You had corruption with btrfs? Was this with a spinning disk or an SSD?

I’ve been using btrfs for over a decade on several filesystems/machines and I’ve had my share of problems (mostly due to ignorance) but I’ve never encountered corruption. Mostly I just run out of disk space because I forgot to balance or the disk itself had an issue and I lost whatever it was that was stored in those blocks.

I’ve had to repair a btrfs partition before due to who-knows-what back when it was new but it’s been over a decade since I’ve had an issue like that. I remember btrfs check --repair being totally useless back then haha. My memory on that event is fuzzy but I think I fixed whatever it was bitching about by remounting the filesystem with an extra option that forced it to recreate a cache of some sort. It ran for many years after that until the disk spun itself into oblivion.

I wouldn’t say, “repairing XFS is much easier.” Yeah, fsck -y with XFS is really all you have to do 99% of the time but also you’re much more likely to get corrupted stuff when you’re in that situation compared to say, btrfs which supports snapshotting and redundancy.

Another problem with XFS is its lack of flexibility. By that I don’t mean, “you can configure it across any number of partitions on-the-fly in any number of (extreme) ways” (like you can with btrfs and zfs). I mean it doesn’t have very many options as to how it should deal with things like inodes (e.g. tail allocation). You can increase the total amount of space allowed for inode allocation but only when you create the filesystem and even then it has a (kind of absurdly) limited number that would surprise most folks here.

As an example, with an XFS filesystem, in order to store 2 billion symlimks (each one takes an inode) you would need 1TiB of storage just for the inodes. Contrast that with something like btrfs with max_inline set to 2048 (the default) and 2 billion symlimks will take up a little less than 1GB (assuming a simplistic setup on at least a 50GB single partition).

Learn more about btrfs inlining: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Inline-files.html

One point: ext4 has a maximum file size of 16TiB. To a regular user that is stupidly huge and of no concern but it’s exactly the type of thing you overlook if you “just use ext4” on anything and everything then end up with your database broken at work because of said bad advice.

Use the filesystem that makes the most sense for your use case. Consider it every single time you format a disk. Don’t become complacent! Also fuck around with the new shit from time to time! I decided to format my Linux desktop partitions with btrfs over a decade ago and as a result I’m an excellent user of that filesystem but you know what? I’m thinking I’ll try bcachefs soon and fiddle around more with my zfs partition on my HTPC.

BTW: If you’re thinking about trying out btrfs I would encourage you to learn about it’s non-trivial maintenance tasks. btrfs needs you to fuck with it from time to time or you’ll run out of disk space “for no reason”. You can schedule cron jobs to take care of everything (as I have done) but you still need to learn how it all works. It’s not a “set it and forget it” FS like ext4.

Have you ever used Google Docs for that? Vastly superior. You don’t even have to send your updated version to anyone… They can see it and work on it with you in real time.

SharePoint promised to make this same functionality work but never got it right. Same for the web version of office. They’re horrible compared to Google Docs and there’s supposedly even better collab word processing tools.

Also, they didn’t mention it but you can always just do this (the easy way, thanks to GNU): chmod a+x somefile to give it execute bits. It works intuitively like that for w and r permissions too.

It’s just quicker to type out chmod 775 than it is to do it the other way 🤷

There’s not much to learn in Windows land! Learn how to set file permissions, how the registry works (and some important settings that use it), and how Active Directory works (it’s LDAP) and you’ll be fine.

If you’re used to using Linux nothing will frustrate you more than being forced to use a Windows desktop. The stuff you use every day just isn’t there. You can add on lots of 3rd party tools to make it better but it’ll never measure up.

When you have to go out on the Internet to download endless amounts of 3rd party tools the security alarms in your head might start going off. Windows users have just learned over time to ignore them 🤣

At this point I’m curious: WTF is Microsoft Word even good for? It’s like the worst-in-class tool for all things word processing, page layout, typesetting, embedding other stuff into the document, and more. Why are people still torturing themselves with this garbage? Just because it’s there? I mean, Wordpad is there too (though maybe not for much longer) but nobody uses that. It’s also garbage but still…

I interview developers and information security people all the time. I always ask lots of questions about Linux. As far as I’m concerned:

• If you’re claiming to be an infosec professional and don’t know Linux you’re a fraud.
• If you’re a developer and you don’t know how to deploy to Linux servers you’re useless.

So yeah: Get good with Linux. Especially permissions! Holy shit the amount of people I interview that don’t know basic Linux permissions (or even about file permissions in general) is unreal.

Like, dude: Have you just been chmod 777 everything all this time? WTF! Immediate red flag this guy cannot be trusted with anything.

It’s not like there’s signs in the sky.

If there are, landing might not be the best option! Best to fly over the apocalypse 👍

To be fair, a 250g RC aircraft can cause a lot of destruction to a plane that’s in the process of taking off/landing or to a car on a highway.

Having said that, they really have gone overboard with the regulation. Restrict airspace near airports and over highways, not something as ambiguous as “over people”. They also (still) require a spotter for FPV which is just silly. The point of the spotter is so you can figure out where it went if you lose control (presumably, to take responsibility if it crashes into something important and does some damage). Anyone flying FPV is going to know exactly where the RC aircraft was when they lost control (and modern ones will return themselves home if contact is lost like that).

They need to focus more on regulating features instead of “what and where”. If every RC aircraft has to have a return to home feature that would make more sense than something super ambiguous like, “don’t fly above people.”

This achievement belongs to the tail end of GENX… The folks that brought us grunge.

To be fair, that’s a very open ended question. I mean, what kind of bolt are we talking about? A standard lag bolt? If so you don’t tighten it! That’d be a trick question! You tighten the nut. Same thing applies with car wheel bolts. Tricky tricky!

Is it a hex bolt that also has a cross head? How tight are we talking?

I’m just going to assume bolts of lightning and Usain Bolt are off the table.

The base assumption is that you can tell anything reliable at all about a person from their body language, speech patterns, or appearance. So many people think they have an intuition for such things but pretty much every study of such things comes to the same conclusion: You can’t.

The reason why it doesn’t work is because the world is full of a diverse set of cultures, genetics, and subtle medical conditions. You may be able to attain something like 60% accuracy for certain personality traits from an interview if the person being interviewed was born and raised in the same type of environment/culture (and is the same sex) as you. Anything else is pretty much a guarantee that you’re going to get it wrong.

That’s why you should only ask interviewees empirical questions that can identify whether or not they have the requisite knowledge to do the job. For example, if you’re hiring an electrical engineer ask them how they would lay out a circuit board. Or if hiring a sales person ask them questions about how they would try to sell your specific product. Or if you’re hiring a union-busting expert person ask them how they sleep at night.

Just use Gentoo. Do it from scratch on the command line without the GUI installer like a pro 👍

At the very least you’ll learn how everything works at a deeper level.

You say that because you don’t realize the benefits:

• Better support for Linux with any new PC hardware on day 1. This includes things like USB devices, monitors, KVMs, UPS, everything.
• Better support for all commercial software in general. More software will become available and it’ll be higher quality.
• Vendors will be forced to test all their stuff on Linux which means it’ll all become more reliable and less glitchy.
• There will be more diversity in software and distros which means widespread attacks (aka hacking, worms, viruses, etc) will have less success and smaller impacts.
• The more Linux users there are the more Linux developers will result. It’s also much easier to start learning how to code on a Linux desktop than it is in Windows.
• Better security for the entire world. Linux has a vastly superior security architecture than Windows and a vastly superior track record. The more Linux users there are, the harder it will be for malicious entities to break into their PCs which translates into a more secure world.
• It’s much easier (for experienced users) to troubleshoot and fix problems in Linux than in Windows. This will lead to support teams everywhere getting frustrated whenever they have to deal with Windows users (this is already the case for many software vendors, haha). Therefore, it makes support people happy and easy going. Who doesn’t want to reach a happy, helpful person for technical support instead of the usual defiant/adversarial support tech? 😁
• The worst sorts of hardware vendors won’t be able to get away with their usual bullshit. For example, if there were enough Linux users HP wouldn’t be offering extremely invasive 2GB printer “drivers” because their Windows customers would know enough Linux users that they’d be rightfully pissed and not depressively submissive like they are now.
• When you do have a problem it will be easier to find a solution because the likelihood that someone else already had it and posted a solution will be higher (though admittedly this factor doesn’t seem to do much for Windows currently because of how obtuse and obfuscated everything is in that OS).

There’s actually a lot more reasons but that’s probably enough for now 😁

I’d love to see more adoption of… I2C!

Bazillions of motherboards and SBCs support I2C and many have the ability to use it via GPIO pins or even have connectors just for I2C devices (e.g. QWIIC). Yet there’s very little in the way of things you can buy and plug in. It feels like such a waste!

There’s all sorts of neat and useful things we could plug in and make use of if only there were software to use it. For example, cheap color sensors, nifty gesture sensors, time-of-flight sensors, light sensors, and more.

There’s lmsensors which knows I2C and can magically understand zillions of temperature sensors and PWM things (e.g. fan control). We need something like that for all those cool devices and chips that speak I2C.

With big freedom come big cursors. Every click is a boom of libration!

The Warhammer lore where people worship an AI as literal God suddenly seems so realistic!

They’ll help you develop and test your AI stuff on Linux but not Windows (I don’t think… Completely different team of engineers).

I’m wondering what will happen when loads of games have built-in generative AI… Will these two paths cross and finally give us Linux folks Nvidia (graphics) drivers that are actually good? 🤔

You’re thinking that every Android device is reasonably new. This is not the case.

There’s devices running Android from >12 years ago that can’t get apps any other way than F-Droid because Google Play Services no longer work.