I have a 60TB disk pool with DrivePool software and have no place to put my data and create a Linux based pool. I have to wait until I can afford a new 20TB disk as a temp storage.

Unless there is an easy way to convert a DrivePool to mergerfs etc.

How much data do you have, and are the drives identical? Usually I do in-place conversions by taking some drives offline, creating a degraded raid on them, migrating the data, then wiping the remaining drives and bringing them online in the new raid.

Works for zfs pools too, but you can’t create a pool with missing drives, you have to create a temporary block device then mark it offline, then replace it with the real drive once it’s free.

Heh wow its been awhile since I checked my storage. Lol I forgot I added a bunch last year. Its actually at 116TB now with 13 free.

Wow! I thought my NAS was loaded, but good lord. What are you storing?

Linux ISOs 🏴‍☠️

I run my family’s Streaming Service.

Me too, but my library must not be nearly as impressive.

Some of the more high quality 4k releases (even 1080p ones) just gobbles up storage. I had to settle for the more optimized releases since I just have a 8tb external drive. Wanted to build a nas but man they are expensive, both a good nas and even the basic hard disks. Can’t wait for the bubble to pop.

Some of the more high quality 4k releases (even 1080p ones) just gobbles up storage.

I’m scratching my head here. Are they just being sloppy and inconsiderate?

The biggest video file I have is a fan edit of the hobbit trilogy. It’s 4 hours of 720p at 8 gigabytes. Why?

I’m just starting to experiment with Jellyfin, and I’m considering shrinking that down. I’m good with whatever format fit 90 minutes onto a 700MB video file that could be burned to a CD.

Compression will almost always compromises on quality. You can often notice the artifacts on scenes with lot of moving particles and such. So if you can afford the extra storage then that would definitely be the better option. At what stage do you consider them good enough is a very personal choice and the difference in quality often diminishes a lot as you go up. If you are happy with smaller releases then that’s perfectly fine too.

If you’re not wanting Remux Rips I’d really suggest converting your files to H.265, it’s got much better compression ratios than H.264. You can set up tdarr or fileflows (fileflows is much easier if you don’t want to write the ffmpeg yourself) to run through your library and automatically run conversions on new files. I use it to also strip foreign language tracks from files where it’s neither the primary track nor original language

True, although I would like to continue seeding forever even on cgnat and keep the hard links. But I do have higher scores to get av1 and hevc whenever possible.

Those are rookie numbers.

Yeah good luck migrating that. Maybe if you’ve still got the torrents in your client, you could just delete and redownload some.

Unless there is an easy way to convert a DrivePool to mergerfs etc.

If I understood right, it’s just software joining together multiple NTFS drives. When you open in another os it’s just a normal NTFS drive

You could take two drives and create a raid1 (right? Or yolo without redundancy?) btrfs array. Move stuff from one drive, when it’s empty, format it as btrfs and add it to the array. Repeat for every drive.

But…

With this much data I wouldn’t risk if you don’t have experience with btrfs via cli

I’ve always used it as my primary driver, so I know very well how to get the most out of it and customize it to my standards. Some of the software I use has no acceptable replacement on other OS. I don’t experience even a fraction of the problems that are reported online.

Yeah, for me windows just works although with a few annoying nags but not enough to make the effort to switch feel worth it. I was going to buy some new drives to make the switch easy but then prices skyrocketed and I don’t want to pay those prices.

Pretty much use it only for the web and games through steam, which is probably the reason for not running into issues.

And you are entirely unbothered by the invasion of privacy?

It’s a bother but it can be limited somewhat via toggles and DNS blocking.

Not all of us just use our computers as a hobby, I don’t have the time to figure out Linux and make things run in wine or proton, and fixing things that break from updating that software is annoying.

Not all of us just use our computers as a hobby, I don’t have the time to figure out Linux and make things run in wine or proton, and fixing things that break from updating that software is annoying.

That’s funny, not having time to deal with shit (like stopping Windows from spying, serving ads, and otherwise abusing me) is exactly why I use Linux.

Unlike Windows, Linux ‘just works.’

That takes a few minutes, it’s not like Linux doesn’t have stuff I’ve gotta spend time to fix too.

Yup

I have a surface pro x I bought during the pandemic that I plan on use until it’s physically broken (software-wise, you may as well say it already is busted) just to watch YouTube and browse the web on the sofa.

Otherwise, I haven’t had to use Windows on my desktop in a year or so ever since switching to Linux. Hooray.

It just never gets old. Can you say it again?

For gaming, until the instant I can run SteamOS on my rig

SteamOS isn’t magic, you know. Other distros already work just fine right now.

None of the big ones have matched Win11 performance on my machine, or even come close enough to justify switching. I’m hoping that SteamOS’ planned Nvidia support, which reportedly is being developed with some degree of collaboration with Nvidia, will move that needle.

If you are noticing a big discrepancy between proton and windows across many games then there’s something wrong with your setup. On average proton seems to out perform windows if all of those news articles are to be believed, at least it should be on par anyway. If you are actually serious about switching then try debugging or just try a different distro like cachy.

Just like any other compute workload, performance is going to vary significantly by game and by hardware setup. Generally AMD hardware does see good improvements in Proton, while Intel + Nvidia is more of a mixed bag, and there’s plenty of reporting out there on slowdowns when switching over. I’ve invested real time in this—tried Cachy, Bazzite, Nobara, mucked around with drivers, proton distributions, launch options, all that. As much as I’d love to report Linux has blown me away here, that’s just not the case. The ecosystem keeps improving and I’ll keep trying because I fucking despise Windows, but at the end of the day I’m rolling with what works.

Heavily modded Skyrim

I’m hesitant to leave 10 because there are a few games I play that don’t support Linux, and I like em too much to quit if 10 still works. However, once support officially ends forreal, I will say goodbye to those games o7 11 will never touch my outers.

At work tho they had to upgrade to 11 in the office, and since it’s retail the office isn’t really that important but 11 is so poorly designed the computers barely run anymore

Which games, out of curiosity?

I’m also curious what games you’re talking about. Most work even without official support. The games that don’t are multiplayer where the AC specifically blocks Linux, which are basically just EA games and Chinese games.

One interesting thing I’ve found is that legacy windows support is better on Linux through WINE/Proton than on Windows. Old games are more likely to be runnable on Linux than Windows.

Specifically Destiny 2, as it’s been my vice since 2019. But given that Sony absolutely gutted the staff working on it, I’m really just trying to tie up loose ends with achivements n the like before moving on.

Yeah, ones like D2 where the developer is actively hostile towards Linux to the point of banning people who manage to get it to run is going to be “use Windows or play something else”, unfortunately

I tried installing Linux but something went wrong and it didn’t work.

I know better than to ask for basic computer help in a Linux community.

The Linux community seems to me more open than ever before. Possibly due to the influx of new users who’s job is not to administer Linux systems.

I wouldn’t be too afraid to ask questions. Linux systems are nowadays quite simple to setup and you shouldn’t have much problems with getting a simple question replied to.

All it takes is one asshole during the trial phase to turn someone off from the community entirely. Especially a non-technical person trying to come from something like Windows. And there are a lot of vocal ones across the various Linux communities. Especially in the discussions on GitHub, which is where you end up for support on nearly every piece of software not from a massive corporation, unless it’s a simple solution or a very common issue.

The number of times I have posted looking for assistance with an issue, or a small suggestion, and gotten some variant of “fix it (or add it) yourself, it’s FOSS” over the last couple years is a bit ridiculous.

Ehh, I have not found much help in the communities. You get couple answers shrugging, and nobody knows how to help you. I would also rather just read from a wiki, or something, since human interactions are so exhausting even online to this autistic idiot, but then I lack the technical knowledge (and language terms) to understand what I am even looking for in there.

In the end that lead me troubleshooting (and fixing) the problem using AI - which is kind of fucked up somehow, I would rather not. But a totally non-linux-understanding person could not have done that either, since it still required quite a bit of knowledge, to understand which terminal commands were correct, and would do even close to, what was claimed.

don’t give up :)

at first i tried to get Bazzite (didn’t even install), then Mint (apparently it doesn’t work well on dual monitors), and what finally worked was CachyOS, and i’ve been cruising on it for a few months now

Mint works on dual monitors… I had it running fine on 4, one of which is an ultra wide (X11 can be a bit flaky about different sized monitors, but other than occasional oddity, it didn’t cause me issues)

after i complained about it not working well for me and asked if there is something i’m missing that’d magically fix it (like maybe some special drivers) i mentioned i have dual monitors and someone told me mint is not made for that :') so i moved on

Hey man, I frequently post to selfhost and I get nervous everytime thinking someone is gonna berate me, only to be met with support and guidance. I’d give it a try again, and if you encounter issues then post in the Linux comm, Selfhost, or even a more general place like asklemmy.

If someone’s an asshole, ignore them, cause they’re a sad excuse of a human being.

Try sticking with a simple distro like Mint, Fedora (Silverblue and Bazzite work too), or even Zorin.

Do you know what specifically went wrong?

I was trying to do a cinnamon VB, which apparently is not the way to start. I don’t really have a second computer to convert, which is the issue.

Legacy windows projects development. I switched to Linux and run windows as virtual guest with minimal usage though.

Since joining the fediverse, I’m convinced the biggest deterrence for more people joining Linux are its users.

True, People can be obnoxious. But you should still try it at some point, there is something to the hype.

I have tried it, and I had more issues with my previous laptop on Mint than I have currently on Windows. Still I’ll look at it again once I need a new one.

Edit: So I guess in my case the users didn’t deter me, since I wasn’t really interacting with the community at any point. I think it’s probably more of a threadiverse user thing than a Linux user thing. And yeah I can be obnoxious myself, I just don’t expect it to yield results.

I mean you don’t have to wear thigh high socks to use Linux. But they sure do look mighty cozy.

One key thing with switching is knowing you will have trouble with it at first, because it isn’t Windows. You’ve spent probably decades learning Windows. You can’t expect to switch to Linux and automatically understand how it works. Be prepared to learn. Don’t expect it to be Windows. Unless your problems were crashes or hardware failing, it’s probably just that you didn’t have experience with it, and that needs to be ok.

I use it for work (AD admin, kind of have to unless I want to change careers while I’m halfway to retirement), and at home I use it for a machine that’s dedicated to running simulator games (I can get the peripherals to work in Linux for the most part, but a lot of the setup for them is Windows only and since it’s only used for that, I’m currently just sucking it up there… Though I’ll need to keep something around even if I switch that system since some of them can only be programmed via Windows, like my VKB flight sticks)

Need Adobe software for work. Want to play online games that have anti-cheat. Also like to run mods in my games.

I have a shitty old laptop for travelling that I’ll try to install Linux on this weekend, since I only need Firefox on that.

is the software enforced by your work or is it what you feel the most comfortable using? because honestly i’m not missing photoshop as much as i thought i would, krita has most of my uses covered, and for photography i use darktable

Not enforced by my work, but Photoshop is honestly the least painful to replace. I’m having a lot more trouble finding fully featured alternative to InDesign and Illustrator. Scribus looks pretty rough and Inkscape has an unintuitive UI and no proper CMYK support.

ahhh, vector graphics, i dabble sometimes but not enough to recommend any alternatives. well, i hope you keep an eye out for new software/updates, being free of adobe feels amazing

Ancient Nvidia GPU (GT1030), I tried but I can’t really be bothered to spend another week scouring forums to find kernel options and drivers to hope that the specific combination will stop making the taskbar blink or something

Just that first thing

I bought my pc before nvidia was trash and so that’s the card I’m stuck with. Do any Linux work well with nvidia cards yet?

I never had an issue with a GTX 1660 Ti on Arch. It’s been 5 years.

Older cards (in my case, the 970 M iirc) are slightly more annoying because Nvidia doesn’t support them anymore. So you can’t just install the generic, up to date, Nvidia driver package. You have to use Nvidia’s website to find the latest driver that supported them, and then install that one through your distro’s package manager.

Afaik, Nvidia supports all cards from the 16xx series upwards in their driver, as of right now.

Having used KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland with an RTX 3080 and an AMD RX 6800, they both work equally well. I can’t attest for other environments.

Pirated games and modded games

You can pirate and mod games on Linux no worries. I pirated WWE 2k25, and I’ve modded both Minecraft and Kerbal space program.

You can but it’s not no worries, especially repacks.

I’ve never had issues with games from gog on Linux. I played new games like cyberpunk and older games like heroes of might and magic 4. I’ve played modded mount and blade bannerlords, the Japanese mod, no crashes or such. I played pirated uncharted 4 without issues as well. My point is, if this is truly the only reason you’re still on Windows, I think you should give it a try. I haven’t looked back for a second

i’ll get downvoted for this but I don’t care. I was on linux for years and this past week I switched back to Windows on my secondary drive. I still daily drive OpenBSD.

to be blunt I switched back because of the linux community. I got tired of it. the constant in-fighting, the near daily drama, the elitist mentality especially on support forums or chat channels, people leaving projects for one reason or another, the advocacy for FOSS but as soon as someone with a lot of money and questionable ethics starts handing it out then political opinions quickly start changing. Suddenly getting 10mil from a facist “isn’t so bad and helps Linux”. With Windows at least I know who I’m getting in bed with.

And as far as Windows being horrible…I don’t see it. I’ve been back on it for a solid week or two now after several years away and I just haven’t experienced what was constantly shoved down my throat from the Linux Community about how bad it is. I don’t have onedrive, i’m not being hounded to set it up, i don’t see it. I don’t have copilot, I don’t have AI, hell I don’t even have any ads in my start menu. where is it all? Things work. The boot time is faster than any Linux distro I previously used. zero driver issues, things work and believe it or not the games I play now perform better on windows. It’s like I was drinking the kool-aid about how bad windows is when currently I don’t see it. I haven’t even been hounded to update anything yet. It’s got winget and scoop now so I can install stuff on this thing just like I would with any Linux package manager. I don’t have to deal with protons or any of that.

I will say though maybe it’s a hardware thing. When I had an ASUS Rog Strix laptop it was a miserable experience on Windows and on Linux it was better. On my Thinkpad it’s the opposite. and on OpenBSD my Thinkpad absolutely swims.

Don’t get me wrong I still like Linux, I just don’t like what surrounds it. I’ll probably go back in a year or two but right now Windows works for me and works well. for my dev work OpenBSD is perfect, it stays out of my way. All my stuff works on that, all my stuff works on Windows. But frankly the Linux community being so divided and clearly consuming the kool-aid opened my eyes and turned me off from it. I just no longer can take what linux users say about other operating systems seriously when I’m just not currently experiencing any of that with OpenBSD and Windows.

That’s why I’m on Windows.

I don’t have onedrive, i’m not being hounded to set it up, i don’t see it. I don’t have copilot, I don’t have AI, hell I don’t even have any ads in my start menu.

I’m not a Linux cultist but come on. You know it took a lot of configuration from the defaults to get there. Or are you running some special LTSC Win11?

it literally took nothing. turned everything off on setup and that’s it. I don’t see one drive anywhere on the taskbar. there’s no pop ups, nothing. It is literally no where on my system. look for yourself:

Powershell : Get-package *One*

Are you in the US? Because there was no way to disable Onedrive during install when I last installed Win11 about a year ago. This is Win11 Pro.

I’m in Canada. I’m on the preview build for September. I don’t have one drive, don’t have ads, don’t have copilot. so shrug Don’t know what to tell you but my windows experience thus far as been great.

So you installed fresh from an ISO downloaded from Microsoft and it didn’t setup Onedrive during install? When was your download? As I said, mine was from around Sept from last year. Or did you use something like Rufus to make an install? MS has said they were doing some deshitification to handle the rampocalpse.

I’d really like to be able to replicate your experience the next time I install Windows.

I have a Microsoft Windows USB drive I bought a few years ago. it’s technically win 10 but when I installed that it put me on the first version of Win 11, and then just manually upgraded (took awhile) from there.

Looks like a rage bait

there is an automatic cutting device used to make crafts projects and the only way to run it is with its manufacturer’s software which only runs on windows

I tried to get it to work on Linux and had mixed success just getting it to start, but it failed miswrably at trying to communicate over the USB connection to the device no matter what I did

the only thing that worked was running a windows VM with VirtualBox and that got the connection to work but the experience of operating it became poor so until that device dies or the app gets Linux support (neither happening soon) at least one machine must be windows, and right now getting another PC is prohibitively expensive

Dual boot . You can install most distros non destructively side by side in your current partition. Ubuntu even makes it point and click on install.

Just for the handful of games that can’t run on Linux. Other than that, all *nix