I never appreciated snapshots until I ran a server. I used to just install a new distro whenever anything significant went wrong. Now I use them everywhere.

Thank you for the incredibly detailed and patient reply. I will try some additional applications like Jellyfin and Immich instead of the built in synology stuff. It was always my intention to have docker images running on a separate server but stress went up and free time went down and I settled for using the built in applications. Luckily, I havent significantly invested in video center as I just used it to preview files while sorting in DSM.

I had some issues with copying files over SMB. I can write fine, I can delete, but copying seems to fail. My guess is because the local user on my laptop is different than the user on the SMB share. In any case, I was using the file explorer in DSM in Firefox to sort through old media by hand. I’ll have to use NFS and continue to sort via Dolphin.

I’m glad to hear the situation isn’t as dire as I had initially imagined. Perhaps I’m a bit shell shocked from all the enshittification that I jumped to worst case scenarios.

I can’t switch from Celsius to Fahrenheit, the switch just reverts. I do think it looks beautiful and has weather stats that I use when I bike but other apps don’t always have (air quality, UV) .

I don’t see any Arch sticker. If it was Arch, it would be the biggest sticker.

The change was 95% unnoticed for me. I looked at the session one day and thought “oh yeah, I have been using Wayland”. I don’t mess with many games or AI GPU stuff though, so it may be that more complex use cases result in a worse experience.

I used the base model and it ran at a very acceptable speed with CPU only. Decent accuracy considering the recording was mediocre quality at best. Thank you for the suggestion.

I was able to quickly set up and use whisper (base) using Speech Note without issue and it saved me over 80% of what I would have had to manually do. Thank you for the recommendation.

Whisper worked for me. I’ll have to go back through and tag speakers and fox a few spots but you guys have saved me 80-90% of the work. Thank you.

Transcription of numerous voice mails and phone calls for a legal matter. Would like to supply transcripts with the audio files so we don’t have to pay as much time for the lawyer’s paralegals to review and decide what is actually going to be useful.

I like that terminology. I use some very high quality, high visibility FOSS software and sometimes feel bad that I more frequently donate to smaller projects that bring me value by filling a specific want or need that no one else is working on.

This answers my question. I wasn’t sure if the server would have to download the whole file from the NAS prior to serving it.

I run my Nextcloud on Debian, ran Debian based distros for a few years, and I’ve done nfs on my synology with my laptop. I might be able to do it!

Wish me luck, and thanks for responding.

Yes, and the desktop is delightfully simple. Makes older hardware feel new but still looks good enough on modern hardware.

I hear you on the tiling. I wish my window arrangement on KDE was more keyboard based. As it is, I end up dragging and resizing across multiple monitors and workspaces.

I should have been more clear,

Assuming dev/sda is Linux and dev/sdb is Windows, I have grub on sda and Windows bootloader on sdb. I use a hotkey at boot to tell the bios which drive to boot from.

Theoretically windows thinks it’s the only OS unless it’s scoping out that second hard disk.

Is there any issue with having windows on one drive and Linux on the other and toggling in the bios at boot? Do I introduce any problems by keeping my rarely used windows installation on a separate disk like this?

We started with Linux around the same time, and I remember how awesome Gnome 2 was on Warty Warthog or whatever old release. At the time, the Windows Start menu was a convoluted mess of folders, uninstallers, readme files, etc. Gnome listed my programs more or less in alphabetical order with one icon each in logical categories. It was so simple, I explored every crevice of it and remember thinking “is this it?”. It was and I soon learned that it was not just simpler, but more powerful and user friendly in various ways. I have moved to KDE since then, but it is absolutely the enshitification of Windows that pushed me here.

Out of curiosity, what do you consider a decent file manager? Dolphin is my favorite currently because I almost always have two panes open, but I’ve been looking for something even better since I also spend a lot of time working with files.

Our favorite OS, comrade.

I also jumped from Gnome to KDE over the years. I’m not a fan of how Gnome went with the convergence, large-padding, touch trend. I love how KDE has tighter spacing and follows a traditional desktop metaphor while still being customizable. Gnome 2 did okay at this, but when gnome 3 hit, I ran to Mint/Cinnamon for a bit before trying a bunch of KDE distros.

KDE is so humble. Their k-apps are much more numerous than I realized and the DE is great on Kubuntu, Neon, Arch, MX, etc.

Having said that, I hold a lot of love for the gnome team too, I just don’t jive with the design philosophy anymore.

I started with Ubuntu in the 2005-7 timeframe on very slow old hardware. Shortly after, I bought an eeepc as I was a poor college student at the time and couldn’t afford much else. I dual booted for years until windows 8 irritated me into giving up Windows for non-gaming completely, I’ve been using various forms of Linux as my primary OS since then.

Tl;Dr tried Linux because my hardware was very modest, stayed because Windows was getting worse in various ways.

The browser ad on doesn’t work in apps, and if they have a blocker outside of that, it probably uses a VPN on the loopback interface to strip out the ads. I run a VPN a fair bit, so I would only be adblocking when I’m not on the VPN. Are there any non-root methods that can do full system ad blocking other than the VPN thing?