Data backup has been, well, something. While working on the NAS, I’ve been figuring out how much data we have to backup and where to put it. It was in the middle of this where I found out that the freezing I’ve been experiencing on my PC was most likely due to one of two things:
A whacked out file somewhere in the large mess of directories and files or
the backup drive I was trying to copy file over to/from
I zeroed in on the drive and started using Konsole to copy but holy hell, even rsync froze the computer. Jesus, wtf?
I did some research and found that freezing while copying large amounts of files can be attributed to a bad disk – and for some reason I’d ignored the fact that this large USB backup drive is well over ten years old. Guess I needed to check it for errors and, well, smartctl wouldn’t pick up anything about this old drive at all, so eeeek. At this point I don’t even know how it was managing to spin its platters. All I knew was Linux wanted all but nothing to do with it.
I plugged the damn thing into the old Windows 10 laptop we have that’s doing nothing but being an interim Plex server (until I get a NAS up and running, which is a story on its own) to see if I could find out anything and Windows complained that “This disk has errors, please fix”. I let it do its thing and everything worked out enough for me to move data off that old drive onto the SSD on the laptop – which is now being copied over to the secondary drive on my desktop (by way of the temporary TrueNAS Core machine). Convoluted? Sure. But, as they say, it is what it is for now.
Speaking of Windows. The aforementioned laptop is an old Dell, i5 that I put a new SSD drive in. It runs Windows 10 which has been fine. Yesterday I turned it on and it took its time updating, like Windows does, and it eventually landed here:
What the absolute shit is this? A few more services, eh? I really, really dislike this “oh! they must have all the things connected all the time!” mindset.
I clicked Remind me in 3 days (because of course they won’t make a button that’s labeled: “No, never. Absolutely not ever in a million years do I want to connect to more of your services, even if it’s just a few”. That would take up the whole bottom of that screen and it would look yukky design wise) and it put me at the login screen. I logged in…
.. And there was a Copilot button next the the Start menu.
I just can’t with this AI shit. At least I could uninstall it. No matter. Once all the file copying and NAS setup is done, this old laptop is going to be introduced to Linux.
Goddamned Phone
GrapheneOS update: I got one of my work apps sending notifications. I really wish I could move to this full time, but I just can’t at the moment.
Following up on my last post, I’ve come up with a plan to untangle myself and Ms. Tucker as much as we can from Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
And, because I’m oh, so very edgy, I’ve named whole thing Project: Friction. Here’s what I’m tackling:
Microsoft 365
I’m not going to lie, I kind of like MS 365. Scratch that, I like OneDrive which is one of the better of the Big Tech cloud storage options that is pretty seamless across Windows, macOS, and even Linux by way of InSync. However, like everything else Big Tech, they done gone and fucked it up. Standalone OneDrive accounts are gone. You can now only get a “basic” plan that includes 100GB of storage, the web based apps, ad free Outlook (seriously) and some other nonsense. If you want more space, then you need to sign up for one of their personal or family accounts that has 1TB of space (ok, cool) and a bunch of shit you may never use (it will install all of their apps on your computer, most of which you’ll probably never use). Oh, and they just increased the prices because they’re forcing stupid Copilot on everyone.
Essentially, fuck all that. Reminds me of this from last year:
Same mood now as then: fuck you and your growth at all costs.
I’m taking the following approach with Microsoft:
Cloud/OneDrive: A new provider that’s (a) not based in the US and (b) supports Windows, Linux, and macOS. I think we’ve settled on pCloud. I’ve been playing around with the service on a basic month to month plan for about a week now and, so far, it’s pretty amazing. Aft first it was not as straightforward as OneDrive but that was to be expected. It is a wee bit of a finicky setup on Linux but that was figured out (and I’m keeping this link handy). I have everything backed up and syncing and it’s humming along doing it’s thing. Remember: Embrace Friction. Bonus points to pCloud for offering a lifetime option; pay once and it’s yours.
At the same time I’m working on configuring a local NAS. While I love the idea of syncing files to the could, let’s face it, we all should have local backups on hand just in case. I have an old, second hand mini computer and will be testing out TrueNAS CORE. This will be a challenge for sure
Apps: This one’s easy: LibreOffice. I mean, come on. It all does the same shit as Microsoft’s apps and, let’s face it, the Microsoft stuff has never really been great. Microsoft is just a monopoly and they tell us they’re the best while duct taping more shit (sorry, “features”) onto their apps. Now we have to deal with Copilot and they can just fuck right off with that.
Operating Systems
At this point in the game, I’m back to Linux being my daily driver. I may setup a dual boot of Windows for the sole reason of playing games1, but we’ll see. Now that I’ve made a full cloud backup with pCloud, I’ve completely flattened my PC and started fresh with just Ubuntu Studio. I’m taking my time configuring everything to my tastes.
Note that I’m not going to force anyone else in the house to take the Linux path but, going forward, I will be looking at setting Windows up without an MS Account.
Goddamn Phones
This one is the most difficult. Your choices are Apple/iOS, or some flavour of Android be it Google or Samsung or whoever. Which means you need to have an Apple ID or a Google account (or a Samsung login or whatever) in order to use the phones in any real capacity.
A hardened version of Android with all of the Google slop stripped out? And the Google stuff you do install has to live in a sandbox where YOU control its permissions?
Fucking sign me up.
So here we go…
After four days my oh so brief review is this: GrapheneOS is excellent except for two things:
The handful of apps I need for my job don’t work 100%.
I can’t get RCS chats working.
The apps I require for work are only half functional. Messages do come into them, but notifications are broken; they simply just don’t alert me. Since part of my job is an OnCall sift every few weeks I need to ensure that I get notifications. I’ll have to stick to the stock Google OS until I can get this figured out. If I can’t get these apps sending notifications at all, then GrapheneOS will have wait.
RCS is another matter. Do I really need it? No? It is nice, but it’s not a deal breaker. I can make due with SMS and I’m working to find out who on my contacts list uses Signal. I know that RCS in the Google Messages app is implemented via Google and I suspect that I can’t get it working because my Google account is not tied to the GrapheneOS phone.
On the other hand, Ms. Tucker has an iPhone 8 that is giving up the ghost and she’s not sure that she wants to give any more money to Apple. So the plan may be to slowly get her used to a Pixel 7 running GrapheneOS with the limited Play services so she can access the apps she needs and see how that goes.
GrapheneOS is amazing even if it reminded me how much shit actually runs on a phone all in the sake of “convenience”. Thanks to playing around with GrapheneOS, I’ve managed to clean up a pile of apps from my stock phone.
None of this is easy, but it’s not meant to be. And I’m back to enjoying what I enjoyed about Linux those couple of years ago: learning new things. Yet it was so easy back then to just give up at the slightest hint of inconvenience and take the stupid, familiar route. Hell, it’s easy to do that now.
At the end of the day, stupid, familiar routes are boring. And I just don’t want to fall back on that anymore.
1: I am attempting to get my games running under Linux (Steam/Proton/Lutris) again.
So, I’m typing this in the Block editor after fighting to get my site to look like this. Take a look around. Basic as basic can get, right?
This look is slightly not what I was aiming for. I did plan to have an image at the top there, but the Block I was using fucked with the colour of the font in the navigation drop down so you couldn’t actually see the links. I mean, whatever. For now this is ok.
Edit: Fixed this, obviously. I will warn you that as I poke more, there may be more changes but I’m going to try keeping it minimal.
Anyway, I have been picking away at Linux and I’m still here. For those that really want to see what’s happening, I’ve started a journal that you can navigate to via the fancy new Linux > Linux Journal link in the navigation. I didn’t want to clutter up the main page with my prattling, so you can find it there.
One thing I’ll update here is I noticed some issues with the Scarlett 2i2 in Mixbus, namely shaky playback and the inputs would drop out depending on how it was set in either System settings or in the Mixbus audio engine settings. Well goddamn, after some digging around I came across this video on YouTube that all but fixed me up.
If you have a Focusrite, Scarlett 2i2 Gen 3, keep this handy:
Fedora was was real fun but, in the end, after a year, I gave up and moved on.
A couple of things happened:
A few weeks ago, I was installing Linux updates on this here laptop and on a restart things started acting weird. My audio interface was nowhere to be found. My mouse started acting real janky. And apps (mostly DAW) were just crashing randomly.
JFC
I didn’t have time to dive in and look so I booted over to my Windows partition and made a note to look into whatever was going on sometime later.
This week, I had decided to trade laptops with my eldest as hers was just not handling the workload anymore. It’s an old, refurbished Dell Latitude that was purchased just before the shutdown in 2020. With it’s fifth gen i5 CPU and 4GB of memory, it was simply no longer up for the tasks she needs it for. I’d backup all the stuff off the HP laptop, (at this point only used as a Plex server) format it, install Windows 10 and then she would have something very workable. Then I’d install Fedora on her old laptop and use it to run Plex.
Getting her setup was a breeze. There were zero hiccups getting the HP back to factory and getting Win10 running and she’s now happily doing schoolwork, playing games, and chatting with friends.
As for the Latitude, Fedora installed easily. Past that, I wouldn’t do the one single thing I wanted it to: run a Plex server.
I simply do not understand why. Plex installed. The Plex service was running. But Plex would not see the mounted external drive nor did it see any folder on the local drive. All the permissions were correct. Everything was showing up in the file manager. I spent hours searching the net for solutions. I tired every command line “fix” that was posted, and there were a lot of potential fixes. I even tried starting fresh by reinstalling Fedora only to wind up in the exact same spot.
I finally just said, “fuck it”.
I formatted that little laptop back to factory (Windows 10). Then I installed Plex, pointed it to a folder and …
It worked.
I went upstairs and tested it on the TV and …
It worked.
So simply I made the decision to flatten this computer back to factory and just move on with Windows.
I just don’t want to fight to use a computer anymore. Windows 11 is actually, surprisingly, really good. It’s stable and you can uninstall and disable all the bloatware and advertising bullshit with a few clicks and it just hums along doing its thing.
I still support Open Source and Independents. While I’m running Windows now, I still run and fully support the applications listed on my “Things I Use” sidebar.
Sadly, Linux just turned out to be a no go for me. I will say that it is absolutely better than it was even a decade ago and I was able to use it as a my primary desktop for nearly a year (and I got to start and finish a song in it!). For me though, it’s still not 100%. So here we are.
Almost half a year into the Great Linux Experiment and I’m still here.
The last time I tired running Linux as a desktop OS was back around 2001. It went so horribly sideways that I lasted maybe two days. Then again this was 2001 and while I could get Linux (Mandrake) installed, couldn’t get the damned thing online. So it was essentially a weekend of yelling and screaming to myself because I had no Internet to yell and scream into.
Now I can scream all I want, anytime I want. Here are a few things I’ve discovered:
Seems there have been a few changes between Fedora 38/KDE 5.x and Fedora 41 with KDE Plasma 6.2.5. In the newer versions, Virtual Desktop and their shortcuts can be found here:
Virtual Desktops: System Settings > Window Management > Virtual Desktops
Customize Switching Desktops: System Settings > Keyboard > KWin > Switch One Desktop to the Left (or Right).
If you’re still in KDE 5.25 then here is the magic:
System Settings > Workspace Behavior > Virtual Desktops
This is primarily for Mixbus and Mixbus32c running on Linux. It also applies to Ardour, which Mixbus is based on. The distro I’m using is Fedora Jam, however this most likely applies to whatever distro you’re using.
Issue
Mixbus 32c shows the following message when launched:
WARNING: Your system has a limit for maximum amount of locked memory. This might cause Mixbus32C to run out of memory before your system runs
out of memory.
You can view the memory limit with ‘ulimit -l’, and it is normally controlled by /etc/security/limits.conf
Solution
Open a Terminal window and check the memory limit by typing ulimit -l . You may see something like this:
$ ulimit -l 8192
This means that Mixbus is limited to 8GB of memory. To open this limit up, in Terminal, edit limits.conf:
$ sudo vi /etc/security/limits.conf
Add the following lines (or if they already exist with a # in front of it remove the # and change the number value of memlock to unlimited):
@audio – rtprio 95
@audio – memlock unlimited
Save the file and check the ulimit again. You should see this:
$ ulimit -l $ unlimited
If you don’t see this, then restart. You can try logging out and back in, but I found this didn’t work. A full restart, for whatever reason did.
Launch Mixbus. If you see the same warning message, check your group in Terminal:
$ groups yourusername
If you don’t see the audio group listed, for example:
username : username wheel pkg-build
add your user to the audio group:
$ sudo usermod -a -G audio yourusername
Check groups again. You should see audio listed:
$ groups yourusername username : username wheel audio pkg-build
