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Cake day: March 1st, 2024

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  • It could be a form of bundling, tacit veritcal integratation, magin squeeze , price discrimination, tie-ins etc.

    Various tricks oligopolistic companies use to prevent competition from bidding prices down - trying to extract a bit of extra profit. The harm is that people are paying more than they might - or for extra features they cant opt out of than they would in a free or open market. Likely the harm is very diffuse and no one person is all that bothered to be paying 10% more or whatever, but it all adds up.

    Anti-trust regulators are so weak they don’t really have to try though. TBF it’s very hard to prove this stuff in court even if there was a political will to improve competition to benefit consumers.


  • I’d go basic debian . Install flatpak and flathub to get any packages that are too far out of date or might get so. Any derivative or ubuntu derivative just sees like unnecessary extra dependencies to me.

    Debian gives i think a wider choice of desktop environment than any of the derivatives on install, but I think they’re all much of a muchness really. Most of the DEs have the “Click something, window opens” feature.







  • I’d say the operational requirements.

    A home PC mostly has max 1 simultaneous user (i.e. the “person”) - out of maybe a small pool of potential users - the availability requirement is ad-hoc. It offers many services, some available immediately on boot, but many are on call.

    A server typically has capacity to provide services to many simutaneous users and probably has a defined availability requirement. Depending on the service, and the number of users and the availability and performance requirements it may need more communication bandwidth , more storage, faster storage, more cores, UPS, live backups and so on. But it doesn’t strictly need any of that hardware unless it helps meet the requirements.

    In terms of software any modern PC runs an OS offering a tonne of services straight from boot / login. I don’t see any real differences there. Typically a server might have more always on serices and less on-call services, but these days there’s VMs and stuff on both servers and on PCs.

    Most PC users would expect to have more rights such as to install and execute what they want. A server will typically have a stronger distinction between user and sys-admin. but again if a server offers a VMs it’s not so clear cut. That mostly comes out of the availability requirement - preventing users compromising the service.




  • I agree, there’s a lot of people in this thread who seem to know exactly what is good or bad for a new user. But I don’t see many being sensitive to what the user might actually want to achieve. New users are not a homogeneous group.

    If the user wants to both use (stably) and learn (break stuff) simultaneously, I’d suggest that they start on debian but have a second disk for a dual boot / experimentation. I don’t really use qemu much but maybe that’s a good alternative these days. But within that I’d say set them self the challenge of getting a working arch install from scrath - following the wiki. Not from the script or endeavourOS - I think those are for 4th/5th install arch users.

    I find it hard to believe that I’d have learned as much if ubuntu was available when I started. But I did dual boot various things with DOS / windows for years - which gave something stable, plus more of a sandbox.

    I think the only universal recommedation for. any user, any distro, is “figure ourt a decent backup policy, then try to stick to it”. If that means buy a cheap used backup pc, or raspberry pi and set it up for any tasks you depend on, then do that. and I’d probably pick debian on that system.