released for those chips. Most importantly is if they go the closed mainstream SoC route which have EoL SDK support dates then what’s the point of building a durable repairable phone at a higher price point when you have to throw it out at the same as everyone else?

    I want to see Framework enter the Linux phone market using “open” chips like Rockchip alongside Pine64’s Pinephone (Pro) and the Librem 5 as I think they would more likely have the funds, dev time and community support to help bring say PostmarketOS into a usable state then have to rework the SDK. This way the phone’s EoL date would be determined be the local phone infrastructure shutdowns. A much longer amount of time.




  • Well I’m in my mid 20’s so I’m hoping for at least that long :). No I won’t likely need alot of what I store to last that long although I am a member of r/DataHoarder (not sure if they’re on lemmy yet) but for a few items like family photos/videos it’s nice to have it written in a way that I can mostly just set and forget. With the standardization and open source implementation of LTFS you have even less worry about having the software to read it in the future. A SAS IT mode HBA and linux with a git clone of the LTFS repo is all you need.

    In terms of cost the drive was very expensive ($2500 NOS from eBay US) but if you treat that as the one off entry cost, the tapes are cheaper for me to buy than the equivalent in HDDs here in Australia. That’s comparing ~$460 20tb EXOS HDDs from serverpartdeals.com to $43 x 8 = $344 2.5TB LTO-6 from stutchdata.com.au.

    Also I store the tapes in IP67 boxes from bunnings along with a pack of desiccant and put the boxes in a cool but damp area. Don’t really have alot of choice where I live. It’s either that or hot daily temperature swings. Basement vs attic/garage.

    I hope that’s enough to store them correctly environmentally speaking. I am in the process of working out how to clean family VHS tapes that were not stored correctly and that’s not an operation I want to revisit. An extended project is to make 900mhz button cell humidity/temperature monitors to notify me when desiccant has expired.

    This may seem excessive but I would argue most don’t do enough in an age where more and more is being stored digitally as the only copy rather than print, etc. I feel this is a small price to pay to keep the still more compact and convenient all digital lifestyle without the data loss issues most people experience. The drive was expensive to buy into but with how little I use it I hope it’s going to last a long time.



  • Yea but the tape is likely to last the 20-30 year estimate. You couldn’t say the same about HDDs especially the helium sealed ones.

    Whether the tape drive will survive as well is another question but between the simpler mechanism, a drive 2 generations ahead can still read the tape, parts inter-compatibility if you needed to frankenstein an older drive with new rollers and motors and just plain buying and keeping drives sealed in storage as new-old-stock ahead of time. You have a few options to choose from.

    Where as with HDDs you may have to repair each one. The helium ones you may have to re-gas.

    Tape sounds like a better long term archival/backup approach.





  • It’s silly to be an absolute open source purist when it comes to Valve anyway. They arguably deserve the money for the amazing ecosystem they have compared to the competition and are one of the biggest contributors to getting GUI frameworks and other Linux systems developed for the Linux based steam deck.

    Valve will likely be the party that gets VR working mainstream on Linux for the upcoming Valve Decard standalone headset. You want to talk about the power of open source… well… an affordable VR headset that’s at least mostly open source in the software department that is also good for gaming. Sign me up. It’ll be miles better than what Facebook shits out for it measly 3-4 years of support.

    I have an OG Vive that I use as the multiplayer setup for when friends come over and it’s still fully supported. 8 years later.

    Valve may not be completely committed to everything open source but until someone out shines them they are the best option for flexibility and longevity.

    Also someone need to be paid to develop open source software. This being the beginning of the topic and all. I’m happy for that to be Valve at the moment as they have shown the industry how to be better.

    No I don’t work for Valve, I’m just sick of closed restrictive platforms as well as open janky platforms for gaming and hardware with fixed EOL dates. I see Valve as the best balance/compromise.

    Sorry for my brains wall of text mode.


  • Steam is my dirty little secret when it come to my interest in open source. I believe that Valve will continue to hold it’s long tradition of user first business as a private business with lord Gaben at the helm (yes I know he’s mostly in the background at this point). I know that GOG exists however I really like steam forums, achievements, steam deck integration, steam link streaming and most importantly steamVR. Buying through GOG is going to massively impact my steamVR experience if you can even at all. steamVR compared to Oculus makes steamVR look like a very open platform. I hate Facebook with a passion for a variety of reasons so steamVR it is.

    FOSS is a great tool/concept but at this time it doesn’t apply to gaming and I don’t really care to massively inconvenience my gaming experience for a small amount more of open source code. I say this as someone who daily drives a PinePhone, runs a Linux server with ZFS and is looking at a Framework laptop for my next laptop to run Linux on. Windows is still where gaming is at, especially for VR, and I don’t care to try and fight to run close source games on an open source operating system. Seems like a waste of effort to me.